ST09 SAS(R) Programs for Adding Functionality to the Occupational Mortality Analysis Program (OCMAP) Software     Contributed

Robert Matthews Department of Epidemiology and International Health University of Alabama at Birmingham ,Dr. David Brown
Wyeth Research, Global Safety Surveillance and Epidemiology
Abstract: The OCMAP-PLUS program is a software package comprised of several component modules. This software allows the user to perform many of the conventional statistical analyses associated with epidemiologic research studies, particularly those among occupationa l groups. We have been using this software for more than a decade and have developed several extensive pre- and post- processing modules in SAS for use in working with OCMAP software. The process of manually abstracting and transforming the raw output from OCMAP to create corresponding Microsoft Word tables was enormously time consuming, resource exhausting and prone to errors. This paper describes the automated processes we have developed, using SAS/AF software, for using OCMAP to generate several types of standardized mortality ratio (SMR) tables, extracting the data from these tables into a SAS dataset, and directly exporting the results into a MS Word document. We estimate that this automated procedure reduced the amount of time needed to produce approxi mately 60 MS Word tables from several weeks to less than 1 hour. Although our use was specific to occupational epidemiology research, it can be readily applied to a variety of other applications.

Biography:
Robert Matthews is a Senior Systems Analyst in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in Birmingham, Alabama. He has used SAS software extensively for fifteen years. He has worked on data management aspects of numerous re search studies in the Occupational Epidemiology group for over fifteen years. His areas of expertise include the Base SAS language, SAS/FSP and SAS/AF.

At the time this paper was developed, Dr. David Brown was as assistant professor of epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in Birmingham, Alabama. He is now at Wyeth Research as an associate director of ep idemiology in Global Safety Surveillance and Epidemiology. He has 10 years of SAS programming experience.