GOVERNMENT

Visual Numerics, Inc., a leading provider of numerical analysis and visualization software, today announced that Humana Inc., one of the nation's largest publicly traded health benefits companies, has implemented JWAVE as the foundation for VeriSight, its advanced visual data analysis application. VeriSight allows Humana analysts and clinicians to identify trends in member data, to analyze the impact of existing programs and products, to identify new service opportunities, and to supplement risk management models. Named one of twelve Computerworld Premier 100 Best in Class initiatives, Humana's VeriSight application is an innovative solution with strategic importance to the business and substantive customer impact. "With VeriSight, we combine massive amounts of healthcare data, such as medical and pharmacy claims, in a highly secure and confidential environment," says Brian LeClaire, Humana's vice president and chief technology officer. "JWAVE gives us the performance and powerful image display capabilities we required for valuable, real-time visualization of that data." JWAVE is a client/server solution that enables users to rapidly develop and deploy applications across an enterprise via the Internet or an intranet. JWAVE helps users perform numerical analysis and visual interpretation of large, complex data sets and functions as a high-horsepower computational environment. Humana selected Visual Numerics because its JWAVE product combines these attributes with web-based (Java) capability, interactivity, and scalability. Visual Numerics also offered expert professional services that assisted Humana with its implementation. "JWAVE offers a unique combination of sophisticated visualization tools, advanced back-end analysis, and the ability to view and understand historical, current and future information," said Phil Fraher, president and CEO of Visual Numerics. Using visual data analysis techniques developed with JWAVE, Humana's VeriSight users now identify relationships among the myriad variables of the member populations served by Humana, to anticipate future costs, clinical events and guidance needs. Users are able to render secure intranet Web pages on-demand, enabling faster, more interactive exploration of clinical program effectiveness and participation, determination of cost drivers and other analytics that fuel programs geared to improving member health and to driving down costs. "Visual Numerics has been a true partner with Humana to make our application successful," said Mitzi Silliman, vice president of information technology, Humana. "The dedicated technical services team has been on hand since the beginning suggesting implementation strategies to get the performance we needed. JWAVE's flexible display techniques and scalability in a Java environment have been instrumental in allowing the Humana application to handle unique views of large amounts of data and to drill down into the data quickly." With JWAVE's high scalability, Humana can continue to add features and functionality to VeriSight to further increase its performance and analytic capabilities.