This year six teams from Benelux joined the global competition. These teams took on exciting challenges: from unlocking privacy-sensitive healthcare data with synthetic data to optimizing cheese production and much more! With access to the latest SAS software and SAS mentors, they were building innovative solutions to real-world problems. Two teams from the Benelux have even become the winners of the SAS Hackathon in their industry tracks!
Want to learn more about some of these cases? Read the article and check the videos to see how teams tackled challenges and learn their takeaways from SAS Hackathon!
Syntho: Unlocking analytics opportunities in health care with synthetic data
Privacy regulations lock up about 50% of valuable data, resulting in missed opportunities and revenue loss. The healthcare sector is particularly affected due to the sensitive nature of patient data. To address this, Syntho presented a ground-breaking solution at the SAS Hackathon. With synthetic data they can unlock analytics potential by reproducing real data patterns while minimizing risks and helping make decisions faster.
During SAS Hackathon, the Syntho team collaborated with a leading hospital on a critical health care case involving cancer research. Their objective was to predict deterioration and mortality rates. Because of privacy, medical data is not easily accessible. Syntho therefore generated a dataset that replicates real data through the application of AI: "synthetic data”. SAS Viya successfully validated that this synthetic dataset is indeed a good representation of the actual data and usable for model development. The dataset could then be deployed for research and used to make predictions about the progress of the disease. With this ground-breaking solution Syntho won the SAS Hackathon in the Health Care and Life Sciences track!
PW Consulting: Predicting staffing costs with advanced analytics
With staffing costs accounting for nearly 70% of all hospital costs, accurately predicting and managing these costs are crucial for financial stability. However, the complexity of factors makes forecasting staffing needs challenging. Internal factors such as retirements, departures, hirings, and maternity leaves, coupled with external variables like changing demographics and the COVID-19 pandemic, further complicate the process.
The team of SAS partner PW consulting used historical data to build predictive models at the SAS Hackathon. They took an anonymized data set from healthcare organization CuraMare, cleaned it, prepared and transformed it to produce three scenarios: prognosis, machine learning and combined. The team then assessed the most accurate way to predict staffing costs and made recommendations based on that.
Notilyze: Optimizing cheese production with advanced analytics
Cheese production is a data-intensive process involving various quality parameters and machine metrics. Collaborating with a prominent cheese factory in the Netherlands, the Notilzye team aimed to optimize cheese production using advanced analytics. Combining and analyzing the available data, they wanted to enhance cheese technology, improve milk quality, minimize waste, mitigate environmental risks, and ultimately increase cheese yield without additional milk.
With the support of SAS, Notilyze helped the cheese factory enhance its production dashboard, helping them gain a deeper understanding of the key components influencing cheese production. Building upon this valuable insight, the team devised strategic recommendations to optimize cheese production techniques and maximize yield.
With this industry-shaking solution Notilyze has become the winner of SAS Hackathon in Manufacturing track!
Overall, the SAS Hackathon is a great opportunity to unleash creativity, network with fellow data enthusiasts and experts, learn from industry leaders, and gain valuable experience in a fun and collaborative environment in just one month!
