TRACS - Tool for Rapid Analysis of Care Services

The goal of CSED's TRACS is to help councils achieve potentially substantial efficiencies by accelerating the time taken to collate, analyse and quantify opportunities within in-house and external social care services.

When redesigning the 'buying' process or negotiating with providers, councils often experience difficulty with:

• 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 two days instead of many months)

1. What is TRACS?

• 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?

• 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?

• It interprets and re-structures raw data from a care management system into a format suitable for analysis
• It simulates the cost of each package over time, based on provided pricing tables, and compares this with actual costs when available
• It provides tools to rapidly perform and store complex what-ifs involving price changes, price table substitution, service restructuring, and volume changes
• It allows 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 complements existing spend analysis tools by providing functionality to rapidly simulate different scenarios:

• 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)

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.

• Solutions Brief TRACS
  Solution Brief - TRACS (September 2008, Vs 3.3): this document summarises the TRACS tool.
• TRACS - Documentation