"Medical Insights" Project from SAP to Accelerate Personalized Treatment for Cancer Patients

SAP® Solutions to Drive Better, Faster Health Outcomes from Primary Research to Frontline Care

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Feb 24, 2014, 06:00 ET

ORLANDO, Fla., Feb. 24, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- To support patients in receiving the maximum benefit from every research and healthcare dollar spent, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) is developing innovative solutions aimed at significantly improving health outcomes while cutting costs and improving outcomes at each step of healthcare delivery. Providing the latest example, the company today announced the first early, live deployment of the project "Medical Insights" for clinical data integration, an important advancement in cancer treatment. The announcement was made at HIMSS14, being held February 23-27 in Orlando, Florida.

"The entire healthcare community recognizes the need to simplify and extract data for the benefit of individual patients," said Bill McDermott, co-CEO and member of the Executive Board of SAP AG. "With the 'Medical Insights' project, we're working on being able to unleash the power of the SAP HANA platform and apply this breakthrough to improving patient care. There is no question that real-time data and analytics will drive more personalized care and better outcomes throughout the healthcare system."

Almost every instance of cancer is unique. There is an immense volume and variety of information processed in providing care to those who have not responded to standard therapies, such as the analysis of multiple cohort studies, long-term studies following groups of people who have and do not have a given condition. Today, these tasks involve manually reviewing, parsing and consolidating the relevant information, typically in spreadsheets. These manual processes cause significant delays for patients waiting for care targeted at individual cancers.

With this project, SAP will aim to improve the accuracy of cancer diagnoses and, ultimately, patient outcomes by enabling integrated access to clinical information and analyzing complex data sets in real time. Built on the SAP HANA® platform, the project was developed in partnership with the German National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) and is now in use for testing purposes at its facilities in Heidelberg.

"We are now able to extract and analyze data from various sources and present it to physicians and researchers in a way that enables surprising new insights," said Professor Dr. Christof von Kalle, director, translational oncology, NCT. "In the future, we would like to use the SAP HANA platform for every diagnostic and therapeutic step, because every cancer is different and can vary immensely from one patient to the next."

"Medical Insights" is envisioned to use a generic healthcare data model and semantic capabilities to pull patient data from many different sources, such as clinical information systems, tumor registries, biobank systems and even text documents like a physician's notes. It will then run the advanced data analytics on the underlying SAP HANA platform and provide the results in real time. This is meant to help increase efficiency among various medical teams so that doctors have the most up-to-date information on their patients allowing for a faster, more accurate diagnosis. Patient cohorts are pictured to be posted and edited collaboratively, exported for further analysis in other software or compared according to different metrics.

"Medical Insights" will also offer a comprehensive overview of each patient's medical history in a graphical timeline, making it easy to access information on any level of detail. This one source of truth with easy integration of all data shall give doctors a complete picture, helping them to reduce the risk of misdiagnosis and focus on optimal treatments instead. For individual patients, all of this will mean faster research and better targeted treatment.

SAP is also focused on designing healthcare solutions on top of the SAP HANA platform that are easy to use and can be accessed on any device.

"In the current healthcare environment, real-time data analysis is critical to providing more precise care and producing better patient outcomes," said Jeff Wilhelm, president & CEO of Fusion Consulting Inc., an SAP partner. "SAP HANA puts analytics in the hands of healthcare practitioners, researchers and administrators when they need it, helping ensure accurate and real-time information is leveraged to shape care decisions."

HIMSS attendees can connect with SAP at the following on-site locations during the event:

Booth #1519: Meet the team and get the "Medical Insights" project demo
Booth #692: See Big Data in action at the "Big Data Bus"
Booth #883: Explore the Business & Clinical Analytics Knowledge Center

For more information, visit the SAP Newsroom.

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