OpenConnect Submits Response to Senate Finance Committee Letter

Recommendations Discuss Ways to Fight Waste, Fraud and Abuse in Medicare and Medicaid

Dallas, TX July 10, 2012 - OpenConnect CEO, Edward M.L Peters, has submitted a white paper responding to the Senate Finance Committee’s request soliciting recommendations on the best ways to combat waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid programs. Seeking private sector expertise, the Committee in an open letter requested the health care community to identify innovative solutions that address potential improvements in the following categories:

• Program Integrity Reforms to Protect Beneficiaries and Prevent Fraud and Abuse
• Payment Integrity Reforms to Ensure Accuracy, Efficiency and Value
• Fraud and Abuse Enforcement Reforms to Ensure Tougher Penalties Against Those Who Commit Fraud

Health policy expert Dr. Merrill Matthews points out that new technology can go a long way toward addressing the challenges facing the health care system.  "The Senate Finance Committee is taking an important step by looking to technology to address the waste, fraud and inefficiencies in the health care system.  Billions of dollars are being wasted by Medicare and Medicaid, and that could be dramatically reduced simply by implementing some of the software solutions already used in the private sector," said Dr. Matthews.

In his paper, Mr. Peters highlighted some of the challenges facing the government, discussed how the private sector has addressed some of them, and makes recommendations as to how to improve program integrity in order to prevent waste and abuse and ensure accuracy, efficiency and value. Mr. Peters also pointed to OpenConnect’s innovative solutions which makes instances of waste and fraud “visible” and targets the root cause of the problem for improvement.

“Medicare and Medicaid programs are confronted with a two edged problem; costs continue their unabated rise with indicators of degraded quality (waste, fraud and abuse) climbing as well. In other words, the more it costs, the sloppier we get; this is unacceptable,” said Mr. Peters.  “The key to solving this problem is the adoption of innovative approaches that are being used in the private sector to deal with these issues.”

Mr. Peters further points out that “OpenConnect clients are a testament to the fact that management focus combined with technology-enabled solutions that make the problems “visible” can lower cost by hundreds of millions of dollars per year.  American ingenuity and innovation has exponentially lowered the cost of thousands of goods and services.  It is time we took the same approach to healthcare, starting with Medicare and Medicaid in order to bring the same type of value to the US Taxpayers.“

Response to Senate Finance Committee letter can be found here.

About OpenConnect

OpenConnect is the leader in process intelligence and workforce analytics solutions that automatically discover, automate and improve service processes and optimize workforce productivity. Combining unparalleled experience and solution capabilities, OpenConnect enables our clients to more quickly address and adapt to today’s operational and competitive challenges. Learn more about OpenConnect at www.oc.com.