2022-3-10 CCSQ D&A Townhall

1. General Announcements
2. Data & Analytics HCD Research
3. System Updates
4. Data Sources and Usage Updates
5. Best Practices Demo
   1. Subsetting with Querying Tables with Large Datasets
   2. Starting Fresh Sessions
   3. Leveraging the Development of the Environment

User Collaboration Wiki - Reminder 

What is the User Collaboration Wiki?

• A collaboration forum through which you can submit your solutions and best practices for others within the CAP & CDR user community.

How can you use the User Collaboration Wiki?

• Submit best practices or how-to articles
• Read through other user submissions, providing feedback, comments, or likes
• Leverage solutions from other users to enhance your analytic work
• Articles that have been reviewed and approved by D&A SMEs will be posted out on the Knowledge Base

Important Notes

• The forum is currently available to those who have HARP Confluence/Atlassian licenses. Either request a license via HARP, or work with your COR to see if an Atlassian licenses can be granted for your organization.
• Questions from users should continue to be posted to the #ccsq_data_analytics Slack channel

CDR Data Catalog Study (March 2022) 

• When: March 10th - March 22nd; 45 mins (via Zoom)
• Goal: To understand your current experience consuming and/or contributing to the CDR Data Catalog.
• Purpose: To inform the evaluation of potential future data catalog tool(s)
• Please consider joining us by signing-up via Calendly link in the chat.

SAS Viya Issues

File Lock Issues

• Issue Description: SAS Viya users have reported file lock errors when reading data from their workbenches during SAS job runs
• What to Expect: The team has found a solution to this, which requires re-mounting storage gateway workbenches. In order to mitigate the impact to production workflows, D&A team is coordinating with each affected organization to re-mount their workbenches at the most convenient time
• Affected Communities: Select SAS Viya Users with affected workbenches
• Call to Action: If you are facing this issue, please open a ServiceNow ticket for our team to remount your workbench.

Lagging Issues

• SAS Viya users have reported intermittent lagging and freezing while utilizing the application.
• Due to the issue's intermittent nature, some users have reported that their issue has gone away by the time that a help desk ticket has been created.
• In order to capture the details for the D&A Team to investigate, please follow these instructions found within the Known Issues Log
• After following these instructions, please provide the information via a helpdesk ticket

Github Issue

• Issue Description: SAS Viya users have reported issues accessing data within Hive due to issues with two of the environment’s worker nodes.
• What to Expect: The team continues to work with the SAS Vendor to obtain a patch that will resolve the issue. More updates will be shared once more information about the patch is available.
• Affected Communities: SAS Viya Users
• Call to Action: A new workaround has been published on this issue. Please follow these instructions found within the Known Issues Log

Scheduled CAP & CDR Maintenance 

Scheduled CAP & CDR Maintenance Schedule

• April 1st
• May 6th
• June 3rd

All events will begin at 8:00 pm ET and end approximately at 11:00pm ET. A communication will be sent out once maintenance is complete. As a reminder, whenever there is maintenance on the environment, you will need to make sure all of your code and table changes are saved.

Known Issues

• BIC MBI Sequence - 8/25/2021
  • Ongoing – TBD
• QMARS Longer Text Fields - 1/12/2021
  • Ongoing - TBD
  • Consider using healthcare_service_qmars_ng if your DUA supports it
• QMARS Appeals - Resolved
  • CDR count inconsistency with QMARS systems is resolved

Claims Part A Updates

• CR20 new fields being added
• Pricer Version Field (CR12463)
• added to display the Prospective Payment System (PPS) Pricer Version to Inpatient/SNF, Outpatient, Home Health and Hospice claims at the claim level
• Medicare-Severity Diagnosis Related Group (MS-DRG) Grouper Version field (CR12463)
• added to display the MS-DRG Grouper Version to Inpatient/SNF claims at the claim level

BIC Updates

• New columns added in mid-April 2022:
• HMO_CONTRACT_NUM field
• HMO_LKIN_PMT_OPTN_CD field

More information will be provided in the data catalog in the future

Learning Objectives:

• Learn the best practice of using subset queries to improve performance
• Learn the best practice of starting fresh SAS sessions
• Learn the proper use of interacting with SAS environments
• Knowing how to work around SAS syntax errors

Using subset queries to improve performance 

• Understand the characteristics of CDR tables to identify opportunities to generate subsets for subsequent querying
• Important in instances where there is a single table that is queried multiple times in one job
• Benefits:
  • Reduces the total amount of data scanned in job
  • Reduces use of cluster resources in job
• Reference the recording for an example

Restarting SAS Sessions

• Reusing stale SAS sessions can cause inconsistent behavior and strange errors to occur
  • Server connectivity issues when new jobs are submitted
  • Inconsistent workbench files and risk of file loss
• Best Practice: Close old sessions and restart SAS Studio every morning, while working in a single session (single tab)

Interactive Best Practices

• SAS Studio provides a powerful interactive development environment, however, it is still a remote tool
• Quick and repeated actions can cause unexpected behavior
  • Executing, killing, re-submitting jobs quickly can cause phantom processes to continue running
• Sufficient local resources are required to load remote interface
  • ”Out of memory” errors in browser
• Foreground jobs can run into connectivity issues
  • Long-running foreground jobs can lose connectivity with remote SAS servers
• Best Practices:
  • Ensure that you do not have too many tabs open
  • Wait for SAS Studio responses before making subsequent actions
  • Run jobs in the background as much as possible
  • Write temporary files into your workbench rather than SAS temporary directories

Working around SAS Syntax errors

• SAS programs with syntax issues may stop abruptly without the new relevant error messages
• Due to encapsulation of macros, previous error messages may appear in logs instead
• SAS may become unresponsive afterwards
• Resolution:
  • Close the window and restart SAS session to continue

Future Best Practices

In a future Communications Call, we will review the following best practices:

• Cloning of a Repository in SAS Studio
• Converting Internal Tables to External Tables
• Restoration Process for Files and Folders

Future Enhancements

In a future Communications Call, we will review enhancements that we are making to the SAS Environment:

• Right-sizing of SAS Viya cluster resources
• Exploration of SAS workbench alternatives for improved I/O performance

1. To aggregate claims data at the facility/hospital level using the NPI field, which database & table should we reference for the facility/hospital information? Would it be the NPI_REGISTRATION table within the RESOURCE_HQR_PRS database or somewhere else?
   A - Please submit this question to the #ccsq_data_analytics channel for other users to review. If you want to direct this to the Data & Analytics Team, send this question to servicecentersos@cms.hhs.gov so that technical experts can track or address your question. 
2. I've read that hive has temporary tables similar to SAS temporary datasets that disappear after the session, is that what you're using here?  Could you discuss temporary hive tables?
   A - The best practice was specifically created for writing out datasets to a folder, which is different than temporary tables. In Hive you can run and generate tables that gets saved to temporary hive tables that persist only in that session. the proper use would be for datasets that need to get generated only for the duration of that session. 
   
3. What is the timeout period for a SAS Viya/Studio session?
   A - 12 hours
4. Will the create temporary hive datasets persist from one hive_exec_sql macro to the next?
   A - It should persist across macros. They will be open for the entirety of the session. 
5. I am confused- are they the same as what we see in work? Doesn't that mean that they are pulled out of hive Weren't we advised not to move things back and forth SPRE?
   A - Please submit a help desk ticket for this question.