The Belgian Poison Center is a very useful and important organization. One call to this center may mean the difference between life and death. Answering calls from citizens, and from doctors and other professionals in the care industry is the Poison Center’s main activity.
The center is staffed by a team of doctors and pharmacists, who are experts in various fields of poisoning and related health hazards. Next to the expert advice that they can thus provide, they are also the ideal team to build and manage the huge knowledge database, consisting of over 13 GB of call record data (over 550.000 call records gathered during the past ten years).
This database serves the Poison Center’s second main activity: ‘toxicovigilance’. Briefly summarized this means that the staff is continuously analyzing data to find out if there are correlations between for example a new product and certain health hazards.
Intuitive and dynamic queries speed up the analysis process
This analysis is now being simplified by SAS Visual Analytics, which combines the intuitive interface with a powerful ‘big data’ engine for in-memory analytics. This way, it becomes feasible to perform some dynamic searches, without having to wait for ages for the results of the next query. These queries can then be further refined to look for any possible correlation.
The SAS analytics software can thus make an important contribution to enriching the Poison Center’s knowledge. And eventually to saving people’s lives, using the available knowledge to perform better diagnoses and to suggest better treatments.
Sometimes the difference between life and death can be the result of some well-performed analyses. The importance of a powerful analytics tool should never be underestimated! :-)