Dr. Mike Cohen is at the cutting edge of a law enforcement innovation that is helping federal agents level the field in the fight against large-scale health-care fraud.

In a demonstration to a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor that Cohen says “no reporter has ever seen,” line after line of data begins to appear on his computer screen, forming a long list of companies and addresses with columns of related measures and rankings assigned to each business. “Your standard pharmacy that is just billing Medicare is going to be $300,000 to $1.5 million,” Cohen says. “Maybe $3 million if you have a really intense population.”

Cohen scrolls through the list on his computer screen. Nine pharmacies at the top of his list show Medicare billing of $100 million or more. “We are not talking about a couple of prescriptions here that are out of sorts,” he says.

Not long ago, it would have taken an entire squad of health-care fraud investigators a decade worth of shoe leather to connect all the dots and compile such a list, Cohen says. Today, he can do it in a few seconds.

“There is no shortage of ways we can twist and crunch numbers to look for targets,” Cohen says. “And there is no shortage of targets.” Health-care fraud has become a big, lucrative enterprise in the United States. No one knows the full extent of the drain on Medicare, Medicaid, and private health insurers. Experts suggest it may cost $100 billion each year.

For decades, federal agents have struggled to keep pace with growing numbers of health-care fraudsters. Now, the hope is that data analytics can inject a new level of oversight and enforcement into the system.

Depending on commands Cohen types into his computer, the displayed results could be a list of the most suspicious doctors, pharmacies, hospitals, drug companies, medical device manufacturers, or others operating in the US health care industry.

The metrics seek to identify patterns in Medicare billing data that resemble known examples of fraud. Health-care swindlers get rich by finding a way to cheat the system and then using that deceptive practice over and over again. Since every transaction in the government-run health-care system is documented, a successful fraud depends on the ability of the swindlers to hide in plain sight amid hundreds of millions of transactions.

If those hundreds of millions of transactions can be organized in a way that identifies patterns of fraud, the suspected perpetrators of that fraud are no longer able to hide from federal agents.