Five Ways Big Data Analytics Can Fight Fraud, Waste, and Abuse

Agencies don’t have the time, money, or manpower to sift through every single tax return, Medicare claim, or unemployment payment that goes out the door, but that doesn’t mean fraudsters can’t be stopped cold. Five ways you can help beat the cheats:

1. 1. Integrate DataBefore you can draw conclusions from your data, you need to see it as a whole. Gary Cantrell, Deputy Inspector General for Investigations at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said better aligning data is helping HHS to identify trends and cut down on fraud. “We’ve made some great impact with our work, we’ve used our data in ways that we never could before, he said at MeriTalk’s Big Data Exchange Stealing from Uncle Sam forum last month. “We can run data across the country, across different parts of the [Medicare] program, so now I can tie ambulance claims to physician claims to home health claims to hospital claims and link those claims across to see a patient’s entire history or a doctor’s entire history.”