SAS Visual Investigator is helping organisations combat the opioid problem, child abuse, crime, fraud, and insider threats by alerting investigators, case workers or analysts to heightened risks or threats.
Organisations armed with SAS Visual Investigator can uncover hidden trends and behaviours that flag danger to a child, drug abuse and trafficking, fraud, financial crimes, and insider threats and point organisations toward answers. This was revealed at the SAS Global Forum which is taking place in Orlando, Florida.
Part of the SAS Viya family, SAS Visual Investigator alerts investigators, caseworkers or analysts to heightened risks or threats. Combining machine learning with dynamic and interactive visual workspaces, SAS enables analysts to easily grasp causes for events or alerts and act on deep analytical discoveries.
Brooke Fortson, product marketing manager for Data Science and Emerging Technologies at SAS, said, “SAS Visual Investigator alleviates these challenges by bringing together massive, disparate and complex data and exposing patterns of interest. The visual and interactive interface lets users import data, perform point-and-click exploratory analysis, and access third-party systems. When all data is easily accessible, well governed and up-to-date, intelligence analysts can stay ahead of issues.”
{loadposition ray}The applications of SAS Visual Investigator are diverse, but government agencies and financial institutions are taking notice.
Predicting and protecting kids at risk
New Hanover County, North Carolina, faces rising numbers of abused and neglected children. It has enlisted SAS Visual Investigator to identify and track risk factors for children and help keep them alive.
Its Department of Social Services (DSS) processes 300 reports of child abuse or neglect every month. By integrating data from criminal justice and public health databases into agency data, the system alerts DSS workers to relevant changes to risks affecting a child in their charge.
It might be 911 calls from the home, arrests of family members, new individuals in the home, or new investigations. SAS’ visual presentation will make it easier for caseworkers to grasp what triggered an alert, drill into the case for details, and determine what interventions may be necessary.
SAS Visual Investigator not only helps New Hanover County reduce child fatalities. DSS also expects to lower paid placements in foster or group homes and residential treatment centres, and increase the rate of “permanency” – a permanent home for the child. Providing a better outcome for kids could save DSS hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.
Child welfare and the opioid epidemic
In the US, 91 people die from opioid abuse each day. And a baby dependent on opioids is born every 19 minutes. The epidemic is causing the number of children in social services care to skyrocket.
In New Hanover County, the number of children taken into permanent custody because of opioids has doubled since 2013. Opioids now account for nearly 30% of DSS interventions. North Carolina is not alone with this social problem.
“The intersection of opioid abuse and child abuse and neglect is threatening to overwhelm the system,” said Wanda Marino, assistant director of New Hanover County DSS. “Case workers, investigators and law enforcement need to understand their data to intervene quickly and try and break this tragic cycle.”
Investigators for prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) combat the epidemic by revealing doctor-shopping patients, provider “pill mills” and networks of collaborating offenders.
SAS Visual Investigator analyses data to pinpoint suspicious behaviours among prescribers and patients, and sends detailed alerts to PDMP staff. Investigators can mitigate addiction by intervening where behaviour patterns indicate a patient is at high risk to transition to heroin. They can also pass on suspicious activity to law enforcement.
Bolstering law enforcement and banking investigations
Drug trafficking, including prescription painkillers and heroin, is one of many crimes carried out by sophisticated criminal networks. SAS Visual Investigator can break through the complexity of associated public safety and law enforcement operations. The software can alert investigators to potential criminal networks, and reliably detect suspicious anomalies across an integrated view of internal and multi-agency data.
Banks face both external and internal risks associated with fraud, loan and asset management and other areas. SAS Visual Investigator’s surveillance framework and machine learning techniques detect insider threats quickly, assesses employees, and identifies potential internal sabotage, helping financial institutions protect themselves from reputational risk and limit financial losses.
A bank’s Financial Crimes Intelligence Unit can identify unknown compliance risks and exposures throughout the world, in every country where it does business. By providing a framework to consolidate anti-money laundering and fraud information, SAS Visual Investigator pinpoints siloed risks that together signal a threat. Through improved search, entity resolution, and visualization of networks, bank investigators can apply human intelligence to rapidly address risks that may not be captured by traditional transactional monitoring.
To learn more, download the white paper Keeping Fraud Detection Software Aligned With the Latest Threats. Click on the video below.
The writer is attending the SAS Global Forum 2017in Orlando, Florida, as a guest of the company.