Harnessing the Power of Analytics

All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) leverages SAS to augment Research

India’s premier institute for medical education, research & patient care, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi provides outpatient services to about 2 million patients and indoor patient services to over 100,000 patients annually.

AIIMS is also an autonomous institution and a deemed university which conducts teaching programs in medical and para-medical courses both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, offering courses & research in 42 disciplines. AIIMS known as the leader in the field of medical research in India today has to its credit of publishing over 600 research publications by its faculty and research team every year.

The Department of Biostatistics at AIIMS is involved in the teaching of bio-statistical and epidemiological methods and medical demography for various undergraduate, post-graduate and
para-medical courses in the institute. The Department also conducts courses on statistical methods in Biological Assays, Survival analysis, Epidemiological methods & other applied techniques to the postgraduate students in Pharmacology, Biotechnology, Reproductive Biology, Biochemistry,
Gastro-enterology, Institute Rotary Cancer Hospital and Anesthesiology

With strong research arm working on over 300 on-going research projects, statistical and analytical accuracy was the need of the hour at AIIMS. Also, keeping in mind, that all the thesis work and the projects carried out at the AIIMS have a bearing on the treatment, management and prevention of morbidities and contribute to the knowledge on health care, it was important to deploy a software that was internationally acclaimed, and at the same time, analytically & statistically accurate.

The Statistical Analysis Challenge
To empower a medical person or a medical research worker to plan the research studies with scientifically and statistically valid designs, and, to arrive at valid and meaningful conclusions by applying appropriate statistical methods, it was imperative that the person undertaking the research work was reasonably acquainted with the potentialities of applications of bio-statistical techniques, and that the same was statistically and analytically accurate.

The Department of Bio-statistics already equipped with a number of locally developed statistical software and various packaged statistical software like Systat, Stata, Epiinfo and Bmdp, needed internationally acclaimed software with numerical and statistical accuracy of the algorithms used in the modules to augment its research capabilities. To generate highly scientific and accurate research reports, it was also imperative that the required software should be able to link large amounts of data for interactive analyst applications.

Why SAS?
AIIMS chose SAS to address its requirement for powerful and sophisticated statistical techniques of planning and analysis of biological experiments & investigations, development of probabilistic models in epidemiology and application of operations research techniques in health care delivery.

Explaining the rationale behind the choice of the SAS Academic Software for research & academia, Dr. K. R. Sundaram - Head - Department of Biostatistics, AIIMS said, “The advanced analytical capabilities of the SAS modules coupled with the global superiority of its numerical and statistical accuracy of the algorithms used, made SAS an obvious choice to meet our various statistical analytical needs at AIIMS.”

Key Benefits
The SAS Analyst module installed at the Department of Biostatistics has enabled the faculty and scientists to work directly with the software, by linking data into SAS and successfully operating Interactive Analyst applications on various statistical tests.

According to Dr. K. R. Sundaram - Head of Department of Biostatistics, AIIMS, "Linking large amounts of data into SAS and running interactive analyst applications, has enabled faculty and scientists at AIIMS to work on their own for simple, common statistical jobs."

With increased training and better knowledge of the powerful capability of SAS Analyst module, the Department of Biostatistics is confident that it will play a significant role in enhancing the quality of hundreds of postgraduate and doctoral theses at AIIMS.