Data and Analytic Solutions, Inc. (DAS)

Dawn Li, Ph.D., President, has about twenty years of corporate and university experience, with expertise in contract management, integrated knowledge and data systems, e-learning curriculum design, and proposal writing.  As President of Data and Analytic Solutions, Inc. (DAS), Dr. Li has won and managed multimillion dollar contracts in fraud detection, business intelligence, and e-learning and web application development.  Under her management team's leadership, DAS has grown into a successful small consulting firm providing innovative data analytic services to the public and private sectors.  Its key clients include Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, US Treasury, US Bureau of Census, US Coast Guard, Citizenship and Immigration Services, Agency for Health Research and Quality, and US Sentencing Commission.   Prior to DAS, Dr. Li worked at Northrop Grumman Information Systems as a contractor to various Department of Health and Human Services agencies (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Food and Drug Administration), consulted on instructional design for multimedia projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and taught a few courses, including e-commerce and web programming,  in US and Chinese universities.   Dr. Li was honored as a 2009 Top 100 Minority Business Enterprise Award Winner and received Maryland's State Governor's Citation in 2009.  She is a member of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA NOVA Chapter), the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), and Women in Technology (WIT).  She holds Ph.D. in English concentrating on Interdisciplinary Studies and an M.S. in Management Information Systems from the George Washington University; her Graduate Diploma and B.A.  are from Peking University and Wuhan University respectively.

Gary McQuown, Senior Vice President, has twenty years of experience in software programming and development, has recently managed five DAS tasks across the areas of acquisition, healthcare, immigration, and court services. He is a solutions architect, developer and analyst with 20 years of experience in designing and implementing data systems.  He has designed and implemented SAS based reporting and modeling applications for numerous firms and agencies.  His hands-on experience and expertise include: Base (including drill down ODS), STAT, ETS, INTRNET, SAS BI (Business Intelligence) Suite and SAS Solutions such as SPM and Enterprise Miner.  Mr. McQuown provides advanced reporting and data related solutions in the areas of risk and credit analytics, fraud detection, automated processing, business intelligence, and revenue optimization. He holds a B.S. in Economics and an M.S. in Applied Information Technology.  He frequently teams with statisticians or economists to assist with the design, maintenance and automation of forecasting models.  He was instrumental in the success of the award winning USCG Deepwater BI/SPM task and is a frequent presenter at technology conferences.  Numerous times he has served as “a fire fighter” to rescue failed projects.  He succeeds where others have failed because of his practical approach, problem solving skills and outstanding technical capability having consulted in most major technical environments across industries.  A frequent speaker at technology conferences, Mr. McQuown is a Principal and Co-Founder of the company. 

Ed Heaton, M.S., Health Solutions Manager, has an extensive career in Information Systems Technology that utilizes his exceptional organizational skills, creativity, and SAS® programming abilities combined with strong mathematical, statistical, and analytical and problem-solving abilities.  His talents at teaching and mentoring other SAS programmers broaden his expansive portfolio of skills.  He holds a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Missouri and an M.S. in Computer Science on artificial intelligence from Johns Hopkins University, plus formal training in SAS, JCL, SQL, Pascal, FORTRAN, C, Java, Windows NT, and TCP/IP.  Mr. Heaton has: fifteen years of professional SAS programming experience plus a total of five years of academic and non-professional programming experience; Team leader, project coordinator, corporate SAS technical coordinator, and corporate-wide SAS technical advisor; Significant experience with SQL Server databases through a SAS front-end.  Developed and taught a course on accessing RDBMS from SAS, focusing on connections to Oracle; Subject matter experience in Quality Control, Health Studies, FECA medical billing fraud, Life Series Projections, Education Studies; Expertise with data extraction through the SAS DATA step and with ODBC, OLE/DB, and the Jet engine for access to Microsoft Excel data; Skilled writer and author of numerous technical reports, process documentation, analysis summaries, and training workbooks – from a few pages to hundreds of pages; Academic co-chair (2007) of the SouthEast SAS Users Group and member of the SESUG Executive Committee.

Dr. Kenneth M. Nelson MD, MPH, CFE, Advisor, has over 30 years of professional experience having worked for NIH and CMS as an employee or contractor in medical research, statistical analysis and fraud concerns. Following completion of a neurosurgical residency, Dr. Nelson was a Special Fellow at the National Institute of Neurological; Diseases and Stroke, through 1969. His research was concerned with brain trauma and the biological basis of brain swelling.  Several publications resulted from the research during that period including the development of an isolated subarachnoid space for research purposes.  From mid 1974 to late 1977, Dr. Nelson was the Associate Director of the newly formed Cancer Control and Rehabilitation Division of the National Cancer Institute.  He left that position to become the Medical Officer for the Office of Inspector General, US Department of Health and Human Services (Then called the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.)  Dr. Nelson worked for 20 years as the Medical Advisor, Office of Inspector General (OIG) US Department of Health and Human Services. His activities have involved bringing medical expertise to support and to orient statistical analysis, audit, and investigations.  As the Medical Officer for the newly formed OIG, he provided medical support for the auditors and criminal investigators reviewing Medicaid records and data. He worked with the OIG Advanced Techniques Staff, a small group of specialized auditors who were pioneers in the development of statistical analyses of Medicaid claims.  While with the OIG he created the medical standards for criminal investigators which were utilized by most federal law enforcement agencies.  He also provided quality assurance and devised standards for the review of medical records utilized in the exclusion of physicians from the Medicare/Medicaid programs. He provided medical support and guidance for criminal investigators and auditors of Medicaid, Medicare, and the Public Health Service. The earliest efforts of the OIG were in Medicaid. The techniques developed there were expanded and applied to Medicare.  For many years, Dr. Nelson was the only MD certified as a fraud examiner.  He is a past regent of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. He also has served on their teaching faculty.

Brett Peppe, CISSP, Enterprise Architect and Risk Modeler, has two decades of analytic systems experience involving system analysis, architecture and development of Marketing, Demand Analysis, Reliability, Financial Risk and Collections Strategy.  He holds degrees in Engineering and Chemistry from the University of South Florida.  His specialties are performance architectures, predictive analytics and simulation.  A Certified Information System Security Professional, Brett has written organizational security policy (CMS, WCRC), performed Information Risk Management reviews and consulted on Cloud security (Microsoft).  The SAS Corporation awarded him the prestigious CCE Gold Record award in April 2011 for outstanding achievements in enterprise systems architecture and implementation.  Brett has published several papers on topics ranging from Immunology to descriptive analytics on Big Data.  Over his career, he has been involved in numerous and diverse modeling / simulation projects such as the Magnetically Articulated Left Ventricle Assist Device (USF College of Medicine), Forecast Information System (GTE), Directory Services Optimization (Microsoft), Pooled Statistical Fleet Reliability (Boeing Airplane Systems), Expert Behavioral Model (T-Mobile), Payment Projection for Collections Strategy (T-Mobile) and Large Balance Transfer Program (T-Mobile).  The LBTP models/system successfully boosted recoveries over 41% (+$300M).