Presentation Abstracts
Arkansas Foundation for Medical Care
Jeff Biggs
Assistant Vice President, Information Services Department
The Arkansas Foundation for Medical Care’s (AFMC) business objectives for its SAS Business Intelligence initiative are to better serve the data reporting and analysis needs of the organization’s primary care physicians in an effort to subsequently improve patient healthcare quality. The purpose of this particular project is to enable AFMC to create a production portal for its primary care physicians so they can access custom reports that present key Medicaid data for their respective caseloads.
This presentation will detail the first phase of this project, which focuses on the creation of a PCCM report. This report also serves as a model for future report development initiatives and lays the foundation for report delivery through a SAS production portal.
Baylor Health Care System
Bruce Zak
Director, Analytic Tools and Programming Department
Baylor Health Care System (BHCS) has actively measured and improved its quality of care since 1999. This effort has included developing measurement systems to collect data on healthcare delivery processes and outcomes, designing and implementing rapid cycle clinical process improvement projects, evaluating the effectiveness of the improvement initiatives and providing feedback for further gains and/or decision making.
In the ambulatory healthcare setting, SAS tools have been important in collecting and reporting clinical preventive services performance data – a crucial aspect of a quality improvement initiative that has raised physician compliance with preventive services guidelines from 37 percent to 93 percent since 1999. Similarly, data collection and reporting has contributed to BHCS’ ranking from median to best performance on the 13 JCAHO core measurements among hospitals systems, with a 95 percent implementation performance.
In order to oversee its complex measurement, analysis and feedback activities, BHCS created the “STEEEP” and Fiscal Impact Sub-Committee of its Best Care Committee, on which both clinical and financial leaders serve. STEEEP is BHCS’ acronym for the six quality domains outlined by the Institute of Medicine in “Crossing the Quality Chasm” – Safe, Timely, Effective, Efficient, Equitable and Patient-Centered.
In this presentation, BHCS will talk about the creation of an overall analytics infrastructure to support clinical and financial evaluations of quality improvement initiatives.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida
Lynn Locke
Director, Database Marketing
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida (BCBSFL) has a long history of providing health-related solutions to the people of Florida. BCBSFL uses database marketing, direct marketing and analytics to better manage their member acquisition, cross-sell and lifecycle communications. It is rapidly becoming one of the most sophisticated direct marketing companies within the healthcare industry.
In this presentation, BCBSFL will discuss how they have used a combination of predictive modeling and new campaign management tools to dramatically improve their direct marketing capabilities.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida
Brad Jordan
Director, Marketing Analytics
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida (BCBSFL) has a long history of providing health-related solutions to the people of Florida. BCBSFL uses database marketing, direct marketing and analytics to better manage their member acquisition, cross-sell and lifecycle communications. It is rapidly becoming one of the most sophisticated direct marketing companies within the healthcare industry.
In this demonstration, BCBSFL will show how they have used a combination of predictive modeling and new campaign management tools to dramatically improve their direct marketing capabilities.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida
Matthew McGivney
Director, Sales Business Development
Representatives from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida will demonstrate MyBlueInsightSM, an account-specific reporting system developed by SAS Health and Life Sciences Professional Services.
Using SAS Data Integration and SAS Business Intelligence, the system offers ease of use while controlling access to reports and data via its metadata-driven, role-based security. All of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida’s customers can access the reports for which they have been given access, but only for their data. Internal employees or brokers may be permitted to view multiple customer accounts or administrator reports and services as well.
This presentation will cover how other health plans can also provide this flexible, self-service framework for their customers, which includes:
- Customized, context-sensitive online help and tutorials.
- Web access to a customized glossary of terms.
- A complete online resource library with user and administration guides.
- Security programs supporting HIPAA compliance.
- Unique branding with organization-specific logos and colors.
- Online training for internal team members.
- Prebuilt data model and ETL for the reporting repository.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee
Jason Carter
Bio-Statistical Research Scientist
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee plans to use SAS® Forecast Server to help predict pricing trends. Having accurate premium pricing allows an organization to minimize the underwriting cycle. Health plans do not want to underprice, which would mean an underwriting loss, or to overprice, which would prevent attracting new or retaining current business.
