Briefs

SAS helps drive earlier, more tailored interventions to improve health

CARY, NC (April 14, 2008) - Healthways relies on SAS, the leader in business intelligence, to help identify people who would benefit from their preventive care services and achieve improved health outcomes. The US leader in Health and Care SupportSM for well and chronically ill populations achieves its objective using SAS Enterprise Miner™. The data mining software predicts hidden relationships in millions of member records to determine patient risk levels and develop more targeted intervention and prevention plans.

"Healthways helps millions of people maintain or improve their health," said Adam Hobgood, Director of Statistics at Healthways Center for Health Research in Nashville, TN. "SAS predictive analytics has the power to accommodate the massive volume of clinical and operational data used in our predictive models. Thanks to SAS, we can turn that data into evidence-based knowledge for predicting the groups of members in greatest need of our support programs. In addition, by identifying high-risk patients and implementing preventative actions against future conditions, we hope to head off the increased costs of care before they occur."

Using SAS Enterprise Miner, efficiency in comparing predictive models has allowed Healthways to accomplish in three days what would have taken weeks. SAS software's user-friendly interface enables users with or without extensive programming experience to quickly perform sophisticated analysis. As a result, Healthways has increased its competitive advantage by helping employer groups and insurers improve member health outcomes and reduce escalating costs.

For more information, visit www.sas.com