At this month’s SAS Explore event in Las Vegas, North Carolina-based SAS unveiled AI and analytics that arm health providers, insurers and public health agencies with flexibility and speed to drive health innovation.

In the healthcare industry, the time-consuming task of integrating data from multiple systems and formats slows down efforts to build and deploy repeatable health analytics that benefit individuals and communities.

SAS, a specialist in AI and analytics, announced SAS Health, an end-to-end enterprise offering for analytics and data automation that simplifies health data management, improves data governance and accelerates patient insights.

These analytic insights – from proactively identifying gaps in clinical staffing to visualising the landscape of screening centres relative to patient populations – allow health systems to measure the quality of each patient interaction and positively impact care for patients with complex chronic conditions.

Health providers and payers need data that are centralised, secure and optimised for analytics. To address this, SAS Health is powered by a common health data model with predefined mappings to widely used industry standards. With just a handful of connection details securely entered, users can be up and running, working on solving problems of improving patient care.

Applying the power of analytics and AI platform SAS Viya, SAS Health can unlock actionable insights more quickly, while facilitating compliance with industry standards and regulations.

“Having one consistent, common data model built on a powerful advanced analytics platform is pivotal for hospital systems and the future of healthcare delivery,” said Gail Stephens, vice president at SAS. “SAS Health offers an extraordinary opportunity to advance patient care and treatment through improved efficiencies in data and analytics frameworks, which ultimately will allow healthcare payers and providers to deliver better outcomes, more quickly.”

SAS Health’s common health data model on SingleStore will be a central location to connect diverse health data with clinical, financial and operational information in an efficient and flexible way, reducing costs and simplifying data access. The cloud-native offering should allow easy and quick ingestion of data from multiple industry standards, starting with fast healthcare interoperability resources (FHIR), in a no-code, low-code format.

Global adoption of the FHIR industry data standard – which defines how health care information can be exchanged between different computer systems – is growing. Major electronic health record (EHR) companies are moving quickly to support FHIR and, in the USA, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has mandated its use.

SAS Health is one outcome of SAS’s recent announcement to commit $1bn to AI-powered industry options over the next three years. As outlined in the May 2023 announcement, the investment in AI builds on SAS’s decades-long focus on providing tailored options to banking, government, insurance, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, energy, telecoms, media and more.

More information on SAS Health can be found at: www.sas.com/en_us/software/health.html.