SAP Community - SAP Health

Providing Healthcare Workers with the Resources They Need During COVID-19

2020-06-09T13:50:06+02:00

Author: Patty Riskind, Head of Healthcare & Life Sciences, Qualtrics

Healthcare is an industry that is in crisis. Even prior to COVID-19, both patients, and the workers that care for them, exhibited signs of trauma. In fact, 81 percent of patients indicate they are dissatisfied with their healthcare experiences. More than half of the country's physicians and nurses show significant burnout symptoms. Post COVID-19, this already-challenging picture is further burdened with additional pressures. An exhausted coalition of medical professionals must find an effective way of managing urgent and chronic patients, making them a priority amid limited supplies and without the guidance of real-time updates.

Experience Management

Being able to manage the experiences that different segments of the population are faced with relies on both operational and experience data. Using these elements, the four core business experiences -- customer experience, brand experience, employee experience and product experience -- can be both measured and improved.

The process of obtaining and using this critical data, however, is currently reactive, siloed and often redundant. A proactive approach for capturing experience data enables healthcare professionals to rapidly adapt to changing situations by quickly propagating insights that can be continuously understood and acted upon. Doing so helps address the challenges that come with less time, demanding customers, fewer resources and burned-out employees, all which the healthcare industry continues to face.

COVID-19 Operating Framework

COVID-19 has highlighted the change needed in many current experience management programs. A flexible and versatile “XM” Operating Framework for improving experience requires a strategy to address culture change, team competencies, and technology. This XM framework can enable personalized, actionable and integrated approaches for service and care delivery.

This allows healthcare organizations to build trust with employees and patients at every interaction. By implementing a strategy of listening, analyzing and acting, healthcare organizations empower their workforce to create solutions that are proactive rather than reactive.

The Qualtrics Approach

Qualtrics offers free, customizable and actionable solutions that are designed to address the pressing issues that are facing the healthcare industry due to the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, the solutions are designed to provide a versatile framework that can be applied to the changing healthcare landscape going forward.

These Qualtrics solutions -- which are available to any healthcare organization on a pro bono basis for 90 days – include a pre-screen and routing solution to capture symptoms and route patients to appropriate resources, a dynamic call center script to expand call center capacity, and a healthcare workforce pulse to help assess the resource and communication needs of employees and clinicians.

When they are used together, these components are designed to provide effective and proactive solutions that health systems can use to better manage through the current crisis. The flexibility and versatility of these solutions also lend themselves to future crises as well as daily operations.

Shaping the future of clinical trial supplies management

2020-12-10T19:08:23+01:00

Authored by: SAP and Tenthpin

The transformation of the traditional pharmaceutical supply chain towards the data-driven, patient-centric value chain disrupts the status quo of the Life Sciences industry. Advanced therapy medicinal products (ATMPs) offer new opportunities for personalized treatments, such as cell & gene therapies. With the launch of ATMPs and the introduction of new product and service offerings “beyond the pill”, the lines between pharmaceuticals and medical technology blur, and pharmaceutical companies need to develop a fundamentally different end-to-end capability, towards a truly patient-centric analysis and response across the entire value chain. Both the commercial and the clinical value chain of tomorrow, from the molecule to the patient, or vein-to-vein, will be leaner, faster, more flexible, self-orchestrated and patient-centric.

The impact on clinical trials operations is substantial. The growing number of new product launches impact the way pharmaceutical organizations plan and execute clinical trials: the number of trials is increasing, while at the same time trials are becoming smaller. Trial designs are becoming more complex, due to companion diagnostics, combination products, and longer and more complex manufacturing and resupply processes. Patient enrollment becomes more competitive, due to smaller target population, increased importance of patient and site experience, and patients being better informed. Finally, pharmaceutical organizations are experiencing an overall higher complexity in the end-to-end trials process due to the increase of non-core countries and challenges due to fast changing, global regulations.

How can technology help?