In the fast-changing world of healthcare, SAS® Forecast Server allows Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee to predict utilization metrics (admits, days, visits and scripts per 1,000). These projections must be made for multiple lines of business in short time frames. SAS® Forecast Server gives accurate projections and allows more analytical time to understand why trends are changing.
CIGNA HealthCare (Theater Track Presentation)
Tamim Ahmed
Assistant Vice President, Medical Analysis and Customer Reporting
Client reporting on health advocacy products has been increasingly gaining momentum in the healthcare market. Such programs empower members to make their own decisions on healthcare purchase and use. Employers want to see how such empowerment induces employees to make the right decisions and, hence, enhance engagements in the healthcare decision-making process.
The impact of this complex member-centric approach to information generation, exchange and communication creates a huge stress on existing data management processes and infrastructure. SAS® Business Intelligence creates new opportunities between upstream processes and downstream reporting through seamless integration to Microsoft Office products. In addition, thin-client application and capability creates the potential for decentralized analytic reporting for clients and health plans.
SAS® Business Intelligence applications bridge data management, analytics and reporting through innovative integration.
Sadeque Ahmed
Sr. Analyst, Medical Analysis and Customer Reporting
Client reporting on health advocacy products has been increasingly gaining momentum in the healthcare market. Such programs empower members to make their own decisions on healthcare purchase and use. Employers want to see how such empowerment induces employees to make the right decisions and, hence, enhance engagements in the healthcare decision-making process.
The impact of this complex member-centric approach to information generation, exchange and communication creates a huge stress on existing data management processes and infrastructure. SAS® Business Intelligence creates new opportunities between upstream processes and downstream reporting through seamless integration to Microsoft Office products. In addition, thin-client application and capability creates the potential for decentralized analytic reporting for clients and health plans.
SAS® Business Intelligence applications bridge data management, analytics and reporting through innovative integration.
Eli Lilly and Company
Todd Sanger, PhD
Director, Global Statistical Sciences
The pharmaceutical industry faces a number of significant challenges. The cost of bringing a new chemical entity to market will steadily increase to an estimated $1.2 billion. Simultaneously, healthcare budgets will continue to dwindle, putting a lot of pressure on drug prices.
To reduce the costs and to increase flexibility, pharmaceutical companies are now outsourcing more activities to other companies, including organizations in India and China. In addition, in order to spread risk and supplement the internal pipeline, most companies are entering into external development partnerships. Hence, there is greater need to share data and information worldwide.
Unfortunately, most current in-house systems were not designed to be open to external parties. Also, in order to shorten development timelines and provide even greater safety, the industry is trying novel clinical trial designs like adaptive designs, increased data and text mining capabilities, and enhanced abilities to combine information from disparate sources.
All of these problems and trends have a direct impact on the industry’s statistics function. And this presentation will cover how Eli Lilly and Company uses SAS Drug Development, SAS Business Intelligence and other SAS tools to overcome these challenges.
INC Research Inc.
Alistair Macdonald
Vice President of Global Data Services
INC Research identified an area within the drug development continuum that has a high demand and is not well-serviced by the “usual suspects” of the CRO world. By partnering with SAS to deliver a world-class product, INC Research was able to apply its high-performance data services teams to this problem and successfully deployed a cost-effective, state-of-the-art solution to its customer base globally.
This presentation will cover INC Research’s business requirements, the company’s solution, lessons learned through adoption and early results.
Mayo Clinic
Dr. James Naessens
Researcher
Health services research is the study of healthcare delivery and examines the access, use, costs, quality, vehicles and outcomes of these services. Its main goals are to identify the most effective ways to organize, manage, finance and deliver high-quality care; reduce medical errors; and improve patient safety. The Mayo Clinic has a strong interest in these issues and has supported a division addressing the institutional interests in health services research since 1993.
This presentation will highlight several of the Mayo Clinic’s quality measurement and quality improvement projects from a health services research prospective.
Optum, a UnitedHealth Group Company
Stephen R. Burch
Director
Optum, a UnitedHealth Group Company, is aggressively pursuing targeted customers who need its consumer outreach services – case management, disease management and treatment decision support. The ability to rapidly integrate and use new data sources is critical to achieving this goal. Data sources must also be carefully analyzed and assimilated to ensure optimal business results. This is often a challenging endeavor because data can originate from multiple sources, which may or may not share common identifiers or other key information fields. This presentation will detail how Optum solved all of the above business challenges.
