New York Counties Eye Salient To Fight Waste, Fraud

The New York State Association of Counties has formed a new partnership with Salient Corporation to combat waste and abuse of tax dollars.

The company announced last week that NYSAC is urging its 57 member counties to use Muni-Minder software, not only to identify questionable Medicaid claims, but also to track the effectiveness of many other programs and services.

"Its broad-based flexibility and effectiveness is what sets it apart from other performance management tools," NYSAC Executive Director Stephen J. Acquario said in a prepared statement.

Salient President Guy Amisano said in an interview Tuesday that his company's business approach gives administrators a continuous feedback loop of information that is being applied in two New York State counties.

"We provide a monitoring solution that allows everyday examiners and agents and other people involved in the process t see where the money goes," he said. "Some of the transactions are fine. What we do is expose where there are problems and enable everyday agents and managers to investigate deeply into the process and find out where the good and bad are."

Chemung and Onondaga counties contracted to use the software for Medicaid. The counties also plan to use a Welfare-to-Work Performance Management module, which is expected to help meet federal mandates for tracking the program.

In New York, there are about 300 million Medicaid transactions a year. Amisano said that, although most of the transactions are legitimate, the system requires oversight.

"There is a great deal of money to be saved in the state, not necessarily just from outright fraud," he said. "For people to understand where the state waste is requires management " to understand where they might be able to place a phone call have a meeting, or call the [district attorney] in some cases."

Salient is in talks with several other New York counties as well states that manage Medicaid spending. The states considering the software include: Louisiana, Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Amisano said Salient charges based on the number of Medicaid recipients in a given county. Hamilton County, a sparsely-populated area, only has 400. There are 70,000 recipients in Onondaga County.

Some counties are using Salient software for real-time data that supplements IBM's information management systems, Amisano said.

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