Health Care Analytics Solutions for Navigating the Impacts of COVID-19

Rapid response to emerging public health threats requires a comprehensive approach to detecting and assessing outbreaks, identifying characteristics of the threat and determining optimal intervention strategies. Modeling the spread of infections based on up-to-date health surveillance data can help you mobilize critical health care resources and understand the effectiveness of mitigation and containment efforts. SAS analytics solutions can help by enabling:

• Simplified and automated public health reporting.
• Increased transparency into spread and trends.
• Epidemiological models that help project dates for peak infection and hospital demand.

Epidemiology is the analysis of disease conditions within a population. For pandemics such as COVID-19, epidemiological models allow health care professionals to run different virus projection scenarios in order to follow the flow of a population through the stages of an epidemic. They also provide important information to non-health organizations that need to understand the impact on supply chains, product demand forecasts and public policy decisions. Using predictive modeling capabilities from SAS, you can:

• Estimate key parameters of interest, such as disease contagiousness or the average number of people who will catch the disease from one infected person (R0).
• Quantify the efficacy of interventions – e.g., social distancing, vaccinations – in reducing R0.

Health care systems need to ensure that adequate, quality medical resources are available to protect public health. Analytics can help predict medical resource needs, including hospital capacity, personnel, and critical medical equipment and personal protective equipment (PPE). SAS has the relevant expertise in epidemiology, workforce analytics and operations optimization – including supply chain and inventory management – to help you:

• Optimize, prioritize and allocate resources to meet demand where and when they are most needed. 
• Continuously monitor demand and supply, and ensure proactive management of scarce resources.

SAS helps public health officials and investigators make sense of overwhelmingly complex disease events, manage the velocity of alerts and understand disease spread. Our comprehensive solution enables you to proactively identify risk contacts and superspreaders by combining:

• Robust link analysis.
• Visualization.
• Text and geospatial search and analysis.
• Interactive network building.
• Entity generation.
• Contact analysis.

Health organizations need to share clinical outcomes data with life sciences and other research companies to advance the development of new therapies and vaccines. The goal is to glean new scientific and commercial insights from real world evidence (RWE). SAS helps you effectively leverage RWE by enabling you to:

• Integrate real world data from internal and third-party sources, including point-of-care systems, electronic medical records, claims, third-party data providers and more. 
• Rapidly build patient cohorts for analysis.
• Predict patient outcomes to optimize clinical pathways.