THEATER TRACK PRESENTATION ABSTRACTS

Health Plans

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota
Better Practices for Information Delivery
Every company wants to follow best practices for its organization. Following best practices ultimately saves the company administrative expenses and allows tasks to be done more efficiently. But exactly how does a “practice” become “best”? Over time, many organizations experience successes and failures. It is through the combined experiences of many organizations that best practices emerge.

This presentation will explore the experiences of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota (BCBSM) as it deployed the SAS BI platform in its organization. It begins with an analytics warehouse vision and continues with information delivery. It will discuss the first applications deployed on the SAS BI platform and review the business pains addressed, what worked well, lessons learned along the way, and resulting benefits to the organization and its customers.

From customizing BI interfaces to provide guided queries for external clients to using the out-of-the-box features for internal provider analysis, BCBSM has leveraged many features of the SAS BI platform. Three specific applications will be discussed with insights about deploying a BI framework at the enterprise level.

Laboratory Corporation of America (LabCorp)
Laboratory tests represent about 4 percent of all healthcare costs, yet they influence and direct approximately 80 percent of all healthcare spending. This makes test results an extremely important part of managing overall healthcare spending and proactive disease state management.

With annual revenues of $4.1 billion in 2007, more than 26,000 employees nationwide, and more than 220,000 clients, LabCorp offers clinical assays ranging from routine blood analyses to HIV and genomic testing. More than 400,000 specimens are handled by LabCorp every day, resulting in more than a million performed tests. Test results are automatically delivered to ordering physicians as a natural course of business, but leveraging that information for analytic purposes promises even greater benefits.

In 2007 LabCorp embarked on a mission to significantly improve its ability to leverage information and made a strategic investment in SAS^® technologies. The first output of that investment is a customer portal powered by SAS Enterprise BI Server that provides direct access to result information to LabCorp payors.

In this presentation, LabCorp will talk about the creation of an overall analytics infrastructure that will support a multifaceted approach to improving customer satisfaction, delivering operational benchmarks, and providing medical insight.

Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield
Redefining Analytics at Wellmark
Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield recently embarked on a comprehensive business intelligence strategy. Our goal is to deliver actionable information to internal and external stakeholders via improved data infrastructure, analytics and consulting services. Traditionally, analytic work at Wellmark has been reactive and ad hoc.

Consistent with the thinking of Thomas Davenport, Jeanne Harris and others, we aim to increase value by shifting toward planned and predictive analytics processes. To execute this vision, in 2007 we implemented a new analytics infrastructure that leverages SAS Enterprise Miner™ and SAS Enterprise Guide^®. In addition we developed and implemented new analytic processes for data mining and predictive modeling using process design principles commonly used in manufacturing.

In collaboration with SAS Professional Services, we validated the processes in a proof-of-concept that produced deliverables on two key initiatives. The first was a new predictive model for complex case management. This process identifies, stratifies members, and provides case managers a relevant clinical summary. The new process identifies future high-cost cases and has reduced the time of initial clinical assessment from 20 minutes to two minutes.

The second was an explanatory model and a series of analytic views of the data that quantifies drivers of physician practice pattern variation for upper respiratory infection. Using 2005 data as a baseline, this model has identified $11 million in cost variation among the top 5 percent of providers. These results suggest our strategy to provide actionable information and value through high-end analytics can be quickly attained by utilizing the right tools, processes and skills.

Life Sciences


Eli Lilly
Operational Innovation: It’s Not an Oxymoron
A lot of press is being given to changing the industry – scientific innovation, new analytical methods, targeted patient identification, reversing the blockbuster model, etc.

Mention the word “operations” and you don’t exactly think of game-changing innovation. However, organizations often overlook the importance of improving upon what they are already doing. Small tweaks in processes, incremental changes to an infrastructure, systems implementations, or thinking about a problem from a fresh angle can reap large returns – just ask your local Six Sigma Black Belt.

This showcase will cover the importance of innovative operational changes and what effect strong implementation can play in the success of any change initiative, whether it is of the disruptive variety or improvements to existing models of operation. Examples of innovative operational implementations at Eli Lilly will also be discussed.

SAS
Body of Millions, Target of One: Better Patient Health Through a Connected Industry Ecosystem
The health and life sciences ecosystem is in a state of gradual convergence around patients. While independent market segments – providers, payers, pharmaceutical firms – remain focused on their respective business challenges, a growing community is recognizing that the challenges each market segment faces can only be solved through working in partnership with the other market segments.

The historical barriers over cost transference and pricing protection must give way to a focus on quality of patient care. Current trends in patient/drug safety, disease management, patient records, reporting, and information system interoperability all point towards a future where health outcomes can be better managed by leveraging the growing repositories of health-related information available within the ecosystem. And whereas 2008 shows a priority around business intelligence, the future of healthcare will be based on advanced analytics that revolve around the patient, leveraging the information from millions of individuals to help target the right treatment to each individual.