Technology is at the heart of the of the pharmaceutical industry’s transformation. It is changing healthcare, the practice of medicine, how pharma innovations reach patients, and how the industry communicates with their patients. Technology increases the industry’s capacity to innovate. We can predict a significant increase in the efficiency and effectiveness of the next wave of clinical trials thanks to the emergence of improved technologies and access to real-time data. Remote clinical trials, and in the future virtual clinical trials, will quickly transform from a future trend into a real-life standard scenario for the industry. And remote patient monitoring and access to real-time patient data will initiate the next big wave of innovation in the Life Sciences industry.

Overcoming today’s pain points

As pharmaceutical companies are starting to standardize and harmonize their commercial with their clinical supply chain processes, clinical supplies are moving into the center of attention. Clinical supplies are often linked to the same challenges across the whole industry. Silos of information make accurate planning difficult and lead to unnecessary buffers and costs. Companies are experiencing a lack of visibility along the end-to-end clinical supply chain with regards to the actual inventory at clinical sites, inbound and outbound shipments, actual patients and dispensing schedules.

Disjointed, siloed perspectives constantly need to be translated, aggregated and adjusted, leading to a misbalance of demand and supply along the value chain. From a process, data and technology perspective, the industry is experiencing a lack of integration between the different partners in the clinical supply chain. The lack of standardized solutions and interfaces are a detriment to faster and more accurate planning cycles.

Looking towards the future, when clinical studies will change and be more agile and more diverse, and require a variety of different set-ups, the industry will need the flexibility in its IT systems to accommodate such changes. New umbrella, basket or platform trials need to be handled, supplies need to be pooled and more elaborate logistics and shelf life considerations must be included in the clinical planning processes. Alongside new study types, also different collaboration models are required in the future: Different solution vendors on the IRT/RTMS or cold-chain side or clinical supply chain partners (contract manufacturers, logistics service providers and others) need to be onboarded and information needs to be shared on a detailed level.

Industry consortium to drive innovation

Having the knowledge about the transformation the pharmaceutical industry is currently undergoing and the challenges these companies experience in their clinical supply chain triggered a number of questions for SAP and partner Tenthpin Management Consultants (Tenthpin).

”How can we design a Next Generation Clinical Trial Supply Management (CTSM) solution,” was the most important question. How can SAP and Tenthpin build a CTSM solution that allows quick and flexible responses to future trends, while at the same time reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and overall business risk? How can we improve the clinical trial process for the industry, sponsors, and clinicians, while improving the patient experience and its outcomes? And, how can we rethink the clinical trials process by taking full advantage of emerging technologies?

To make the data-driven, patient-centric value chain a reality, SAP, Tenthpin and several global Life Sciences companies decided to partner, co-innovate, and build an industry solution for CTSM. In order to achieve the objective of building a true industry standard, SAP launched an industry consortium to bring clinical trial sponsors and external clinical supply chain service and solution providers (like CMOs, logistic providers, and IRT/RTMS vendors) together. All members can actively participate in the process design discussions, influence the strategic direction, and proactively shape the future industry best practices for clinical trial supply operations.

Key capabilities that enable the transformation

To have a fundamental impact on the future clinical supplies processes, a clinical trial supply management solution should:

Accommodate faster planning cycles and novel types of clinical trial protocol set-ups

Harmonize master data and align processes for an end-to-end information flow

Standardize interfaces to enable a faster study start-up, but also ease the operational burden of the clinical supplies system landscape during the trial execution

Be interoperable to allow system flexibility, extensibility and ensure maintenance and upgrades at low TCO

Apart from a facilitated study set-up, accurate planning is instrumental for the optimal supplies provisioning during a clinical trial. Timely visibility into actual supplies consumption is the basis for CTSM-driven replenishment, i.e. anticipating what is needed when and where and accordingly sourcing, manufacturing and shipping needed supplies, without producing overages nor running the risk of supplies shortages.

In order to plan more accurately, a variety of data points need to be brought together:

planned and actual enrollment data,

visit and dispensing schedules,

the overall lifecycle status of a study or sub-studies,

regulatory approval information for study start or shelf life extensions,

up-to-date stock information in warehouses/depots,

in-transit stock,

in-process orders

and the real-life quality status of the patient kits, especially in IoT sensor-monitored situations.

