AOK Chooses SAP HANA™ Platform to Improve Patient Care and Reduce Costs

MADRID, Nov. 10, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced that AOK, Germany's largest health insurance provider, has chosen the SAP HANA™ platform to further its focus on preventive care. The deal, signed in the third quarter of 2011, is the largest of its kind globally to date. AOK plans to use SAP HANA to conduct real-time analyses of mass medical data in order to identify patterns of illness in its often regional variants early on and offer individualized pre-emptive programs. In doing so, the company aims to become even more attractive to its customers and even more efficient. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE® NOW + SAP® TechEd, being held as a co-located event in Madrid from November 8-10.

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Like each of Germany's statutory health insurance funds, AOK must deal with a vast and constantly growing ocean of data: 12 independent regional health insurance funds with 24 million insurants, over 370 million outpatient treatment cases, 1.5 billion diagnoses to go along with them – plus untold amounts of other medical data. In Germany's liberalized healthcare market, approximately 150 statutory health insurance funds wrangle for the attention of customers. It is increasingly difficult to tell one provider from the next, especially since the establishment of a central healthcare fund on January 1, 2009, which standardized the insurance contribution rate. In the competitive environment, having superior healthcare programs and services has become decisive. This has led to a rise in the importance of managing medical and preventive care, which is precisely where AOK intends to leverage SAP HANA.

"True to our credo as a healthcare fund, we want to help our clients' to avoid illnesses in the first place — our existing and diverse preventive care programs are aimed at doing exactly that," said Uwe Deh, deputy director of the Federal Association of the AOK. "However, as an innovative company, our goal is to continuously improve those services and increase their efficiency and impact. We will develop tailored programs corresponding to the insurants' individual risks. To do so, we need tools we can use to conduct real-time analyses of the tremendous amounts of medical data we receive, recognize potential health risks, assemble various preventive care programs and respond to those risks appropriately and ahead of time. SAP HANA meets all of these requirements."

In addition to the ability to process and analyze data in real time, AOK was interested in the evolutionary approach of SAP HANA, which enables the company to constantly evolve its existing data warehouse solutions. Those solutions are based on oscare®, an industry solution for statutory health insurance funds developed by AOK. The SAP HANA platform is designed to install on top of an existing infrastructure and work with the available data. In the medium term, the SAP HANA database could replace the conventional relational databases used in connection with the SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse component.

With these capabilities, AOK sees itself in a position to conduct real-time analyses and simulations on an exceptionally broad base of data in the immediate future. Preventive care for diabetes and heart failure patients is just one of the traditional fields in which such efforts could be applied. With the help of the early detection system it hopes to assemble, AOK aims to bolster a number of medical and preventive care models, including those centered around general practitioners. The company also intends to achieve significant cost reductions through tailored prevention, which will help prevent expensive unneeded treatments.

AOK has pursued a dedicated strategy based on standard SAP software in its business and IT since 2001.

"Over the past 10 years, AOK has found great success time and again in being among the first to take advantage of SAP innovations," said Michael Kleinemeier, CEO, SAP Deutschland AG & Co. KG, and president, DACH region, SAP. "The company's trust and the role it has played as a development partner have helped us to fine-tune our industry solution for the statutory health insurance market, as well as make constant advancements with its supplementary solution oscare. Seeing an early adopter like AOK choose SAP HANA demonstrates how much potential there is in-memory computing technology."

To learn more, see "Video: AOK and SAP Set New Standards." For announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage during SAPPHIRE NOW + SAP TechEd Madrid, visit the Events newsroom.

SAPPHIRE® NOW + SAP® TechEd Madrid

In 2011, SAP brings together its largest ecosystem education event series with its premier customer conference for a co-located event being held in Madrid, Spain, from November 8-10. With SAPPHIRE® NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe, and can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. SAP® TechEd brings IT managers, software developers, administrators, and business process experts together for a look under the hood of today's business motors: the latest advances in in-memory and mobile technologies, and in on-premise, on-demand, and on-device applications from SAP and more. Follow on Twitter at @SAPTechEd and @SAPPHIRENOW, and join the conversation at #SAPTechEd and #SAPPHIRENOW.

About SAP

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 176,000 customers (includes customers from the acquisition of Sybase) to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "forecast," "intend," "may," "plan," "project," "predict," "should" and "will" and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The factors that could affect SAP's future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including SAP's most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates.

Copyright © 2011 SAP AG. All rights reserved.

SAP, R/3, mySAP, mySAP.com, xApps, xApp, SAP NetWeaver and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries all over the world. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies. Data contained in this document serve informational purposes only. National product specifications may vary.

Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

For customers interested in learning more about SAP products:
Global Customer Center: +49 180 534-34-24
United States Only: 1 (800) 872-1SAP (1-800-872-1727)

For more information, press only:
Soenke Moosmann, +49 (0) 62 27-74 05 29, [email protected], CET
SAP Press Office, +49 (6227) 7-46315, CET; +1 (610) 661-3200, EST; [email protected]

To speak with press contacts on site during SAPPHIRE NOW + SAP TechEd Madrid (from November 8-10), please dial the SAP press line at +49 (6227) 7-46315.

SOURCE SAP AG

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