INPS picks Teradata, SAS

OHIO, USA: Teradata Corporation and SAS recently announced that INPS - Italy's social security agency - has selected and implemented a combined Teradata and SAS enterprise data warehouse (EDW) and analytics system for healthcare-related fraud detection.

The new system includes software, hardware and services. The Teradata data warehouse, combined with the SAS analytic solution will help in analyzing multiple terabytes of detailed data linked to millions of health insurance claims, patient experiences, doctors, hospitals, treatments, and procedures to answer complex questions and gain valuable insight into trends, costs and quality of care.

Hermann Wimmer, president, EMEA, Teradata said, "Innovative customer installations such as this one at INPS show that SAS and Teradata are delivering on the promise of in-database analytics, which is to give customers a flexible, powerful means for implementing advanced information management in one location."

INPS aspires to detect the highest possible number of non-compliant behaviors in terms of prognosis accuracy, whether by companies or individual claimants. This requires software-based investigation involving masses of dynamic data to analyze sickness certificates and medical inspection details.

Each year INPS receives about 12 million individual sickness certificates and indemnifies a virtual 164,000 years of work, corresponding to 60 million days of work, for which it pays out several billion euros. To manage and analyze such events and verify the authenticity of sickness certificates, INPS carries out around 1.5 million medical inspection visits that cost tens of millions of euros per year.

The use of analytic techniques and data mining aims at spotting information hidden in the data and anomalous behavior to discover meaningful patterns and suspicious activities. The rapid distribution of intelligence to all users involved is of the essence in scheduling of medical inspection visits and thus swiftly detect fraudulent behaviors against INPS.

The INPS announcement was made in tandem with the annual Italy Teradata User Group meeting this week in Rome.