Company: The Permanente Medical Group
Company background: The Permanente Medical Group, Inc. (TPMG) is a physician-led medical group in Northern and Central California with over 9,500 dedicated and exceptional physicians working together across specialties. TPMG is the largest medical group in the country with over 70 years of providing quality medical care.
Contact: Anju Gupta
Title: Data Reporting & Analytics Consultant, Programming IV
Country: USA
Award Category: Innovative Problem Solver
Tell us about the business problem you were trying to solve?
We have multiple databases in our vast Northern California region holding financial, operational and health record data that needs to be accessed quickly, consistently (in a standard way) by all our groups to help our leaders, clinicians for our patients. The databases are complex.
How did you use SAS to solve that business problem? What products did you use and how did you use them?
Creation of a pdat library that consists of SAS Macros to help SAS Developers with repeated tasks like connections as well as non sas developers to run common code and deliver the results to their users.
What were the results or outcomes?
The pdat group, consists of 3 people now manages and maintains 57 connection type - SAS Macros, 95 content macros, and 5 rollup macros. Each macro is in a list as part of a library of macros, with full documentation on the source, transformations, usage instructions, example and contacts.
Why is this approach innovative?
This approach is innovative because it allows for a lot of redundancies to be eliminated - every group no longer has to run or create the SAS code from scratch. This library is important and heavily used. On average, 70,000 macros are run every month. Moreover, business logic is standardized.
What advice would you give to new SAS users?
SAS and SAS data can be integrated with many tools. There is a strong community of SAS users to leverage from.
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