How LOGEX helped Finnish Social and Health Care Authority Essote break new ground with customer-level costing for social care
About the collaboration
Essote, or the South Savo Social and Health Care Authority, is a social service and healthcare provider in Southern Savonia with about 3.700 employees and an operating cost of close to 400 million euros.
Essote provides social, primary and secondary care services to seven municipalities.
LOGEX provides them with costing solutions and LOGEX Region, a comprehensive solution for performance management and service network management for integrated health and social care.
The challenge
To fully analyse the costs and outcomes of their services, Essote needed to gain more detailed insights into all care activities and costs, including primary and secondary care and social care. While patient-level costing in healthcare is already a settled practice in Essote and many organisations in Finland, there was no known precedent for social care customer-level costing. The structured data quality in social care information systems can also vary significantly.
Our capacity for knowledge management in social care needed to be developed, and there was no ready-made solution for accurate care activity costing.
Viljami Kaasalainen, Project Manager, Essote
The solution
Our financial costing team supported Essote in establishing care activities and cost calculations for social care that follow Finnish national guidelines where available. The project’s goal was to define, implement and validate the cost calculations of selected social care entities, but we eventually did the costing for all of social care. A major part of the project was transforming social services and activities into calculation objects, thus enabling customer-level cost calculations.
By supporting Essote in this challenge, LOGEX had the unique opportunity to spearhead this development nationally; some would even say universally. This is why we also cooperated with THL, the Finnish institute for health and welfare, to whom we have reported our findings and results. They are naturally interested to see how the Finnish national recording guidelines can be applied to support customer-level costing.
The project started off with a very clean slate, following the national definitions for social care from the very beginning. LOGEX monitored and promoted the implementation of the specifications with great attention to detail, which also resulted in positive feedback from THL on the project.
Viljami Kaasalainen, Project Manager, Essote
Financial Control
Our Financial Control suite enables you to gain mastery over patient volumes, resources and finances for the entire organisation, leading to better financial performance—with the numbers to prove it.
We cover the full spectrum of financial and operational processes, from costing and budgeting to forecasting and contracting.
Our activity-based costing model empowers you to:
Calculate, apply, and optimise
Make cost calculations for healthcare providers that are easy to understand, apply, and optimise.
Maximise the flow of resources
Allocate resources and costs to patients, care activities and episodes.
Benchmark and improve
Benchmark unit costs with national and international peers to identify areas for improvement.
Deliver, regulate and meet standards
Deliver information to national regulators automatically and in full compliance with National Cost Collection requirements.
Our activity-based budgeting model makes it possible to:
Build and benchmark budgets
Seamlessly link volumes, resources and finances in one budget.
Anticipate and respond to future demand
Match the deployment of resources and manpower to the future demand for care.
Zero in on areas for improvement
Determine how portfolio choices impact operations, and spot areas for improvement.
Involve physicians and managers in budgeting
Bottom-up budgeting functionality facilitates collaboration with non-financial stakeholders.
Our forecasting model enables you to:
Forecast and monitor volume, revenue and cost
Stay on top of expected vs. realised volumes, revenues and costs on a near real-time basis.
Analyse and factor risk into payer contracts
Automate value-at-risk calculations for all contractual agreements with commissioners.
Leverage machine learning algorithms
Build and maintain reliable, easy-to-access forecasts based on machine learning algorithms.
Produce timely, compliant reports with ease
Deliver periodic financial results that are fully compliant with national regulations.
Bring down costs by providing the right treatments, at the right time. We help you take the first step, starting with a critical assessment of treatment options and care processes.
Reduce variation among physicians and providers
Identify unwarranted variation in treatment decisions and care processes.
Deep-dive into data adjusted for meaningful differences
Compare disease-specific peer group selections adjusted for case-mix, patient characteristics and complexity scores.
Elevate commissioner contracts from volume- to value-based
Establish objective indicators to qualify for innovative value driven contracts with commissioners.
Benefits
Overall ease of use
Simple navigation with a full audit trail integrated analytics and benchmarking. No need for internal SQL skills. Costing practitioners and Trust colleagues can focus on engagement and identifying performance improvement opportunities
Hosting
- Fully hosted and secure
- No need to rely on internal IT infrastructure and resources or invest in expensive infrastructure
Engagement
- Integrated analytics so less reliance on Trust-wide BI infrastructure
- Unlimited use
- Full access control
- “Live” system enables use in meetings
Pricing
- Fully inclusive annual subscription with no hidden extras
- All Technical Consulting support included
- Unlimited use included
- Analytics included
Speed
- Fast set up and model build
- Make changes live and use for discussion in meetings
NHSI submission requirements
- Easy visualisation of how your costs relate to NHSI categories
- Automated submission outputs
Implementation
Fast turnaround with limited input required from the Trust team
More value from Costing data
- Use costing data and methodology for budgeting, forecasting, and costing care pathways
- Fully integrated financial management control platform
System working and benchmarking
- Easily configured to support group working
- Integrated benchmarking to identify performance improvement opportunities
At LOGEX, we understand that getting a grip on your data and performance should be a rewarding endeavour. Our models give you clarity and control over your operational and financial performance. Clarifying costs and optimising processes will be easier than ever!
Impact created with LOGEX Costing
With a detailed view of the costs and activities of all social and health care, Essote has much-needed data to improve the impact of their integrated social and health care services. A major challenge is to contain the costs of services needed by an ageing population with complex needs. Providers like Essote need to understand their whole cost structure and analyse the use of services of customer segments with varied needs for both health and social care, not only through the lens of primary care, secondary or social care separately. Essote is now able to utilise the new customer-level costing information in the LOGEX Region integrated social and health care analytics solution, thus enabling data-driven decisions and the analysis of their effects not just on separate functions in the region, but so too on the region and its population as a whole.
Viljami had the following to say about the impact: “We also found it very useful to have strong assistance in mapping the activities of our organisation. Although the various analyses were mainly done for the project, we also gained valuable observations and insights into various areas for improvement in our operations. In addition, the project management, communication and cooperation were commendable. Compared to the baseline, our social care costing has improved considerably, which enables us to perform knowledge management in a completely new way.”