Such additional sources of information can be leveraged to apply up-front knowledge whether supply meets demand and can recognize potential future shortages earlier on, helping planners with a recommended course of action to make better decisions and gaining the shop floor and logistics teams valuable lead time to replenish supplies. Combining the protocol-driven consumption logic with supplies network insights and real life data infusion, like cold chain issues, or nowadays during the Corona pandemic enrolment delays or supply chain challenges, like delivery or border crossing delays, helps companies better manage shortages via a fair share distribution model so that ongoing clinical trials can proceed as planned and each patient receives the needed treatment. Awareness of manufacturing and logistics capacity help determine the optimum between production cycles, delivery costs, and supplies buffers on site. Machine learning algorithms and simulation capabilities can further refine the planning process and increase the resulting planning accuracy.

An increase in planning accuracy in-turn reduces the need for high inventory buffers and therefore reduces sourcing, storage and shipping costs. Coupled with a system-supported change management strategy, planning for successor products and optimal management of the grace periods guarantees optimal consumption of existing stock across the various countries participating in clinical trials. Avoidance of hard (static) reservations per trial and pooling of supplies across trials further optimizes the inventory levels. Last but not least, avoiding unnecessarily high stock buffers avoids waste and also impacts the reconciliation effort to recall and destroy the remaining supplies at the end of a trial and supports meeting corporate sustainability KPIs.

A final key requirement to prepare us for the future is the ability to collaborate closely and efficiently with all the stakeholders in the clinical trial space. Outsourcing has been a key trend on the commercial side, so SAP can leverage existing solutions and capabilities also for clinical trials to share information and harmonize workflow processes between the clinical trial sponsor, development partners, contract manufacturers, suppliers, clinical research organizations, labeling and translation service providers or logistics providers. Cloud-based sourcing, collaboration and data exchange capabilities facilitate close cooperation and improve cycle times, technologies like bots help automate and facilitate processes and make the daily life of the investigators and patients easier, while network-based message exchange allow us to move away from high 1:1 connectivity efforts to enable corporations to more quickly and more flexibly do business with each other and start clinical trials.

There is an exciting future ahead of us!

The convergence of new types of medicines and new technologies brings us to a pivotal point in time, how we organize and run clinical trials in future - comparable to what the manufacturing industry has seen with the Industry 4.0 changes. SAP and Tenthpin welcome additional companies to shape this future with us, so we invite you to join the CTSM industry consortium and look forward to your thoughts!

Learn more.

Solving Supply Chain Volatility

2021-01-11T15:51:38+01:00

Authored by Mandar Paralkar, Global Head of Life Sciences at SAP

Supply chain disruptions aren’t new, but they are more challenging during a pandemic. An arsenal of supply chain management technologies are available to help monitor shifting demand patterns, share critical data, and ensure life-saving medications reach people in need quickly and at manageable cost.

For most of us, supply chains work silently and seamlessly all around us. Or at least they did until COVID-19 broke the spell we were under that all was well. Initially, missing gloves and disinfectant wipes were evidence of cracks in the supply chain. Thankfully, both of those supplies had limited worldwide repercussions. There’s concern, though, that similar breaks in life science supply chains could impact human lives.

In a recent IDC Perspective from Michael Townsend, research director for IDC Health insights, the analyst points out that events like the pandemic highlight shortcomings in traditional supply chain management. For the life sciences supply chain, the impact takes on a greater level of accountability as it could delay life-saving drugs, devices, and personal protective equipment that hospitals need to care for patients.

At the time of writing this article, the US and most of the world was again experiencing a major surge in coronavirus cases and huge demand for tests while readying for the potential release of few vaccines currently in clinical trial stages. For busy hospitals and clinics, inventory for equipment like masks, gowns, gloves, disinfectants, and diagnostic kits was not keeping up with demand. On the pharma side, biologics and vaccine companies needed to fast track approval processes for patient medicines. From every direction, the situation for the supply chain is incredibly pressurized and traditional just-in-time inventory management is limiting fast response and easy collaboration.

