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Healthcare

Carl Farrell came up to talk about sales enablement and execution. 2010 was an interesting year in the Americas as the recovery was very inconsistent between countries in the Americas and across verticals. Strong growth in First Year Fees – 21% in US, 15% in Canada and 56% nearly in Latin America (with the Southern [...]

Humana is looking for a Technology Manager to manage the Clinical Business Rules Team in Louisville, KY. They are looking for “a self-starter and a proven leader” who would “enjoy using your technical knowledge to help empower your team to identify and resolve organizational issues”. Role has 12-25 direct reports and reports to a Technology [...]

Subtitled “from 0 to 1400”, this case study discussed how Unum (an insurance company) introduced business rules. Back in 2009 their rules were scattered, siloed, hidden in requirements documents and in different formats (from code to if/then statements to long verbose notes). And even though they tried to focus on rules, they were often embedded [...]

Eric Siegel opened Predictive Analytics World with a keynote on Five Ways Predictive Analytics Cuts Enterprise Risk. Predictive analytics is a hot topic these days, with demand in terms of jobs for instance doubling since the beginning of 2009. Yet the audience was really clear that most executives do not get the true power of [...]

The McKinsey Quarterly had a nice piece on Reforming hospitals with IT investment that contained a great paragraph: Combined with clinical-decision-support (CDS) tools that give physicians best-practice guidelines for medical procedures and with stricter coding classifications, electronic health records not only broaden access to medical information but also serve as a forcing agent to spur [...]

I was sent this link to a NY Times article over the weekend – Dizzying Symptoms. In it we read of a patient with an unusual set of symptoms that baffles various doctors. Eventually they find out the cause and it turns out to be a vitamin deficiency that is a not uncommon side effect [...]

Silverlink update

I did some work with Silverlink some time ago and was really impressed by their use of decision management to improve the communication of health plans and others in the healthcare space with members and patients. I got a chance to catch up with them recently to discuss progress and their use of adaptive control [...]

New Rexer Analytics survey

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork I recently got the survey results from the annual data mining survey that Karl Rexer of Rexer Analytics runs. You can get the summary here or the full results from Karl but here are my thoughts: Data mining is everywhere. The most cited areas are CRM / Marketing and Financial Services with [...]

Keynote at the Drools bootcamp

I am giving a keynote at the Drools bootcamp in San Diego. The bootcamp has some days focused on the healthcare industry as well as some more general sessions

I got a chance to catch up with the folks from Red Hat recently. I have reviewed the new functionality that Mark Proctor and his team have been adding to turn the old Drools rule engine into a competitive Business Rules Management System or BRMS when the latest release came out. This time we chatted [...]

Last session at the SAS/BetterManagement.com event this week on IT and personalized healthcare. Yan Chow of Kaiser Permanente presented on their vision for IT-enabled healthcare. Kaiser is an integrated system with 8.6M patients and 180,000 employees and physicians. Integrated means that insurance/delivery are all aligned and Kaiser is very focused on prevention. It is also [...]

I got a chance to catch up with Andrea Allmon of FICO to hear about their new Insurance Fraud Manager release (3.0 in July). This is a timely topic because of the debates around healthcare at the moment. In all the discussions about healthcare costs you never hear about the amount of fraud involved, yet [...]

Jim Sinur introduced the session by describing how Gartner saw BPM being used to turn a cost reduction axe into a cost reduction scalpel during the recent recession – cutting more precisely. The current economic climate he says is “nirvana” for BPM and BPM is not perceived as a luxury but a necessity. The session’s [...]

Rules-based innovation

An old friend of mine, Anders Björlin, has just won a 2009 Humanitarian Impact award from The Itanium Solutions Alliance. The press release says: Judges selected Kiwok of Sweden for its BodyKom(TM) Series remote ECG monitor. Deployed in conjunction with caregivers and health systems, BodyKom allows heart patients to live independently while their heart is [...]

I saw this comment last week in The US stimulus program Taking medical records online – McKinsey Quarterly – Health Care – Strategy & Analysis and it struck a chord with me: health care providers to upgrade their IT systems rapidly to reach the act’s standards for “meaningful use” of EMR (Electronic Medical Record) This [...]

This week’s event calendar is below. The intent of this weekly post is to focus on web events coming in the next few weeks and conferences in the coming months. If you know about web or physical events around business rules, analytics, optimization or decision management, please let me know – james@decisionmanagementsolutions.com. Web Events: Silverlink: [...]

Vision Service Plan, VSP, presented on their use of business rules to build agile business processes in healthcare. VSP has some 55M customers in their plans and have been an IBM/ILOG customer since 2002. Every process in healthcare is governed by policies, regulations – every process has decisions that must be made following the rules [...]

Syndicated from Smart Data Collective Natasha Balac from UC San Diego and Michael Zeller from Zementis (their product was blogged here and their support for the amazon.com compute cloud was discussed here) presented on the use of Medicare and Medicaid data to detect and prevent fraud. The high computing center at UC San Diego (San [...]

Syndicated from Smart Data Collective John Elder presented a collection of case studies to showcase the ROI of data mining. John started by making the point that many of his case studies had technical success but not business success – an interesting statistic. John sees three major ways that predictive analytics can help – streamlining, [...]

Mr Obama, smarten these systems!

Like millions of my fellow Americans I listened to our new President today. As I did I was struck by the opportunities for decision management to deliver the smarter systems that will be critical with some of the priorities President Obama laid out in his speech. There were four commitments he made that struck me [...]