HEALTH

SAS, the leader in business intelligence, today announced that the company will team with the University of Alabama and the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Health System in an effort to improve patient care. SAS is sponsoring a pilot study that will be conducted by University of Alabama MBA students, who will use SAS data and text mining solutions to examine 12 thousand of the 7 million records in UAB Health System's patient database. UAB Health System selected SAS Enterprise Miner and SAS Text Miner to analyze information from doctors' notes and textual comments in its patient database. SAS delivers advanced analytic technology that will convert unstructured data into intelligence that can be mined in concert with demographic variables to track and predict patient response to various medical procedures. The UAB Health System is looking for patterns and clusters of repeated indicators to point to the best methods of treatment. Leaders of the cooperative effort are Jerry Oglesby, director of SAS Higher Education Consulting; Mike Hardin, Ph.D., a SAS Alliance Partner and director of the University of Alabama Institute of Business Intelligence, Culverhouse College of Commerce and Business Administration; and Joan Hicks, chief information officer of UAB Health System. "We plan to use this study to develop an early-warning system that supports physicians," Hardin said. "Physicians see patients and provide dictation in electronic format along with clinical encounter notes and other textual information. We seek a way to combine information from medical transcriptions with lab results and other numerical data to create a full picture of patient health and to help our physicians make better clinically based decisions." According to Hardin, the study may suggest actions that administrators can take to reduce hospital stays and expenses, improve overall patient care and satisfaction, and lead to more accurate diagnoses. And study organizers hope the findings will extend far beyond the UAB Health System. "While this study certainly will benefit the UAB Health System, we have more far-reaching goals as well," Hicks explained. "We anticipate developing solutions with SAS that can be replicated at other organizations, solutions that include the extraction of reporting data for required quality measurements and the predictive modeling of individual patient outcomes during their hospital stays for more rapid interventions and preventions." Partnering with institutions of higher education is nothing new for SAS. In the past four years, the privately held software company has worked with more than 100 universities and colleges to provide trainer kits, guest lecturers for MBA courses, and innumerable workshops and conferences. The University of Alabama's MBA students will be given an opportunity to work with patient records from UAB Health System to solve real-world issues using SAS software. Hardin reports that students who have completed similar predictive modeling studies supported by SAS have landed jobs after graduation with annual salaries $10,000 to $15,000 above their peers. And for SAS, it just makes good business sense. "This partnership gives students additional tools to survive in the competitive work force and helps address pressing healthcare issues," Oglesby said. "It also raises awareness of the power of SAS software in college institutions that are training future business leaders. This is a situation where everyone wins."