Preparing for Demand driven supply chain

Most likely, this won’t be our last surge, or the only vaccines developed for the virus. With so much riding on the ability to deliver these life-saving goods quickly and safely, life sciences organizations need better collaboration tools. Thankfully, new and better resources are available. Technology can improve end-to-end visibility in the supply chain to help monitor shifting demand patterns in major disruptions like a pandemic and for smaller ones such as batch-process inconsistencies or regulatory requirements.

As horrible as this pandemic has been for each of us, it is pushing organizations toward digitization that has been needed in the life sciences supply chain for decades. Adding more collaboration and insight into the supply chain sets up opportunities for one-to-one personalized treatments with a batch size of one, adjustments to cold chain constraints, chain of identity and chain of custody requirements. We could also see make-to-order manufacturing and rough-cut demand plans become a reality not only for coronavirus medications but also for targeted therapy treatments.

These types of hopeful scenarios seem distant while we’re in the midst of the pandemic. In response to immediate COVID needs, technology can again ensure better collaboration for vaccine distribution. What we’ve seen during the pandemic is a welcomed higher degree of willingness and desire to work together. The right tools and technologies can help us get in front of the coronavirus and hopefully save lives.

Vaccine Collaboration Hub for Life Sciences

Frequently, ineffective collaboration starts with the inability to share information, whether that be data, messages, or nontraditional sources like social media and Internet of Things data. Fortunately, we are in a time where solutions are available that can exchange large volumes of data in different formats across a life sciences supply chain and apply artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to that data from the cloud.

These technologies are available and can be combined, integrated via the infrastructure for the Vaccine Collaboration Hub, which evolved from a pharmaceutical network developed by SAP and several large pharmaceutical wholesalers and manufacturers. Powered by cloud services, the hub enables Life Sciences trading partners to deliver:

Controlled vaccine sourcing and manufacturing

Seamless vaccine distribution

Analytics for transparency and visibility

Using the hub, manufacturers, logistics service providers, pharma companies, wholesalers and dispensers can all work together. Necessary activities like order fulfillment to dispensing units and postvaccine monitoring can be initiated, tracked, and managed on the hub to assist in distributing and administrating vaccines to people around the world. In a time that demands speed and accuracy, the hub enables vaccine supply chain transparency, and can distribute the right vaccines, in the right quantities, in the right condition at the right time, to the right place at the manageable supply chain cost.

The hub illustrates the kind of collaboration that is needed now and post pandemic. It’s one of many examples of technology companies’ efforts to help the life sciences industry become stronger and more resilient. When we have the tools, we need to work together and collaborate effectively we can expect a stronger, healthier, and more agile future—and fewer life-altering disruptions.

Personalized Medicine: Changing the World One Patient at a Time

2021-01-25T14:32:41+01:00

Author: Pankaj Sali, Principal Consultant, SAP Life sciences, Infosys Ltd.

Imagine if someone had terminal cancer and he could have medicine created specifically for him that would provide exactly what his body needs to heal. It’s possible, and it’s already happening.

It’s called personalized medicine, and it’s changing the world one patient at a time.

Personalized medicine is the emerging practice of using a patient’s genetic and molecular profile to produce targeted cell and gene therapies, treatments, or medicines tailored to their individual health needs. It combines genomics and big data analytics to determine specific requirements for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease.

How is personalized medicine possible?

Personalized medicine is usually considered a viable option once all traditional methods of treatment have been attempted without success. This means that patients are usually at a critical stage in treatment with few or no other options available to them. At this stage, timing is critical, and there is no room for error, so the creation of personalized medicine must be as quick and accurate as possible.

This involves a comprehensive business process that includes:

Taking blood and plasma samples from a patient

Transporting the samples through a cold supply chain logistics provider

Analyzing the samples to determine the drug properties required

Manufacturing the individualized drug

Shipping the drug back through the logistics cold chain

Infusing the medicine into the patient (at one or multiple appointments)

Each of these steps involves various key players, including healthcare providers and payers, laboratories, cold chain logistics suppliers, transportation providers, and cryogenic drug manufacturers. All of these moving parts need to work in unison in order to go through the entire process and get the specialized drug back to the critical care patient within 21-28 days.

