In an initiative to advance healthcare services with artificial intelligence, SAS, a leader in analytics, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) jointly staged a one-day Workshop and Hackathon, as part of the Healthcare AI Expo 2020 organised by the National University of Singapore (NUS) and National University Health System (NUHS). The in-person and online event on 5 December 2020 was targeted at healthcare professionals, data scientists and students, and aims to help the healthcare industry unlock the full potential of digital transformation.

The hackathon, which consisted of cross-disciplinary teams with a mixture of healthcare professionals, data scientists and students from Singapore, provided a platform to enable collaboration and knowledge sharing within the healthcare and data analytics professional community. This echoes the larger industry trend of democratization of data analytics and empowering of the citizen data scientist that sees more cross-disciplinary professionals coming together to better address real-world challenges.

A recent forecast predicted a global healthcare analytics market growth of 16.3% CAGR over the period of 2019-2027, with the fastest-growing market globally Asia-Pacific. Factors driving the market include the rise in demand for population health analytics, increasing use of big data technologies and the rise in the opportunities in cloud-based analytics solutions. However, a lack of the broad skills, knowledge, expertise, and experience required to work in the data analytics field is a significant concern.

“The hackathon demonstrated the ease of using SAS analytics to solve healthcare problems and through this platform as well as our on-going initiatives, we hope to equip and build data literacy capabilities that will empower healthcare professionals and nurture analytics innovation in healthcare. Advanced analytics and AI can improve speed and accuracy of diagnosis, operational performance of hospitals through optimization of resources” said Randy Goh, Singapore’s Managing Director at SAS.

Other initiatives to develop data analytics talent in Singapore include SAS’ Business Intelligence and Analytics Programme, Singapore’s largest data science and analytics development programme providing in-depth technical and business training which has successfully placed many graduates into relevant analytics roles in organisations.

The hackathon saw the use of HPE and SAS utility-based analytics solutions for the first time, as participants were provided with real-world healthcare datasets and computational resources. SAS and HPE offer a series of subscription-based data science packages that enable the acceleration of AI initiatives. The modules in each package are designed to suit different levels of data readiness, making it an easy process for companies to adopt the package that suits their needs. 

The Healthcare AI Expo 2020 is a week-long event consisting of a series of workshops, conference sessions and hackathons bringing the healthcare and data analytics community together.

Photo caption: Using analytical modeling, the champion team of the hackathons predicted the patient's length of stay at a hospital to free up bed capacity for COVID patients