SAS® text mining software turns prose into profit

SAS® Text Miner now available to analyze e-mails, call reports and other documents

CARY, N.C. (May 31, 2002) - Words fill the world of work. Every day, we're flooded
with e-mails, Web pages, memos, agendas and countless other documents filled with
simple words. While individuals seek to make sense of all the words that cross
their paths, business analysts have had no way to use data mining techniques to
detect meaningful patterns or to make predictions based on the massive volumes of
text generated within their organizations and beyond. 

That's why SAS, the leading provider of business intelligence, today announced the
general availability of SAS® Text Miner, adding advanced text mining to the
company's market-leading data mining solution. Text Miner allows users to discover
and extract knowledge from a wide variety of text documents, including sales call
reports, medical records, Web pages, patents, warranty claims and e-mailed customer
communications. The software can access text data in Microsoft Word documents,
PDFs, HTML and many other kinds of files stored in a wide variety of databases and
file systems. 

For instance, text mining can help a sales manager examine free-form text notes
collected from customer e-mails and by telesales representatives, categorize these
notes into meaningful clusters and then make informed decisions on up-sell or
cross-sell opportunities given each customer's position in the sales cycle. 

Medical researchers can use text mining to review patient records, analyze medical
conditions and treatments, and then identify trends that can help healthcare
providers understand what combination of approaches works best with certain
patients. 

"Text Miner solves the problem of too much unstructured, text-based data piling up
in organizations. Everybody knows this data is valuable, but until now no one could
exploit it," said Jim Davis, executive vice president and chief marketing officer
for SAS. "With SAS Text Miner, organizations finally can apply analytics to
discover unseen patterns and unearth intelligence otherwise buried in these
collections of free-form text."

Text Miner goes one step further than other available text mining products by
providing full text preprocessing within the powerful, easy-to-use SAS Enterprise
Miner(tm) process flow environment. Users can obtain further insight and
intelligence by integrating unstructured textual data with existing structured data
such as age, income and purchasing patterns. 

"SAS is an emerging leader in enabling the analysis of unstructured data, including
text, from within an enterprise data mining workbench," said Andrew Braunberg,
senior analyst at Current Analysis. "With text mining working in concert with data
mining, SAS' analytical solutions are even more compelling to companies looking to
solve real-world business problems."

Through a strategic text mining alliance with Inxight Software, Inc., Text Miner
ships with rich multilingual text analysis capabilities in English, French and
German. Support for 13 additional ASCII-based languages is available through
Inxight. 

Text mining plays key role in healthcare

Hospitals affiliated with the University of Louisville report healthcare
information to organizations like the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospital
Outcomes (JCAHO) and the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), two of
the many industry groups that create performance measures and accreditation
standards for reporting healthcare information to the public. 

Outside organizations rank hospitals and healthcare plans throughout the United
States based on information reported by healthcare providers. According to Patricia
Cerrito, a professor of mathematics and biostatistician for the University of
Louisville, it's important to consider the source of the ranking -- the reported
data -- when hospitals seek to improve their rankings. 

In an effort to standardize reporting practices, Cerrito is using SAS Text Miner to
explore medical records from more than 10,000 open-heart surgeries performed across
the country in the last five years. The SAS solution pulls relevant variables from
patient charts and makes it easy for Cerrito to look at patterns in the way
healthcare professionals treat patients and report patient information. 

For example, Cerrito has discovered that the under-reporting of patient risk
factors has a large impact on hospital rankings. Hospitals that under-report
patient risk factors will have lower predictions for patient mortality. So even if
their success rates are equal to other hospitals, their ranking will be lower,
because they report a greater difference between predicted mortality and actual
mortality. 

Using Text Miner, Cerrito compares information from patient charts to the
information that is abstracted for reporting purposes. She can easily see what has
been missed and determine how improved coding of diagnoses and risk factors can
increase the hospital's ranking. 

"By examining the data for all open-heart surgery patients, we've discovered that
the patients treated at our hospitals have been more ill than we've been
reporting," Cerrito explained. "We use SAS Text Miner to identify other health
conditions that commonly affect open-heart patients -- such as diabetes, urinary
tract infections and allergies -- and then we can go back to our physicians to make
sure they fully document all the ailments impacting our patients. That way, our
physicians and the rest of our healthcare staff can get the credit they deserve for
the great job they're doing."

Already, Cerrito's research has helped solve problems and improve national
accreditation rankings at local hospitals. But ultimately, her results should lead
to better patient care. "Better reporting of quality measures makes everyone look
more closely at what they're doing," Cerrito says. "And more effective reporting
will help everyone see the value in the existing measurements."

About SAS
 
SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence
software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are
used at more than 38,000 sites - including 99 of the top 100 businesses on the
Fortune 500 - to develop more profitable relationships with customers and
suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive
organizations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading
data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence
from massive amounts of data. For 25 years, SAS has been giving customers around
the world The Power to Know(tm). Visit us at www.sas.com. 

SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered
trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ®
indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their
respective companies. Copyright © 2002 SAS Institute Inc. Cary, NC, USA. All rights
reserved. SAS Text Miner contains LinguistX Platform® and Thing Finder(tm) from
Inxight Software, Inc. Copyright © 1996-2002. All rights reserved. www.inxight.com.

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PRESS RELEASE: SAS® text mining software turns prose into profit
Date: Fri, 31 May 2002 17:30:58 -0400
From: Bob Chase 
To: 'Daniel Power'