The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia–Policy Lab approached Ozmosi for help in supporting its application for federal funding to establish a new organizational structure to better support children in the Philadelphia foster care system. The proposed structure was designed to provide a consistent network of support for the children as they passed from one agency to another in the foster care system. A small-scale pilot program had demonstrated that such a structure could result in improved success in placing children and reduced behavioral issues for those children, ultimately reducing costs.
Using a patient-flow model, Ozmosi outlined and tracked the current flow of children through the foster care system, then modeled the expected flow under the proposed new structure, based on data from multiple government agencies and internal experts in the foster care system. The improved outcomes suggested by the pilot study were modeled into the flow of children through the foster care system using a best-case, base-case, worst-case scenario approach. In all cases— including the worst-case scenario—Ozmosi’s analysis showed that the savings resulting from the new organizational structure far outweighed the cost of instituting it, signaling that this new structure could provide better outcomes for children and drive savings for the system overall.
Ozmosi’s work allowed the group to produce a compelling proposal for support, one that included hard data illustrating the return on investment and likely citywide effect of the proposed program—something that would not have been possible without Ozmosi’s customized (and somewhat complex) patient flow model. The director of the CHOP Policy Lab summarized the value of Ozmosi’s involvement: “We came to Ozmosi with a tight deadline, a complicated problem, and a big internal team to manage. They helped us do something we thought impossible, and were terrific to work with.”
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