Did you hear that Prince William is getting a new job? Next year, he’ll fly emergency helicopters for the East Anglian Air Ambulance. The prince, who’ll donate his salary to charity, called his new gig “one of the finest forms of public service.” The Duke of Cambridge won’t get any
If you're a really big company, with many locations around the country, how do you keep track of all that? ... With a great map, of course! I recently read a CNN article about the Community Health Systems network being hacked - exposing the names, Social Security numbers, physical addresses, birthdays
There are many ways to use SAS in Health & Life Sciences, and one of my favorite is using it to track the spread of diseases. This post demonstrates how to layer several customized maps to track the recent Ebola outbreak in Africa. In this blog post, I describe how I
For 38 years, SAS CEO Jim Goodnight has run this company by a simple philosophy: Treat employees like they make a difference and they will. It was with that philosophy in mind 30 years ago that SAS opened the doors to its on-site healthcare center – with just one employee!
If you recognize this 1984 Wham! hit then you also recall girls in ties and blazers, guys in leisure suits, gas for $1.10 a gallon and seeing The Karate Kid at the Cineplex for $2.50 (at night!). If you think music and fashion were suspect thirty years ago, consider SAS’
I bet a lot of SAS users know where the phrase "Live Long and Prosper" comes from ... but can we use SAS software to also help analyze 'how long'? This blog posting shows several different kinds of SAS graphs that can help answer such a question! Let's start with
The US health care industry is always getting a bad rap. It takes heat for being too expensive or not efficient enough or just too complicated. We know we need it, and that living long and healthy lives requires it. But we also know we love to complain about it
All my friends seem to be having twins these days (below is a picture of my friend Holly's twins, for example) - I wondered if I could use SAS to analyze this twinning trend ... When I was growing up, way back in the day, twins seemed to be rarity.
Would you like to analyze the 9 million lines of Medicare payment data that was recently made public? You'll need lots of luck if you're planning to use Excel ... whereas this is the kind of thing SAS was built for! Here's a sneak-peek at what the text data looks
With all the changes the Affordable Care Act brings, including new care and payment models, there is an increase in provider’s need for data. While some large health systems are able to learn much about a patient’s full course of treatment by integrating their systems, the majority of health care
In the Breaking Bad TV series, Walter White has an impressive lab where he secretly makes the illegal drug methamphetamine (meth). Wouldn't it be cool to use SAS to show the locations of all the clandestine meth labs in the US?!? Let's do it!... In this blog, I show you
People who know me know that there’s one thing I hate at work – duplication of efforts. I’m not talking about working on a problem in a coordinated fashion. I’m talking about two or more people doing the same work, to answer the same question. Without coordination, there will be
I'm always trying to find new uses for SAS - this time I've written a proof-of-concept that shows how you might use SAS to create charts that test for color blindness. If nothing else, I think it's a fun example :) First, I did a Google search, and looked at several
"It slices, it dices ... it helps test laboratory mices!" In a joking way, this is a perfect description of SAS software, don't you think!?! :) And to prove it, this blog contains a collection of 32 examples, showing a variety of ways SAS can be used to graph data
With the medical science these days, there are many genetic defects you can be tested for, to see if you might develop a certain problem/disease, or might be a carrier for it. Would you rather know, or not know? (Would your health insurance company rather know, or not know?) These
Big data might be daunting, but Matthew J. Becker, Senior Director and Global Head of Statistical Programming at inVentive Health Clinical, says the goal remains simple for those in health care and life sciences: cure disease and improve health outcomes. Speaking last week at SAS Global Forum, Becker noted that
You've all heard about the recent meningitis outbreak, right? Being a data-guy and a map-guy, I went looking for maps related to the outbreak. I found the following map on the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) website. It shows the states that received the recalled drug used in epidurals (for back
The lines at clinics, hospitals and pharmacies seemed endless. My people, the people of Datapolis, were growing wearier by the day… The targeted, on-time communications intended to inform citizens about new healthcare options and relieve stress on the system were arriving late, or being delivered to the wrong consumers. And
The League of Analytic Heroes is growing. With the addition of each new member, we are better able to combat the chaos of big data. Illumino and Magnacomm are eager to welcome their newest team member. Keep your eyes on www.analyticheroes.com for his arrival. He's already got his eye on
It has become more and more apparent, country by country and state by state, that many organizations do not have a clear grasp on what their exposure is to health care fraud. Whatever name it goes by – aberrant behavior, abuse, waste or fraud – and no matter how it is measured – in currency (dollars,
It is becoming clear that a fair percentage of the health care community, particularity outside of the United States, are uncomfortable using the word, “fraud.” Instead, you see the words "risk" and "error" used more often to describe fraud. There appear to be many different reasons for the discomfort with
The men, women and children of Datapolis are falling ill at an alarming rate, forcing me to turn my attention away from my ongoing battle with Obscuro and toward helping the Datapolis Council of Elders distribute its medicine before it is too late. As it happens, just as we most
What is the solution for patient-centric healthcare? Big data, says SAS expert Alice Swearington in the post, Treat patients with big data insights. "Service providers throughout the healthcare continuum that become patient centric first will win the patient," she explains, citing the industry tends toward insurance exchanges and retail insurance
In most of the articles and press pieces that speak of health care fraud, the topic is usually covered in broad terms regarding the type or activity that has taken place: over-billing to Medicare/Medicaid, services billed and not delivered, over subscription of medication (by members or Pharmacies), and the list
When discussing fraud and abuse, it often (very often) becomes a philosophical discussion of whether aberrant activities are fraudulent or abusive. The quick difference being that fraudulent is intentional and abuse is not. The distinction quickly becomes an issue of legal and illegal as opposed to right and wrong. What
For the past year, I’ve had the pleasure of serving on the communications team of the National Collaborative for Bio-Preparedness (NCB-P), of which SAS is a partner and the analytics provider. That experience was heavy on my mind as I recently watched the film Contagion. I may drop some minor
For the past year, I’ve had the pleasure of serving on the communications team of the National Collaborative for Bio-Preparedness (NCB-P), of which SAS is a partner and the analytics provider. That experience was heavy on my mind as I recently watched the film Contagion. I may drop some minor
Most health care organizations either intentionally or due to some inability don’t use outside information (not just referals) in their search for fraud. There are great numbers of valid reasons for this: HIPAA, security, usable/current data sources, inflexible information systems or processes, restrictive compliance & IT departments, and the list
As part of the staffing efforts for the new SAS Center for Health Analytics and Insights (CHAI), SAS recently hired Dr. Graham Hughes, MD, as the company’s first Chief Medical Officer (CMO). When I heard the news, I sent a few questions to Graham to learn more about the new
Due to the rapid changes in both the health care market and more specifically the amount of fraud being committed in it, it is even more important than ever to maintain some degree of life cycle management to update the analyses used to detect and identify aberrant activity. However, many
