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June 18, 2014

Hospitals Improving Patient Care with SAS Visual Analytics

CARY, N.C., June 18 — Hospitals across the Netherlands are using SAS Visual Analytics and data visualization to optimize business processes and improve patient care. Seven hospitals across the region, including Gelderse Vallei Hospital, the Sint Maartens Clinic, the BovenIJ Hospital, the Scheper Hospital, the Bethesda Hospital, and the Hospital of the Gelre Foundation selected SAS to access and analyze large data sets to better manage business processes.

Based on SAS in-memory processing technology, SAS Visual Analytics is not only ideal for departmental or workgroup applications; it can also take on big data. SAS in-memory innovation requires no data movement or user programming for its fast analytical processing.

Self-service data

Gelderse Vallei Hospital (ZGV) is using SAS Visual Analytics to improve the quality of patient care by connecting patients with services faster. SAS’ data visualization software provides near-real-time information, making it easy for staff to analyze, interpret and act.

“We analyze care logistics to detect bottlenecks quickly, so patients get the care they need, when they need it,” said Rik Eding, Data Specialist and Information Analyst for ZGV. “The quality of this information, therefore, is critical.”

Before SAS Visual Analytics, employees relied on data analysts to build reports. SAS eliminates this extra step by presenting information graphically. Staff analyze data on their own to build accurate reports for management, saving significant time and money for the hospital.

“Analytics is no longer just for our finance department or data analysts,” Eding continued. “It is pivotal to the hospital’s care and medical process. Analytics gives us deeper insights into patient admission times and treatment procedures. SAS Visual Analytics literally puts the power of analytics into the hands of employees, yielding invaluable results.”

SAS Visual Analytics is also available to ZGV employees via the web and mobile devices, providing roaming users with easy, quick data access to analyze and build reports in their preferred format.

Beyond big data

The potential of big data in healthcare is great and according to research agency The METISfiles, big data spending on health care will grow at an average of 37 percent in the coming years to 239 million euros in 2018.

“The features of SAS Visual Analytics connect well with the current developments in which the need for information surrounding the care process is becoming increasingly bigger and more important,” said Henk Stobbe, Senior Account Manager at SAS. “Medical professionals not only have an accessible visual dashboard with all data, but can now examine different scenarios and make predictive analysis based on this data. With the visual insights from big data, they can better prepare for improving the logistics processes surrounding patient care and identify areas for improvement.”

Customers can choose how to deploy SAS Visual Analytics. Available for on-site licensing, SAS Visual Analytics scales from workgroups on a departmental server up to massive environments, including enterprise deployments supporting multiple lines of business and the Hadoop big data architecture. SAS supports Cloudera and Hortonworks Hadoop distributions. Customers can also use SAS Visual Analytics in a cloud environment.

The best way to understand the value of SAS Visual Analytics is by experiencing it firsthand. To try the software, please visit the interactive SAS Visual Analytics demo.

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