The jails aren't overflowing in San Antonio anymore. People with serious mental illnesses have a place to go for treatment and the city has saved $10 million a year on. How did it happen?

"You know Brad Pitt in the movie Moneyball?" asks Gilbert Gonzalez, Director for the Bexar County Mental Health Department. "Well, the success in that movie was based on the data and analytics. We needed to do the same thing."

Gonzalez's task was to look at all the money San Antonio was spending on mental health in one way or another.

Just eight years ago, the jails, hospitals, courts, police and mental health department in Bexar County all worked separately.

Each part of the system was encountering the same people with serious illnesses, but the people were just cycling through, not getting better. Gonzalez found that the city was spending enormous sums of money while taking care of people with mental illness poorly.

So Leon Evans, director of the community mental health system for Bexar County and San Antonio, got everyone talking. That turned out to be the most challenging piece of the puzzle.

[For more of this story, written by Jenny Gold, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/healt...yball-in-san-antonio]