SAS
Dr. Edward Helton
Chief Scientist, Regulatory and Biomedical Affairs
In 2006, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) introduced many significant initiatives to re-engineer the life sciences industry. One example is the Guidance for Industry for Providing Regulatory Submissions in Electronic Format that allows use of an XML backbone specification – the CDISC standard – and the replacement of define.pdf with the CRTDDS (also called define.xml). SAS is well prepared for this new XML era and is already making efforts to facilitate 2007 initiatives, including the proposed new Part 11 and biostatistics guidance (analysis data model-based).
SAS previously supported and learned from the CDISC mock electronic FDA submission using CDISC standard data models and a metadata format. Thus, Data Integration (DI) is burgeoning at SAS, and its very probable relationship to the FDA’s JANUS and Critical Path items 44, 45 and 72 will become increasingly apparent. DI may also be crucial to facilitating the pending FDA Sentinel Network and/or Adverse Event Reporting System II.
Lastly, SAS is a strong player in the overarching metadata model (BRIDG) for the CDISC/HL7 end-to-end movement of healthcare data (EHR/IHE/CDASH) to therapeutic product development. Our vision, which is in close alignment with the FDA’s electronic platform concept, is supported by SAS-integrated and/or SAS-validated tools for mapping, mining, analysis, reporting and submitting electronic data to regulatory agencies. eCTD Life-Cycle Management interfaced with pharmacogenomics that uses standards and compliant workflow for annotation, acquisition, aggregation, analysis and archiving is a SAS endgame.
Attend this presentation to further learn how we’ve made transparency and the unambiguous path requested by the pharmaceutical industry and world regulatory bodies our primary goals.
University of Alabama
Dr. J. Michael Hardin
Associate Dean for Research, Culverhouse College of Commerce and Business Administration
This presentation will discuss the use of information analytics and predictive modeling to enhance diagnosis and therapy selection in clinical treatment.
University of Louisville
Dr. Patricia Cerrito
Professor of Mathematics
There is considerable variability in the treatment of patients with similar illnesses. Different treatments can have higher costs and/or improved patient outcomes. With the increasing availability of electronic medical records, we can use data mining techniques to “drill down” into this variability to determine treatment pathways that can optimize patient care. We can also use claims data to construct sequential episodes of treatment and to examine the subsequent treatment episodes for patients with chronic illnesses. To date, we have examined pathways in cardiovascular surgery, the catheter lab and the emergency department, and we are currently investigating treatments of patients with diabetes.
We will show how market basket analysis and summary statistics can be used to examine physician prescriptions of antibiotics in the emergency department where there is no time to determine the specific infection (which requires a 48 – 72 hour culture). Generally, one broad-spectrum antibiotic of many possible choices is prescribed by the physician. There is a choice to give the antibiotic orally or to give it intravenously. The patient is admitted or discharged depending upon the estimated severity of the infection. We can use analytics to examine patterns of antibiotic prescriptions and the issue of cost.
WellCare Health Plans Inc.
Jack Shoemaker
Vice President, Executive Information Systems
The fundamental widget at a payer organization such as WellCare is the beneficiary or member. Associates at all levels of the organization need to know the volume of membership, though not all at the same level of granularity.
The enrollment solution developed using the SAS Business Intelligence toolset allows users to browse membership at an aggregate segment level – Medicaid versus Medicare – as well as drill into specific products and cohorts, for example, the age and sex composition of a specific primary-care physician. By surfacing this data through the SAS Business Intelligence tool, associates are able to create and save the membership view most appropriate to their business needs. This self-service model, in turn, reduces the demands on the various reporting groups to produce varying displays to suit different needs.
Using a demonstration data set, this demo will show how to create and save these various views of membership.
Yale New Haven Health System
Diana Russo
Senior Information Access Analyst
The Yale New Haven Health System Electronic Balanced Scorecard was released into production in April 2004. Over a two-year period, it evolved into an information portal that captured daily, monthly and quarterly data from various departments, including decision support, MIS, performance management and HRIS.
In July 2006, Performance Management IT began the conversion from SAS®8 to SAS 9.1.3. This required a complete rebuild of the existing platform, user interface and security, as well as many changes to the current SAS®8 technology. Although it created some challenges for the technical team, it has proven to be a great enhancement over the earlier SAS application.
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