Excellus BlueCross BlueShield picks SAS software to analyse data

Johannesburg, South Africa  (29 Sep. 2010)  – Excellus BlueCross BlueShield, the largest non-profit health plan in upstate New York, wanted to provide its actuarial team with more time to analyse data and predict future membership trends and medical claims expenses.

To do so, Excellus BCBS turned to SAS, the leader in business analytics software and services. Since implementing SAS data integration technology, Excellus BCBS has decreased the time it takes to process data by as much as 70%.

"In a typical year, we deal with more than 100 million member and claims records," said Joseph Randazzo, Excellus BCBS Manager of Actuarial Services. "The amount of data is too large to manage with Microsoft Office Access databases. With SAS, you can just kick off a process flow and work on something else while waiting for the results."

Excellus BCBS uses this data to forecast medical and membership trends that it needs when setting health insurance premium rates for the upcoming year.

"We were in an environment where we spent 70% to 80% of our time scrubbing, extracting, transforming and loading data – with less than 30% of time spent on analysis," Randazzo said. "With SAS, in many instances, those numbers have flip-flopped." Excellus BCBS worked with SAS partner d-Wise to implement the data integration solution.

SAS' comprehensive solutions for health insurance enable organisations to align actions with business strategy, improve operational efficiency and increase bottom-line results. SAS solutions address customer intelligence, operational intelligence, health plan reporting, health plan intelligence, health insurance fraud, health informatics intelligence and disease management. Other health insurance plans that use SAS include Horizon BCBS of New Jersey, CareSource and Highmark.

Excellus Blue Cross BlueShield

Excellus BlueCross BlueShield, a non-profit independent licensee of the BlueCross BlueShield Association, is part of a family of companies that finances and delivers vital health care services to 1.7 million people across upstate New York. Excellus BlueCross BlueShield provides access to high-quality, affordable health coverage, including valuable health-related resources that its members use every day, such as cost-saving prescription drug discounts and wellness tracking tools in its Step Up programme. To learn more, visit http://www.excellusbcbs.com.

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