The City of Fort Worth recently partnered with healthcare cost-reduction experts SmartLight Analytics in an innovative effort to alleviate the rising costs of employee healthcare, the company said in a news release.
An initial analysis of employee healthcare claims from the previous two years showed that the ongoing partnership could save millions for the city over the next few years.
The SmartLight Analytics release said the City of Fort Worth Human Resources department engaged SmartLight Analytics to review a subset of past paid claims in a pilot program. Initial findings showed that an ongoing partnership would give the city additional tools to continue to proactively fight against wasteful healthcare spending and decrease its overall healthcare costs.
SmartLight CEO Asha George said the “singular objective is to meaningfully reduce the City of Fort Worth’s per member per month cost by identifying and removing wasteful spending from its annual health plan dollars.”
Once a wasteful claim is identified, SmartLight will pass that information on to the city’s current medical and prescription providers and work with them to get the money back for the city. Additionally, the medical or prescription providers may report these findings to authorities to help curb the abuse throughout the healthcare system.
SmartLight Analytics anticipates the city could save up to $2-$3 million per year in reduced wasteful claim costs.
“We anticipate that SmartLight Analytics will identify claims with fraud, waste, or abuse. Then, they will work with our claims administrator to recover the costs for the City, and have them credited back to us,” Brian Dickerson, Fort Worth’s Human Resources Director, said in the news release. “This will be a win for our employees, our retirees, and the taxpayers of the City of Fort Worth.”
– FWBP Staff