Takeda
How Integrating SAS^® Tools Can Improve Global Working in Biometrics: Vision Versus Reality
Takeda has implemented an innovative SAS infrastructure to enable global work and broaden the scope and value of biometrics support to the organization. In this presentation, Takeda will highlight the business drivers for change and analyze the business benefits it has realized.

Healthcare Providers


Canadian Institute for Health Information
The Canadian Institute for Heath Information (CIHI) works with stakeholders to create and maintain a broad range of health databases, measurements and standards. We develop reports and analyses from our own data and other sources. We also work with stakeholders to help them better understand and use our data and analysis in their day-to-day decision making. We do all of this in a way that ensures privacy and value for Canadians.

CIHI’s vision is to help improve Canada’s health system and the well-being of Canadians by being a leading source of unbiased, credible and comparable information that will enable health leaders to make better-informed decisions. Attend this presentation to learn how CIHI supports this vision by using SAS^® products for analytical work.

Maine Medical Center
Using the Balanced Scorecard to Ensure Safe Patient and Family-Centered Care
Maine Medical Center has five years of experience using SAS and the Balanced Scorecard tool to advance its strategic goal of delivering safe patient and family-centered care. As part of a comprehensive performance improvement program, this tool enables the medical center to transparently communicate the organization’s priorities. It also makes up-to-date progress toward achieving those priorities accessible to all employees at the click of a mouse.

This track will cover some of the lessons learned from describing the infrastructure needed to make the system work to how the balanced scorecard concept fit into the existing organization.

CUSTOMER DEMONSTRATION ABSTRACTS

Health Plans


BlueCross and BlueShield of Minnesota
BCBSM has developed multiple applications using components in the SAS Business Intelligence Server. The company will demonstrate a Provider Operations Reporting tool built on SAS Web Report Studio and describe other custom applications that leverage the SAS BI platform.

BlueCross and BlueShield of Tennessee (BCBST)
SAS Enterprise Miner for Care Management
BCBST leveraged the power and depth of SAS Enterprise Miner to improve the accuracy of identifying Medicaid members unlikely to obtain a recommended mammography screening. This knowledge was integrated into a geographic information system (GIS) to identify member groups for intervention focused on increasing compliance rates.

Techniques developed in this study are transferable to a multitude of quality improvement initiatives, markets, industry and research. The demonstration will include a brief overview of the data elements, modeling techniques examined, discussion about the chosen model, interpretation of the results and plans for deployment.

BlueCross and BlueShield of Tennessee (BCBST)
Using SAS Forecast Studio for ROI Measurement and Reporting
This presentation will provide a practical demonstration of how to use SAS Forecast Studio for ROI measurement and reporting at a health plan. The experience of BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee in using SAS Forecast Studio to evaluate a utilization management program is used as a case study.

Program evaluations of health plan interventions – including utilization management programs – are fraught with methodological issues and difficult choices. The key problem in determining a valid program ROI and quantifying financial savings involves ascertaining what would have happened versus what actually happened. The predictive capabilities of SAS Forecast Studio enable an accurate estimation of “what would have happened,” facilitating valid measurement and reporting of ROI.

CIGNA
Data Integration for Health Plan 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 of information processing and variety of visualization.

SAS Business Intelligence applications bridge data management, analytics and reporting through data integration, single platform to support variety of visualization format, effective and flexible development and deployment of business applications.

Life Sciences


Eli Lilly
Operational Innovation: It’s Not an Oxymoron
A lot of press is being given to changing the industry – scientific innovation, new analytical methods, targeted patient identification, reversing the blockbuster model, etc.

Mention the word “operations” and you don’t exactly think of game-changing innovation. However, organizations often overlook the importance of improving upon what they are already doing. Small tweaks in processes, incremental changes to an infrastructure, systems implementations, or thinking about a problem from a fresh angle can reap large returns – just ask your local Six Sigma Black Belt.

This showcase will cover the importance of innovative operational changes and what effect strong implementation can play in the success of any change initiative, whether it is of the disruptive variety or improvements to existing models of operation. Examples of innovative operational implementations at Eli Lilly will also be discussed.

Merial Limited
Patient Safety: Signal Detection and Root Cause Analysis
Going beyond simple adverse event reporting systems and unmanaged signal detection, SAS Patient Safety provides a comprehensive solution that addresses new regulatory safety guidance and provides the most advanced analytics for signal detection, pharmacovigilance and root cause analysis.

More than a series of statistical algorithms, the signal detection and root cause analysis capabilities in the SAS Patient Safety solution provide automated signal detection that integrates the application of multiple sophisticated algorithms into a comprehensive surveillance strategy. SAS Patient Safety also offers customizable workflows within a Web interface that guide users through their routine safety review process. Plus, its ad hoc analysis and text search capabilities enable users to explore the data or focus on suspicious trends.

Healthcare Providers


Maine Medical Center
SAS Strategic Performance Management Application at Maine Medical Center
Maine Medical Center is using SAS Strategic Performance Management to deliver scorecards to the entire organization. This showcase will demonstrate Maine Medical Center's scorecard for its strategic annual implementation plan – which charts hospital performance achieving key strategic priorities in patient safety and quality, patient flow, human resource and financial management.