How SAS is helping organisations harness their data for good

In recent years, data and artificial intelligence (AI) have emerged as transformative forces that hold immense potential to shape a better future for humanity. The convergence of these technologies presents us with unprecedented opportunities to solve complex challenges, drive innovation, and create positive change across various domains. There is an extraordinary asset that organisations possess that has the potential to drive this innovation and change: data. By harnessing the power of data analytics and insights, companies can not only drive innovation and competitiveness but also make a positive impact on people, society, industry, and the environment.

Data has become the lifeblood of the digital age, and its importance cannot be overstated. By leveraging advanced data analytics, organisations can gain valuable insights, enabling them to make informed decisions and drive positive outcomes. From healthcare to education and climate change, SAS has harnessed its capabilities to enable organisations the ability to innovate and drive positive impact in their sector.

Data and AI for health

Demonstrating the immense potential of data-driven initiatives in combating childhood cancer, SAS collaborated with The Kids’ Cancer Project, utilising data to help children battling cancer. Whilst The Kids’ Cancer Project had built a large database of over 1.3m donors, 300,000 of these were underutilised. To increase the number of regular donors, SAS helped with the implementation of data cleaning, and analysis software, mapping out a program to re-activate dormant donors and enlist new donors. Beyond this, SAS was able to help The Kids’ Cancer Project team automate financial data processing, reducing reporting time from eight days to just two hours, realising significant operational savings which the charity could redirect towards their ultimate goal of helping sick children. Through SAS’ partnership with the Kid’s Cancer Project, harnessing the power of data and AI, the charity was able to grow its donation pool and operate more effectively, delivering greater outcomes for children battling cancer.

Using data for conservation

Recently, SAS has partnered with the UNC Centre for Galapagos Studies (CGS), applying crowd-driven artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to help protect endangered sea turtles. Through an app called ConserVision, citizen scientists can match images of turtles’ facial markings, training a SAS computer vision model. Once the model can accurately identify turtles individually, the data gathered from this exercise can help researchers understand temporal and spatial movement patterns, identifying turtles’ health risks and migratory patterns over periods of time. As our global challenges increase in complexity, so does our need for dynamic solutions. Technologies like analytics, AI and machine learning give us access to such powerful information that can be harnessed to help solve global challenges like climate change. Through their partnership with UNC CGS, SAS hopes that the insights gained, will not only help benefit sea turtles but also other threatened species and environments worldwide.

Data for mental health

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 2022 National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing, over two in five Australians aged 16–85 had experienced a mental disorder at some time in their life¹. Revolutionising mental health care is a necessity, given the increase in mental ill-health since COVID. The Black Dog Institute’s six-year collaboration [IE1] with SAS, to develop LifeSpan, an evidence-based approach to integrated suicide prevention in Australia, shows the potential of data-driven approaches to tackling the current mental health challenge. By aggregating and analysing data from various sources, including healthcare records and self-reported information, Lifespan aims to identify risk factors, predict mental health outcomes and develop targeting interventions for its users. This data-driven approach can help healthcare providers deliver personalised treatments, improve mental health outcomes, and reduce the burden on individuals and society. What Black Dog Institute was not initially prepared for was the volume of data that would need to be evaluated, and how they were going to extract meaningful insights from the data. Working closely with SAS, the institute was able to set up infrastructure, allowing LifeSpan to clean, store, and analyse different data sets, to inform insights that can be used to potentially save lives.

The transformative power of data cannot be underestimated, and limiting your data capabilities will only limit your innovation and business legacy. Organisations that harness data to drive positive change have the potential to revolutionise industries, enhance environment, and improve human lives. SAS’s collaboration with The Kid’s Cancer Project, Black Dog Institute and the UNC Centre for Galapagos Studies highlight only some of the capabilities that data can harness. It’s time for businesses to begin thinking about the challenges that they would like to solve and harness the power of their data to create innovative solutions that can shape the future.

Explore how SAS customers and partners are turning their curiosity into capability for a smarter, healthier and more equitable world here.

^{[1] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/mental-health/national-study-mental-health-and-wellbeing/2020-21}

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