SAP CEO Bill McDermott’s own health crisis this year, after an accident in which he lost an eye, has seen the company focus attention on the advancement of personalised medicine.
SAP has now launched the SAP Foundation for Health and the SAP Medical Research Insights solution, built on the HANA platform, to facilitate the integration of patient data, from biomedical data to electronic medical records to clinical trials.
“SAP is committed to helping the world run better and improving people’s lives, and what better way to fulfil this pledge than by developing software to advance personalised medicine,” said McDermott. “The healthcare industry’s first step will be transforming core business operations with a live system strategy built on the SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA suite of applications. With SAP Foundation for Health powered by SAP HANA, you get an unprecedented ability to handle inputs like medical research, electronic health records and human genome sequencing. With SAP Medical Research Insights we’re coming even closer to better access to data and more positive patient outcomes.”
SAP Foundation for Health will provide a flexible and extensible clinical data warehouse model, as well as analytics on large-scale structured and unstructured data, enabling life sciences companies and healthcare organisations to develop and target new drugs, devices and services, and undertake real-time flexible R&D analysis, patient cohort building and analysis, patient trial matching, and extended care collaboration solutions.
The first solution to run on SAP Foundation for Health is SAP Medical Insights, which was codeveloped with the National Centre for Tumor Diseases (NCT) and has already received a prestigious Red Dot Design Award.
The NCT, which delivers patient care, cancer research and cancer prevention, was operating on an old system with required medical staff to search multiple databases, compile patient lists, print patient files and manually check if patients matched criteria for clinical trials by reviewing each file individually. This made accessing and analysing patient data an extremely complex and time-consuming process.
“The team from the NCT worked closely with the SAP Innovation Center site to conduct observations, incorporate feedback and iterate in short cycles, which resulted in a well-rounded, award-winning solution,” said Professor Dr Christof von Kalle, managing director of the NCT and head of Translational Oncology.
“With SAP Medical Research Insights, medical staff can visualise and analyse patient data in real time due to the speed of SAP HANA and simple app design. This provides a holistic view of a patient’s medical history in a graphical timeline, allowing physicians more time to care for patients instead of going through paperwork. It also dramatically reduces the turnaround time for clinical studies, which can ultimately lead to life-changing discoveries.”
SAP has also partnered with the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (ASCO) non-profit subsidiary, CancerLinQ to develop a health information technology platform that will harness big data from millions of de-identified patient records to deliver high-quality, personalised care to people with cancer and cancer survivors.
“With our cancer expertise complemented by SAP’s unique ability to break down data silos and provide real-time analytics on massive amounts of federated clinical data, CancerLinQ is in a position to make a huge leap toward becoming the platform of choice for oncologists,” said Kevin Fitzpatrick, CEO, CancerLinQ.
