Company: CPESN USA
Company background: CPESN® USA is America’s first clinically integrated network of pharmacy providers. With more than 3,500 community-based pharmacies operating in 48 networks across 43 states and Washington D.C., CPESN USA is the country’s fourth largest pharmacy organization and reaches 83% of the population with hand delivery to patients’ doorsteps. Over 8,500 CPESN pharmacy providers deliver patient care services that have proven to improve the health of patients and lower total cost of their care. CPESN USA incorporates innovation and technology to empower its networks of pharmacy providers to succeed in an evolving health outcomes marketplace.
Contact: Monali Bhosle
Title: Assistant Director, Analytics and Reporting
Country: United States
Award Category: Community Uplift Award
Tell how you've used SAS to have a positive impact on your community?
For our team, the most crucial application of SAS analytics software was during COVID-19 pandemic. CPESN USA was selected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as one of the Federal Retail Pharmacy Partners to administer COVID vaccines via local pharmacies. The challenge for our team was to ingest vaccine administration data that we received from 2,000 individual businesses (our CPESN pharmacies), create reports in a specific template provided by the CDC, and upload those reports to the CDC portal on daily basis. We implemented a process in SAS-EG that not only performed all these tasks but also performed quality control checks to ascertain that we are sending accurate vaccine administration data to CDC. Our rigorous processes reflected in CDC’s data validation score card where we achieved 10/10 on all data quality metrics!
The impact on the communities these pharmacies served was tremendous! Since we were able to receive and report vaccine administration data, local independent pharmacies were able to participate in the CDC’s program. Without us, they wouldn’t be able to access the federal allocation of vaccine. The program closed at the end of 2023, and our 2,000 CPESN participating pharmacies received 7M doses of vaccine and administered nearly 6.8M vaccinations. Our combined efforts earned the pharmacies $270M in additional revenue ($180K per pharmacy) and helped make a healthier patient population within the local community.
Here is the CPESN Success Story: Success Stories Showcase 2023 on Vimeo
What SAS products are you using and how are you using them?
We primarily use Base SAS and SAS-EG to create standardized reports and visualization. SAS can be easily integrated into our web-based and open-source applications to access and analyze complex data. We have standardized the code in SAS that can be used across multiple programs. This is extremely valuable for our small Analytics and Reporting team. During COVID-19 pandemic, the daily reports were created in SAS-EG and were exported into the template provided by CDC. We also integrated various quality control checks into this code for the internal team.
What was your most surprising discovery about your work?
I have personally been using SAS for the last 15 years and amazed by the advancements made by the SAS team in their analytics software for scalable solutions. At CPESN USA, our most surprising discovery was the ease of using SAS-EG to analyze complex data with inbuilt functions and the ability to automate/schedule the reports. We built our state-of-the-art predictive models in SAS, which are ultimately being utilized by community pharmacies across the nation to better serve their patient population. We were also surprised to know that SAS can easily integrate APIs to fetch data from external sources. We are working on implementing the API-based extraction of US Census data, that will be integrated into the pharmacy workflow to gain valuable insights about the community they serve.
In the healthcare industry, analyzing the data with patient identifiers requires the utmost standards. SAS’s industry-leading advanced analytics software with 24/7 support by experts and SAS community dashboards not only enables us to meet those standards but also helps us in creating accurate and rigorous analytics solution for our customers, which ultimately translates into improved performance of CPESN pharmacies and improved health of the patients in the communities they serve.
