A system (100) and method (300) is provided to assess an acute and chronic healthcare impact index of a patient. The impact index identifies patients having a highest potential impact for reducing program health-care costs. The method can include forecasting a health-care resource use of the patient, converting the health-care resource use to a monetary value, ranking the monetary value by an opportunity cost, and generating a score from the ranking. The score can identify patients having high health-care cost savings potential. The opportunity cost can be the projected cost of a health-care benefit, such as the cost of the emergency room visit or an in-patient length of stay.