SAS has formed a think tank to help healthcare and life sciences companies find new ways to use its analytics software to improve medical care and their bottom lines.
The SAS Center for Health Analytics and Insights, or CHAI, is hiring 16 staffers for the center at the company's sprawling headquarters complex in Cary.
"Quite frankly, we're doing it because our customers are asking for it," said Kecia Serwin, vice president of health and life sciences at SAS. "The face of health care is fundamentally changing. For them to be viable and sustainable going forward, they are going to have to transform the way they do business."
Corporations and other customers use SAS business intelligence and analytics software to analyze their operations and predict trends.
Privately held SAS is one of the largest companies based in the Triangle, with more than 11,500 workers worldwide, including 4,650 in Cary. Last year SAS' revenue rose 5.2 percent to a record $2.43 billion.
CHAI plans to conduct research "looking at how analytics might be applied to a variety of industry problems," said Jason Burke, the center's director. It will collaborate with customers and other organizations to "validate whether a particular approach is the right approach."
The health and life sciences industry - a broad category that stretches from health care providers to health insurers to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies - already is SAS's No. 2 customer group, after the financial services industry. But SAS sees plenty of unmet demand that it hopes to meet.
For example, said Burke, the industry hasn't yet embraced customer-intelligence analytics, which are used by organizations to understand who their customers are, what their needs are and how they could best be addressed.
"If you're a health plan, and you want to help improve the care and delivery of medicine to individual patients, ... you need to know a lot about the individual people you are trying to insure," he said.
Serwin said that the center also hopes to foster collaboration across industries, such as between health care providers and insurers.
"That is what we believe is the real promise here ... breaking down the silos that exist today," she said.
SAS plans to unveil the formation of CHAI at its Cary headquarters today during its eighth annual Health and Life Science Executive Conference.
The conference, which is expected attract 300 attendees, will include presentations from former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle; Jan De Witte, CEO of Healthcare IT at GE Healthcare; H. Shelton Earp, director of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center; and Lanier M. Cansler, secretary of the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services.
