SAP Unveils New Solutions to Advance Personalized Medicine

By unlocking patient data and uncovering insights in real time, healthcare organizations, life sciences companies and research institutions realize the full potential of personalized medicine.

SAP today announced SAP Foundation for Health and the SAP Medical Research Insights solution.

Built on the SAP HANA platform, the new solutions reveal the value of patient data, from biomedical data to electronic medical records to clinical trials. They facilitate data integration and provide real-time analysis and reporting that together lead to improved personalized medicine and patient care.

“SAP is committed to helping the world run better and improving people’s lives, and what better way to fulfill this pledge than by developing software to advance personalized medicine,” said Bill McDermott, SAP chief executive officer.

“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 (SAP S/4HANA) 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 provides a flexible and extensible clinical data warehouse model, industry-focused data integration management and real-time, advanced analytics on large-scale structured and unstructured data. With SAP Foundation for Health, life sciences companies and healthcare organizations are able to:

  • Develop and target new drugs, devices and services to populations and individuals
  • Use an open and secure platform for real-time, flexible R&D analysis, genomics and other “omics” disciplines, patient cohort building and analysis, patient trial matching and extended care collaboration solutions developed by SAP and partners
  • Trust the results because SAP provides full transparency into the data and gives users complete control over how the data is used, processed and reported

Making the World Run Better by Helping Improve People’s Lives
The
American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (ASCO) wholly owned nonprofit subsidiary, CancerLinQ LLC, is working with SAP to develop CancerLinQ, one of the only major cancer-data initiatives developed by physicians with the primary purpose of improving patient care. CancerLinQ is a health information technology platform that will harness Big Data from millions of de-identified patient records to deliver high-quality, personalized care to people with cancer and cancer survivors. Doctors are expected to receive personalized insights like never before, and patients will have better access to high-quality care based on the most up-to-date insights and findings.

“In teaming with SAP, we found an ideal company with state-of-the-art technology, a commitment to invest major new resources and a clear dedication to our patient-care mission,” said Kevin Fitzpatrick, CEO of CancerLinQ LLC.

“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.”

The National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) delivers patient care, cancer research, and cancer prevention. The old system 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 analyzing patient data an extremely complex and time-consuming process. To simplify and streamline the process, NCT and SAP codeveloped SAP Medical Research Insights — a solution based on SAP Foundation for Health that allows fast, easy and secure access to patient data and comparison of patient profiles from various sources.

“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 Prof. Dr. Christof von Kalle, managing director of the National Center for Tumor Diseases and head of Translational Oncology.

“With SAP Medical Research Insights, medical staff can visualize and analyze 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.”

Providing an Award-Winning Medical Solution
SAP Medical Research Insights — the first SAP solution running on SAP Foundation for Health — is the recipient of a Red Dot Design Award. With SAP Medical Research Insights:

  • Clinical researchers can filter and group patients by multiple attributes, identify potential patients for clinical trials based on selected criteria, perform Kaplan-Meier tests for measuring survival of patients after treatment, and make real-time visual estimations of individual patient timelines
  • R&D professionals from life sciences companies can quickly analyze genomic, proteomic and clinical data from multiple sources to maximize medical insights and development of drugs, devices and services that drive personalized medicine
  • Clinical researchers and R&D professionals have easy-to-understand visual representation of results to help identify trends and correlations for specific patient populations and select patient cohorts to find potential candidates for clinical research projects