Humana: Visualization of Healthcare Claims Trends and Member Health Benefit Opportunities

Humana, one of the nation’s largest publicly traded health benefits companies, has implemented JWAVE as the foundation for Verisight™, its advanced visual data analysis application. Verisight allows Humana analysts and clinicians to identify trends in member data, to analyze the impact of existing programs and products, to identify new service opportunities, and to supplement risk management models.

Humana selected Visual Numerics because its JWAVE product combines visual interpretation of large, complex data sets with web-based (Java™) capability, interactivity, and scalability.

Using visual data analysis techniques developed with JWAVE, Humana's VeriSight users now identify relationships among the myriad variables of the member populations served by Humana, to anticipate future costs, clinical events and guidance needs. Users are able to render secure intranet Web pages on-demand, enabling faster, more interactive exploration of clinical program effectiveness and participation, determination of cost drivers and other analytics that fuel programs geared to improving member health and to driving down costs.

In partnering with Teksouth to develop a neural net forecasting application, Visual Numerics tapped into its mathematical and statistical libraries. The neural network forecasting application extracts information from historical cost data, applying the information to forecast future costs. The analytic engine will have the flexibility to prioritize historical data and exclude anomalous data to improve its predictive capabilities. The solution applies knowledge gained form historical data to new problems, fine-tuning its forecasting accuracy even more over time.

"The flexibility and learning potential of our neural net forecasting application has significant potential to help government agencies and commercial businesses improve their predictive analysis capabilities, moving well beyond traditional tools into high end business intelligence."

-Larry Northington, vice president of strategic planning and corporate development for Teksouth, and a retired U.S. Air Force Major General.

Major European Telecommunications Company: Advanced Forecasting for
Cellular Network Optimization

For a major European mobile telecommunications company, planning and managing their cellular network is key to their success. Too little coverage and customers experience service problems; too much coverage and resources are wasted. Good planning means analyzing the massive amounts of usage data generated by the thousands of cellular towers in the service provider’s network. To track usage on their German mobile network, the service provider already utilized sophisticated data analysis techniques, but needed another level of refinement in order to better understand traffic patterns.

For a company owning thousands of cellular towers, all sending data to their Network Operations Center, traditional statistical analysis techniques were inadequate, labor intensive, expensive and cumbersome. The service provider turned to Visual Numerics Professional Services group. To identify the outliers and locate any seasonal trends in
the data, Visual Numerics leveraged the ARIMA algorithm from the IMSL Numerical Library. Visual Numerics’ software engineers then automated the algorithm to tackle the customer’s faster processing requirement. The state-of-the-art, custom-built expert-system Auto_ARIMA algorithm allowed the service provider to produce more accurate forecasts faster than before, giving them a significant advantage in the market.

Major European Grocery Chain

In the very competitive grocery industry, companies win or lose based on their ability to predict customer shopping habits. A major grocery chain in Europe that handles hundreds of thousands of products was relying on historical average order statistics to forecast product demand and inventory. For some products, these statistics did not provide forecasts of short term inventory requirements. They wanted to do better. The grocery chain turned to Visual Numerics Professional Services to help them use more advanced statistical and data mining techniques for predicting inventory requirements. They wanted to quickly and accurately forecast the demand for each product for each of their stores.

Visual Numerics is delivering a total data mining solution through its extensive libraries,
in-house data mining expertise, and development resources, packaging this technology as a customized, configurable and easy to use solution. Neural Net preprocessing, forecasting and training engines will be provided for integration into the customer’s current enterprise .NET applications used by store managers.