Clayton-based Centene reaps millions cutting government health costs

Each day, executives and analysts at Centene Corp. peer into a digital dashboard, hunting for spikes in health care usage—and costs. Their proprietary database, known internally as Centelligence, helps them predict the likelihood that a patient will, for instance, develop diabetes or asthma. And they can drill into individual patients' records to pinpoint causes. Like bond traders poring over rates and yields, Centene's prognosticators dissect health data to play the spread between what state governments will pay Centene for Medicaid management—and what costs Centene can shave for a specific subpopulation's health care.