Using Stata with Large Datasets in Corporate America: Lessons Learned

While Stata has gained wide acceptance in academia, its use in corporate environments lags far behind. For academic Stata users, the product's inability to penetrate business has important consequences. Students trained in Stata have fewer opportunities than those trained in other tools, particularly SAS, that are widely used by businesses. Academic statisticians have fewer opportunities to collaborate and consult with colleagues in business. For the past five years, ProfSoft has been developing and marketing a medical claims analysis system that builds on the data management and data analysis capabilities in Stata. Our experience has shown that Stata can greatly enhance the analytic capabilities of health plans, provider organizations, and purchaser coalitia and that Stata is a very powerful tool for working with large corporate databases, sometimes in excess of 100 million records. During that time, we have learned many lessons about how Stata can gain acceptance in mainstream corporate America. In this presentation, we discuss factors that helped gain acceptance for a software product that is based on Stata. We discuss the features in Stata that are most imporant to our customers, and those that have little interest. We demonstrate business applications with web-based graphical user interfaces that unleash the power of Stata to users who have little or no interest in learning how to use Stata directly.