At Intenda, we know that South Africa is bursting with talent, and we believe that every generation has the potential to achieve greater things than the one that came before. That’s why, in partnership with the North-West University (NWU), we welcomed two BMI students, Petra Coetzer and Tiaan le Roux, to complete 6 month internships with Intenda last year.

Along with achieving distinctions and Top Achiever awards for the BMI Industry Directed Research Projects they completed during their internships, both Petra and Tiaan achieved distinctions for their MSc degrees. Following their successful internships, the two have taken up fulltime positions at Intenda, and we are delighted to have them onboard.

The two top achievers provide a brief synopsis of their projects:

Petra: “Fraud, waste and abuse (FWA) is a significant concern in South Africa and various types of FWA involving medical scheme claims are regularly committed. My project aimed to analyse data from South African medical schemes and to use the analysis to develop a set of metrics and a dynamic method that may be used to identify healthcare providers suspected of FWA. The submitted claims were assessed in the context of the provider’s healthcare discipline and claims categories.

The set of metrics provides a profile of the healthcare provider’s claim behaviour that may be used to build a case motivating why a healthcare provider is suspected of FWA (or why not). The project’s methodology resulted in a dynamic method (or tool) that may be used by IFS to detect South African healthcare providers suspected of FWA, adding value, and enhancing IFS’ reporting services to their clients. The solution developed during the project enables IFS clients to investigate claims submitted by the identified FWA healthcare providers to recover any losses incurred due to FWA.”

Tiaan: “Data preparation remains a time-consuming facet of data analytics. A main contributor to the amount of effort and time spent on data preparation is the divide that exists between generic and domain-specific data profiling. My Master’s project aimed to bridge this gap by developing a framework capable of supporting both generic and domain-specific data profiling, with specific focus on the financial domain.The framework has a layered architecture and is extensible and customisable, with the ability to generically and specifically profile data. To demonstrate this, metadata profiles were created to broadly classify data, detailed profiles to incorporate domain-specific and high-level generic classification, and financial domain profiles to identify domain-specific fields. The framework is designed to incorporate country-specific fields, and after classifying and profiling data fields, the profiles can be reverse engineered to identify complex invalid data values.The framework performed significantly better than a well-known competing tool in numerous benchmark measures. It correctly classified more data fields into broad and detailed-orientated categories and outperformed the competing tool in classifying domain-specific data fields.”

Our first two students delivered results that surpassed all expectations, and we look forward to welcoming more BMI students to Intenda in the future.