Streamlining public health analytic software costs in a time of budgetary challenge

Over the course of the last several decades, public health has experienced dramatic fluctuations in funding. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, new emergency preparedness departments were created within agencies to draft plans, develop training, and execute responses to disasters impacting human health. Funding dwindled in the years that followed, up until the emergence of SARS-CoV2. A rapid infusion into public health budgets enabled a mass expansion of staff and equipment, followed by efforts to fortify and modernize public health infrastructure. Many agencies successfully revised outdated software, data stores, and duplicative—and often slow—network connections. Agencies were also left to evaluate which procurements made during COVID were worth keeping.

The landscape has shifted again, and in response to shortened grant periods and reductions in federal funding, agencies are critically reassessing their analytic needs. SAS has supported several agencies in these evaluations and developed a set of recommendations to streamline and simplify enterprise analytic solutions.

Execute a comprehensive user survey

Targeted to all employees, the survey should assess which statistical, visual, and peripheral tools are being used, how frequently they are used, what data they access and its respective size, whether and how open-source code is utilized, and what challenges or barriers hinder efficient work.

Capture license costs for all software tools

For assessing SAS licensing, some licenses are provided by the CDC, others may be managed by a centralized IT organization, and still others may reside on SAS servers or as stand-alone desktop licenses. Your SAS Account Executive (accessible via the SAS Customer Service Portal) can help determine the types and counts of licenses assigned to your agency. The same approach may be needed to assess licenses for other analytic or visualization software such as SPSS, RStudio (Posit) individual, small business, or enterprise editions, Tableau, ArcGIS, Power BI, STATA, ActivePython, and others.

Identify cost and labor-intensive constraints on infrastructure

Are there redundant servers supporting specific analytic processes? Are there security concerns with users interacting with protected data using open-source tools? Are excessive processing times contributing to increased cloud computing costs?

Crosswalk software functionality and identify redundancy

The following questions may help further identify potential cost savings:

Are employees clustering use of certain tools without collaborating or exploring the option of streamlining to fewer tools?

Are users publishing dashboards and reports in multiple visualization tools (e.g., tableau Power BI ArcGIS)?

Are there options to migrate burdensome processing jobs into a more efficient statistical software tool?

Can software be migrated to a single hosted environment?

Explore potential changes by requesting trial environments

SAS Viya offers supported trial environments for agencies seeking to compare its cloud-based version with traditional desktop configurations. These trials allow users to load de-identified data, build dashboards, test SAS code, create workflows, and publish and share reports.

As part of the SAS trial experience, a content assessment is typically included, where SAS desktop code is evaluated to determine which procedures are in use and how they align with SAS Viya license levels.

Conclusion

SAS Viya is one of the few statistical platforms capable of replacing and expanding upon SAS 9.4 or Enterprise Guide functions, offering a drag-and-drop interface, integration with open-source tools, and powerful visualizations that match or exceed those of Tableau, Power BI, or R Shiny. Investing in SAS Viya can streamline and simplify statistical and visualization tools, improve software management, boost productivity, reduce cloud computing costs, and foster collaboration within an agency.

Learn more

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