Healthcare is Big Biz

Being as complex as any other business, it is natural to find accounting systems, ERP systems and process-management systems in healthcare, too. Sometimes they are customized or even specifically created for the healthcare industry. We’ll look at two such offerings.

Cubot



Cubot, a decision-support system, can take data present in rows and columns and present it as graphs and tables, with drill-down facilities. The combinations of axes have to be pre-defined, and the display can be in units or in monitory value.

Users access the system over a browser and depending on rights allocated. Cubot’s pricing is on per server, with no restrictions on clients. This is achieved by using Linux as the platform for running Cubot. The database is either MySQL or Oracle; and depending on the database, prices could vary widely.

Using the software is simple. You choose the data you want presented from two axes on the browser itself–two rows on the top and a column on the left. If it is a graph, clicking on any item graphed will give you a drill down. You can save commonly used views as well as snapshots of graphs that you would want for record.

Contact: Robust Designs, Bangalore. Tel: 080-2996505 E-mail: srini@robustdesigns.com  

SAS



SAS has datawarehousing and datamining solutions that can be used in clinical trial report analysis, drug development, managing drug inventory, generate reports for clinical studies, etc. One of the solutions helps standardize the drug-development life cycle process. Consider the stages involved in this process. A company would first conduct a variety of clinical trials on patients and gather data. This data comes from a number of sources, depending upon the tests, and is also likely to come in different formats. To analyze this, the researcher has to first convert this raw data in a suitable format. This can be quite difficult and time-consuming. This is where SAS solutions becomes handy. It helps transform the data into a more analysis-friendly format. It has guidelines for naming and defining the key structures of the various data sets and variables, so that it can be put in a standard structure. The data transformation is then done using specific SAS programs that can



be run as a batch process or individually. 

Once data is transformed, it is easy to analyze and generate reports. Report generation is wizard driven. It can create the documentation for all analysis, and all documents are hyperlinked. A data explorer allows the medical

staff to locate data specific to  their drug. 

Apparently, the SAS reporting formats have been approved by the US FDA. The basic solution is priced at about Rs 3 lakh. It can run on Win NT/2000, Unix, or even old Mainframe systems. Client access is Web-based, meaning it’s accessible from anywhere across the network. 

Contact: SAS India, Mumbai. Tel: 022-2349400. E-mail: george.varghese@sas.com 

Anil Chopra