Welsh Analytics LLC

In the current economic climate, many health care “safety-net” providers across New York State stand on the brink of failure and the communities that rely upon them face new uncertainties regarding vital healthcare services.

In response, the New York State Medicaid Redesign Team adopted an initiative to “provide operational and restructuring assistance to safety net hospitals, nursing homes and clinics to make critical decisions to either close, merge or restructure.” Recognizing immediate threats to the health care safety net in Brooklyn and the potential closure of one or more hospitals in that borough, the State Health Commissioner convened a work group to evaluate the hospital system in Brooklyn and make recommendations to ensure its viability. Welsh Analytics LLC, an independent consultant, assisted the work group with data collection and analysis on the Brooklyn health care system.

Welsh focused on neighborhood and service-level assessments of inpatient utilization by service line, by emergency department, and by outpatient demand against a geographic backdrop of need and resource indicators. This work provided tabular and graphic analysis of millions of patient records and will provide a flexible ability to move between aggregated results and detailed views within hospitals, service lines, patient geographies, payor groups, referral sources, and other relevant dimensions of the data. The analysis employed desktop mapping tools to guide the work group’s understanding of neighborhood and service area differences and the relationships between measures of need, resources, and patient utilization and outcomes.