Horizon BCBSNJ saves money, improves analytics capability with SAS^®

Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey is one of the oldest members of the Blue Cross Blue Shield family and the only Blue Cross affiliate serving New Jersey. Horizon BCBSNJ’s 3.6 million members are demanding more sophisticated information in order to manage expenses. To meet those needs, the company turned to SAS Enterprise BI Server and saved more than $500,000 in the first year of use.

Customer Success Video

Check out this video to learn more about Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey and its successes with SAS.

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Customer Viewpoint
You have questions; our customers have answers. Check out this video Q&A.

Mike Occhipinti
Director of Informatics

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Mike Occhipinti has been with Horizon BCBSNJ for nearly two decades, and the Director of Informatics can recall when most customers needed little more than data on how much hospitals and providers were paid. “The demand for data has grown in size and scope tremendously,’’ says Occhipinti. Today, customers want disease management statistics and a frequently updated utilization dashboard to monitor expenses.  

The workload had grown so much that Occhipinti's group found it challenging to keep up with requests. It would take days to pull together data for simple questions from executives. Disease-management utilization information for each large customer account took one person two weeks every month to pull together.

As Occhipinti started to look at solutions that would save time and deliver a quality product, "we just kept hitting either space issues or resource or functionality limits. We concluded SAS, which we had used in a limited capacity, was the easiest to use and the most scalable for our needs.''

Just three months after installing SAS, Occhipinti's group was delivering automated 14-page disease management and health reports for major customers that pull data from multiple sources. These were the same reports that took one person two weeks to create prior to using SAS Enterprise BI Server. Other important time and money savings include:

• A data file consolidation process that eliminates 720 hours a year worth of data reconciliation efforts.
• A simple means of converting existing SAS programs to stored processes that speed information delivery. This saves 3,600 hours of work per year.
• The ability to store data in pre-defined OLAP cubes, which allows users to access standardized data more quickly for trend reports. This saves 2,304 hours of work a year.
• A user interface that allows Horizon BCBSNJ to produce analytic reports with less training, gaining 400 hours of productivity. Through self-serve reports, internal users now have the ability to query deployed data sources on their own.
• Microsoft plug-ins and Web delivery for rapid and dynamic deployment with less conversion on the customer end, saving 1,199 hours of work a year.
  

One version of the truth
More importantly, Occhipinti says, the data is more reliable and more readily available internally. "Our executive leadership sees this one version of the data as a huge benefit. They are receiving customizable executive-level reports with summary data detail back up readily available." Internal customers love that they can log on and have a customized up-to-date dashboard available in 30 seconds or less.

"The business analytics supplied by the Informatics group support 70 major corporate projects,'' Occhipinti says. "Achieving 5 percent more value for just one project can be worth millions.''

Horizon BCBSNJ achieved a return on its investment in SAS in just three months. "We used SAS Professional Services, and they helped us achieve ROI quickly,'' Occhipinti says. "SAS has become absolutely mission critical."

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.

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