Tool for Rapid Analysis of Care Services (TRACS)
The goal of CSED's TRACS is to help councils achieve potentially substantial efficiencies via accelerating the time taken to collate, analyse and quantify opportunities within in-house and external social care services.
Some of the Issues TRACS addresses: Councils have expressed, to a lesser or greater extent, the following issues when embarking on either redesigning the ‘buying' process or on information based negotiation with providers:
- Difficulty in obtaining information
- Information not structured in the right way
- The time taken to get the data
- Data and systems which do not lend themselves to ‘what-if' option appraisal
- Shortage of skills to convert numbers into something which paints a picture
TRACS has been designed to address this type of issue quickly (within 2 days instead of many months)
Please download the CSED TRACS Overview (PDF) for more information.
Click on this image to download the latest version of the TRACS Brochure - May 2008 (2.53mb)
TRACS Summary
1. What is TRACS? Very simplistically, TRACS consists of two parts:
- A data warehouse product for storing, analysing and presenting social care data
- Consultancy support to make use of the product and support councils in the identification of opportunities
2. What data does TRACS use? There are two core sets of data which the tool relies on:
- A download of agreements (or ‘orders') from the care management system
- Agreed rates for provider supplied services
With relatively simple additions to a generated skeleton set of look-up tables, it is possible to analyse the provided data in much richer ways, e.g:
- By Post-sector / zoning information
- By Categorisation of client types
- By Classification of services
- By team / individual responsible for placing the order
- - other analysis options are available
3. How does TRACS work? The tool works by:
- Interpreting and re-structuring raw data from a care management system into a format suitable for analysis
- Simulating the cost of each package over time, based on provided pricing tables, and comparing this with actual costs when available
- Providing tools to rapidly perform and store complex what-ifs involving price changes, price table substitution, service restructuring, and volume changes
- Allowing the user to graphically present and export the results in a variety of ways using filters, grouping and simple calculations
4. The Benefits of TRACS: TRACS is designed to complement existing spend analysis tools by providing functionality to rapidly simulate different scenarios:
- At its simplest level TRACS can be used to very quickly analyse tenders
- TRACS also goes much further - it can be used to model and evaluate complete price restructuring (e.g. rationalising Supporting People contracts with Older People contracts)
- Simulation and analysis is not limited to prices - volumes and costs can also be analysed by any combination of provider, type of package, service
category, client characteristic, geographical zone, etc thus lending itself to brokerage restructuring - Trends over time can also be simulated (e.g. modelling growth in learning disability support, the impact of individual budgets, and so on)
In order to arrange your two day consultancy support and a licensed free copy of TRACS for your continued use please contact:
Mike Charnley-Fisher (mobile 07710 381694) mike.charnley-fisher@dh.gsi.gov.uk or any representative of CSED already known to you.