Communications of the ACM
Can the World's Fastest Supercomputer Combat Health Care Waste?
"It's not just a supercomputer exercise. It's using the technology to do holistic analysis of all the data all the time," says Oak Ridge National Laboratory Senior Researcher Andrew Loebl.
Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have proposed using Jaguar, a recently upgraded Cray XT5-based supercomputer, to help with U.S. government health care reform. Combining and analyzing health care data could save as much as $50 billion per year by getting rid of waste and preventing fraud, says Oak Ridge's Andrew Loebl.
The U.S. government currently uses five regional contractors to process claims for health care programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, as well as programs run by agencies including the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments, Indian Health Services, and the Federal Employee Benefits Health Plan. The new program would eliminate the need for outside contractors and could proactively identify fraudulent or inappropriate claims before they are paid. The FBI estimates that 10 percent of payments are improper, totaling $150 billion per year. Loebl estimates he could save $50 billion by reading the data in real time.
The Jaguar supercomputer has a processing speed of 2.3 petaflops and has 362 terabytes of memory. Loebl says that Jaguar can easily handle the health care data and the workload would not interrupt the climate modeling or other advanced research being done using the supercomputer.
From Government Computer News
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