How Leveraging Data Prevents Financial Fraud, Abuse at HHS
The Department of Health and Human Services has been leveraging data and data analytics to help prevent fraud, waste and abuse of resources and to manage its grants programs in more effective ways — especially over this past year, said HHS Office of Inspector General Chief Data Officer Caryl Brzymialkiewicz.
Data can allow data analysts at the agency to gain visibility into how money is used and managed, Brzymialkiewicz said Thursday at the Financial Services Summit in Washington, D.C. Sharpening data analytics has allowed for analysts to address significant cases of fraud.
“For our analytics in the past year, we’ve actually had the prosecution and sentencing of … our biggest Medicare fraud case to date for a single case — it was a billion dollars,” she said.
To gain visibility into the flow of money, Brzymialkiewicz and analysts have worked to take disparate datasets and try to understand which are most important. In doing this, Brzymialkiewicz said she considers how her work and analysis integrates with the business of the agency so that she knows how to best leverage data for HHS and its beneficiaries.
Throughout this work, Brzymialkiewicz’s team also explores how applying automation and self-service capabilities can further accelerate and sharpen their analyses. Data analysts at HHS use these strategies of data-driven work and decision-making in helping the agency with grants management, she said. In this area, her team has especially been working on understanding disparate grant datasets.
“In the grant space, thinking about what [trillions of dollars] means and how we’re going to police disparate data sets together — it was about fusing information from single-audit data and the findings from the single audits to systems like the System for Award Management, the Tracking Accountability in Government Grants Systems, the Payment Management System,” she said. “We have a small business association, and … we were starting to look at the National Institutes of Health.”
Brzymialkiewicz’s team has been trying to pull those fused pieces of data together while also leveraging technologies in their Office of Information Technology and considering where they believe they can find the highest risk related to grant fraud.
