Centra Health gets timely, detailed data with OLAP & SAS/MDDB server.

CARY, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 16, 1997--SAS Institute Inc. today announced that Centra Health, a health care delivery organization based in Lynchburg, VA, is using OLAP and the SAS/MDDB(R) server to find and analyze information that used to take several weeks - in just minutes. The MDDB offers fast, flexible data summarizations, analyses, and reporting capabilities so business users throughout an organization can identify and track trends for strategic decision making.

Centra Health began developing this aspect of its information infrastructure three years ago with a goal of streamlining business operations while improving patient care. "We wanted to understand where we were better than the competition and where we needed to improve," says LaDonna Shedor, Corporate Director at Centra Health. "If you are doing better and not looking at it, you might accidentally discontinue that practice. The SAS solutions have helped us focus on real life operational things that will make a difference -- things we need to do as a business." Today, Centra responds to nearly seven times the requests handled just three years ago, compares its medical staff to others, makes staffing decisions based on trending over time, and tailors training classes.

Centra Health built a data warehouse and implemented the SAS/MDDB server. "Centra's primary focus is getting information into the hands of people who can operationally make a difference," said Mark Moorman, SAS Institute program manager for business intelligence. "The SAS MDDB has graphical, spreadsheet, reporting, data visualization, and DSS tools. This OLAP engine's power is its complete integration with SAS software's application development capabilities - among the most powerful object-oriented development tools available."

"Benchmarking results for the new MDDB have been very favorable," explains John Wimmer, Centra Health's team leader of financial and decision support systems. "The system has been used most extensively to analyze data on finances and operations. People get data now that they just couldn't get before. Running a report against the base tables, our run times ranged from five to seven minutes," added Wimmer. "Running the same query against the MDDB took only seconds."

Business and IT benefits of the SAS MDDB include:

--fast/accurate ad-hoc analyses - the ability to "slice and dice" data by diverse dimensions.

--the ability to drill down and through to detailed data to examine variances.

--client/server capabilities to exploit any hardware platform, including MVS, UNIX, Windows and WindowsNT - as the OLAP server.

--Web-enabled dynamic or static data delivery via either an internet or intranet architecture.

--integrated Object-Oriented development tools to easily build customized reporting applications.

--object library providing "out-of-the-box" reports for ranking, variance reports and business visualization.

Now in its 21st year, SAS Institute is one of the top ten largest independent software vendors in the world, and is the largest privately held software company. The leading provider of data warehousing and decision-support software, the Institute has won the reader-selected 1996 and 1997 Datamation magazine Data Warehousing Product of the Year award and Software Magazine's Editor's Choice award for decision-support software.

SAS Institute provides an integrated suite of information delivery tools that allow companies to transform the wide variety of data within their organization into information that business users need to make decisions. To make data useful, SAS(R) software collects data from almost every platform and data format; cleans and transforms data into information that users will understand; and stores that information in an open and efficient data warehouse structure. To explore that information, SAS software includes OLAP, query and reporting, EIS, data mining, analysis, data visualization, and application-development interfaces. SAS software is client/server and Web enabled.

SAS Institute also delivers business solutions that are complete packages for financial consolidation and reporting, clinical trials analysis, oil and gas analysis and IT service management. Currently, SAS software and business solutions are being used at more than 30,000 business, government, and university sites in more than 120 countries.

Please visit SAS Institute's Web site: www.sas.com

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CONTACT: SAS Institute Inc.

Wally Maczka or Pamela Meek, 919/677-8000

www.sas.com