Company: MedImpact Healthcare Systems Inc.("Medimpact")
Company background:
MedImpact Healthcare Systems Inc. (“MedImpact”) is a privately owned pharmacy benefits manager that works with commercial health plans, government programs and self-insured groups to administer highly customized benefit designs, formularies, clinical programs, and analytics.
Contact: Michael Aleman
Title: SAS Programmer
Country: USA
Award Category: Innovative Problem Solver
Tell us about the business problem you were trying to solve?
MedImpact provides clinical programs to help our Clients improve medication use quality, making it easier for members to take clinically appropriate medications as prescribed with the ultimate goal of improving healthcare quality and reducing costs. This often requires identification of issues and outreach to prescribers to provide education and suggest follow-up actions, as appropriate. However, prescribers are often inundated with communications from various stakeholders which can cause prescriber frustration and overwhelmed office staff. This may ultimately lead to important messaging getting lost in the shuffle. To solve this key business problem, we had to innovate smarter prescriber communications that would provide necessary, actionable medication use data in an easily deciphered format on behalf of the members who needed it most. This requires being able to identify members with suboptimal medication use patterns, distilling those patterns down to an intuitive visual representation,
How did you use SAS to solve that business problem? What products did you use and how did you use them?
For our prescriber outreach, we used base SAS 9.4 to leverage our team’s intellectual knowledge about pharmacy claims data and industry-standard medication use quality metrics as well as expertise in the use of algorithms, APIs, and SAS functionality to retrieve key data from various databases to segment identified members and prescribers for clinical outreach. MedImpact created dynamic communications that can create and array the communications data and chart data mapping points within an XML. Our team used SAS’s vast macro language to create dynamic programs where we were able to create standard programs, custom programs, and the ability to integrate clients without any complication. Using SAS’s ability to produce any type of data format and structure, our communications software can ingest the data from the XML to construct the multiple dynamic communications based on segment and create the chart graphics on the demand. The graphics added to the individual communications created an at-a-glance chart of the member’s fill history where the prescriber could easily identify suboptimal medication use patterns, such as abnormally high doses, gaps in refill history, and overlapping fills of drugs that may interact with one another and lead to increased risk of adverse health outcomes.
What were the results or outcomes?
The result of using the versatility of SAS assisted us in creating a mechanism that could interact with configurations that were already set-up in-database, use segmentation or algorithms to determine the population of members for outreach, and generate a communication to the prescriber to address medication use issues and deliver quality improvement results for our clients. Our innovative member-level claims data visualization promotes better prescriber engagement by making our communications more visually appealing and easy-to-interpret quickly and efficiently by providers so that they can work to address medication use quality with their patients.
Why is this approach innovative?
The approach to solving this business problem was innovative from a standpoint of using the technology that we already had and software that we had in production. We didn’t have to test pilot or purchase additional software to accomplish our goals which helped lower costs of development. Our team was able to maximize base SAS and how SAS interacts with other products and systems. The use of dynamic, member-specific pharmacy claims data embedded in prescriber communications is also innovative, as it eliminates the need for text-heavy descriptions or bulky pharmacy claims lists that are often included in these types of communications to convey suboptimal medication use patterns to prescribers. This makes it easier for prescribers to get the medication use data they need to improve the care they provide to their patients and improve health outcomes.
What advice would you give to new SAS users?
Don't focus so much on the programming, that will work itself out. Focus on solving the problem and how SAS fits within your solution.
