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In my last blog about the state of healthcare innovation in 2014, I mentioned that I'll talk about a specific innovative solution that SAP has developed on its SAP HANA® platform which is aimed at significantly improving health outcomes while cutting costs at each step of the healthcare delivery.

Today at HIMSS 2014 annual conference, one of the largest healthcare IT and management systems conferences in the world, the company announced the first live deployment of the project “Medical Insights” for clinical data integration in order to support patients in receiving best benefit from every research and healthcare dollar spent. Read the press release here.

Almost every instance of cancer is unique, which creates an immense volume and variety of information processed in providing cancer care, such as patient cohort analysis (these are 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 “Medical Insights”, SAP aims 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. “Medical Insights” was developed in partnership with the German National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) and is now in use at their facilities in Heidelberg.

“We are now able to extract and analyze data from various sources and present it to physicians 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 at every diagnostic and therapeutic step, because every cancer is different and can vary immensely from one patient to the next.”

“Medical Insights” will 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. The application will then run the advanced data analytics on the underlying SAP HANA platform and provide the results in real time. This helps 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 can 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 will 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 means faster research and better-targeted treatment.

“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.”

I am currently at the HIMSS showfloor demoing the project to the attendees and receiving enthusiastic response, which I’ll talk about in my next blog. If you are attending the event too, join me at SAP booth #1519 for a live demo!

Twitter: @sajal_agarwal