Nation's Largest Medicaid Health Plan Selects MEDSTAT

The MEDSTAT Group, a Thomson company, announced that it has been awarded a multi-year contract by Keystone Mercy Health Plan and AmeriHealth Mercy to license a data warehouse and decision support system for evaluating the cost and quality of healthcare provided to its members.

Keystone Mercy, headquartered in Philadelphia, is the largest managed care organization serving Medical Assistance recipients in Pennsylvania, and through its sister company, AmeriHealth Mercy, the largest multi-state Medicaid managed care organization in the country. Together with its affiliated companies, Keystone Mercy serves more than 245,000 members in Pennsylvania and nearly 800,000 members nationwide.

"We selected MEDSTAT because it brings the broadest array of competencies including cutting edge technology, clinical expertise, system support services, and importantly, experience in the Medicaid arena," said Kevin Dougherty, manager, Special Investigation Unit, Keystone Mercy. "The MEDSTAT solution gives us an enterprise-wide system that will meet all our departments' analytic and reporting needs." The system will be used to understand the key factors driving increased health costs, identify the highest quality and most efficient providers, improve member quality of care, and detect fraud and abuse.

"We are uniquely positioned to support health plans serving the Medicaid market because of our extensive experience working directly with Medicaid programs to address their health information management needs," said Shelby Solomon, senior vice president at MEDSTAT. "We bring together our Medicaid experience and our knowledge of health plan business issues to provide Medicaid health plans with mission-critical analytic applications and reporting capabilities."

Keystone Mercy has licensed the MEDSTAT Advantage Suite solution which seamlessly integrates data warehousing capabilities, advanced healthcare analytic methodologies, and business intelligence applications to provide a powerful decision support solution including:

• MEDSTAT NetEffect Management Information System, a Web-enabled executive information system used to quickly and cost-effectively disseminate information internally and externally;
• Healthcare Measures Catalog that provides a simple, consistent process for developing performance statistics by providing hundreds of pre-defined and customizable cost, use, quality, and access measures;
• Portfolio of report templates for management decision making, including an ad hoc report design application that enables program analysts to create their own reports and analyses;
• Leading age-sex/case-mix and risk adjustment methodologies such as MEDSTAT Disease Staging Software for creating fair comparisons between health plans; and
• Healthcare data repository that integrates and transforms multiple sources of data into easily accessible, analytically ready information for consistent reporting across the organization.

The MEDSTAT Group, www.medstat.com, is a health information company that provides decision support systems, market intelligence, benchmark databases, and research for managing the purchase, administration, and delivery of health services and benefits. It serves more than 1,000 organizations including many of the nation's leading employers, providers, pharmaceutical companies, government organizations, and health plans and insurance companies. Headquartered in Ann Arbor, Mich., MEDSTAT has a 20-year track record of delivering results for customers through innovative products, superior customer service, and outstanding people. MEDSTAT is part of The Thomson Corporation, www.thomson.com, a global e-information and solutions company in the business and professional marketplace with 2000 revenues of approximately US$6 billion.

Contact The MEDSTAT Group, Andree Joyaux, 734-913-3295, andree.joyaux@medstat.com.