This requires zero tolerance for error, so advanced technology solutions using chain-of-identity IoT and blockchain technology ensure that each specialized drug gets back to the right patient.

The big pharma mind shift

The promise of personalized medicine also involves a huge mind-shift in the pharmaceutical industry, according to a recent webinar with Infosys and SAP.

“For our pharmaceutical manufacturers, it's not going to be an easy shift,” said Vivek Ruikar, Vice President at Infosys during the webinar. “There is a massive mindset that needs to change. Today, everyone is used to manufacturing in bulk. Tomorrow, you have to manufacture for the batch size of one individual patient. So that's what this solution is about to address is this new upcoming art of the possible requirement, which has been made feasible by various technology advances.”

Technology makes personalized medicine possible now

According to the webinar, three technology advances have made personalized medicine more accessible in the life sciences sector:

Advanced analytics: the ability to quickly process an immense volume of data allows scientists to analyze genome-level data for an individual patient to determine what modifications are required.

Democratization of cryogenic manufacturing: Making cryogenic manufacturing practices more accessible enables pharmaceutical manufacturers to scale capabilities up or down.

IoT, mobile, and robotic process automation (RPA): The combination of these three advanced technologies allows active management of the end-to-end supply chain logistics.

The promise of personalized medicine

Advanced technology is making the promise of personalized medicine achievable.

Infosys is working with SAP using S/4HANA and SAP Cloud solutions to manage all of the important aspects of personalized medicine business process, from patient management to logistics, and manufacturing to regulatory compliance.

“All the functionality is addressed through an SAP suite of offerings,” said Vivek. “The front end for the patient and various providers is provided by SAP Cloud Platform (SCP), the core logistics supply chain manufacturing is delivered by S/4HANA, and all analytics and reporting is delivered by SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC).”

Watch this informative webinar for more details on the Infosys SAP Personalized Medicine solution.

The Importance of Clinical Trial Supply Chains - LinkedIn Live Session

2021-03-07T20:18:36+01:00

Now more than ever clinical trials are important, regardless of this clinical trials face the same supply chain challenges as the whole life science industry. Added onto this, clinical trial processes are disjointed and lack visibility into the end-to-end supply chain process. Life science companies are in need to standardize their clinical trail supply chain process, where they can be more agile and flexible to change.

SAP, Roche and Tenthpin will be hosting a LinkedIn Live session on Thursday, March 11 from 10:30-11:00am ET. They will speak about their co-innovation to harmonize the clinical trial supply chain by creating a next-generation clinical trial supply chain management solution.

Join the LinkedIn Live event, "Life Sciences: Navigating the Supply Chain for Clinical Trials"

The creator of Cloud Wars, Bob Evans will be the moderator of the discussion. He will be speaking to David Volk from Genentech (subsidiary of Roche), Michael Schmidt from Tenthpin and Mandar Paralkar from SAP.

Discovery Health Leverages SAP HANA to Drive the Digital Transformation of Its Healthcare Delivery System

2021-04-06T15:03:03+02:00

Author: Maia Surmava, CIO, Discovery Health

South Africa’s Discovery Health has teamed up with SAP to develop a digital health ecosystem that improves the patient experience by delivering relevant, personalized information throughout the course of a patient’s healthcare engagement. The digital health platform leverages SAP S/4HANA’s financial management and ERP capabilities and extensions plus third-party add-ons to help patients better manage their treatment plans, while enabling healthcare providers to improve health outcomes by delivering personalized treatments and timely interventions powered by data-driven insights.

The Discovery Digital Health Ecosystem for SAP HANA delivers digital tools, clinical content, and insights through a human-centric engagement platform. The modular platform provides integrated management capabilities that enable personalized healthcare across the continuum of care, connecting patients, providers, and other members of the healthcare team.

The platform’s foundation is a massive intelligence layer where health-related master data is collected, analyzed, and made actionable. As shown below, potential data inputs include: insurance claims, authorizations, Electronic Medical Records (EMR), lab results, radiology, point-of-care devices, wellness screenings, risk assessments, and much more.

Leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning, the ecosystem’s intelligence layer is mined for valuable insights and predictive foresights, which are translated into three categories of potential healthcare interventions provided to individual patients:

1) Wellness: Includes screening tools, dynamic assessments, risk calculators, educational content, personalized objectives, an incentive-based behavior-change engine, and other features to help patients better understand their risks and promote healthy behavior.

2) Digital Therapeutics: Provides information and tools to help better manage treatments and prevent disease progression. This includes a set of customizable care pathways for specific conditions (e.g., diabetes, mental health); a medicine tracker tool for improving medication compliance; a personalized feed of information and alerts relevant to each individual patient; and access to EMRs detailing a patient’s medical history, including doctor visits, hospital admissions, prescribed medications, and key health measurables (i.e., body mass index, weight, cholesterol, and blood pressure).

Predictive models are utilized to identify health risks and the potential for disease progression, providing Discovery Health beneficiaries with critical information they can use to take actions for improving their health. Digital therapeutics also encompass the integration of devices for remote monitoring and virtual diagnoses, as well as a variety of third-party health apps (e.g., sleep, mental health, diet, EKG, etc.).

3) Care Coordination and Enablement: Digital tools that provide healthcare professionals with a complete view of a patient’s health history, medications, and test results, improving patient care and reducing the likelihood of errors and duplicative or unnecessary tests. Included are: dashboards and alerts for all members of the care team; virtual video, voice, and chat care consultations; customizable ePrescription templates that detail dosage guidelines; and a variety of customizable templates for treatment referrals, lab tests, care pathways, and more.

Also included are clinical workflow notes that can be integrated to automate and simplify the submission of claims and electronic discharge summaries that can be shared with other medical professionals to improve the coordination of care between medical professionals and lead to better patient outcomes. Additionally, there is set of self-service tools that make it easy to quickly fill in enrollment forms, submit claims, and track claims processing status and payments, thus reducing administrative burdens and enabling healthcare professionals to focus on care delivery.

Lastly, the Discovery Digital Health Ecosystem integrates Discovery’s Vitality engagement engine, a powerful behavioral-change program that offers beneficiaries incentives and rewards for taking steps towards a healthier lifestyle.

Deloitte’s Population Health Management Framework[1] outlines the four building blocks and nine success factors that are critical to enabling successful population health management. The Discovery Digital Health Ecosystem for SAP HANA provides all the tools and capabilities required to succeed.

To learn more, visit the SAP Store.

[1] Deloitte 2020 Global Health Outlook Report

Increase Patient Satisfaction with an End-to-end Payment Solution that Delivers Advanced Functionality and Real-time Posting to SAP

2021-04-22T03:15:13+02:00

Authors: Rebecca Truscott, Salucro Healthcare Solutions and Bruce Magill, Director of Business Development, Global Strategic Healthcare Partnerships at SAP

Market survey data has shown that patient acquisition and loyalty increasingly is impacted by the consumer financial experience. Salucro’s online offering leverages SAP’s ERP capabilities and advanced automation to enable seamless transaction processing and payment collection across the entire revenue cycle, simplifying the patient payment experience. The solution works with SAP Extension Suite and SAP Integration Suite to function as an online subscription service (SaaS), delivering operational performance levels (SLA) of 99.5% or more while complying with all international security and privacy standards and directives. It is highly configurable and easily integrated into existing systems, giving healthcare providers worldwide a solution that can be customized to meet their unique payment collection workflow requirements.

Multiple Payment Options to Meet Patient Preferences

While credit and debit card transactions remain dominant throughout healthcare payments, if the flexibility were offered nearly 33% of survey respondents¹ showed interest in using emerging payment technologies to resolve their healthcare balances. To support emerging patient preferences, Salucro offers over 16 different payment options, including access to third-party financing and various e-wallet integrations.

Payment Locations to Meet the Needs of Patients and Providers

Healthcare providers benefit by elevating financial management and payment collection efficiencies and improving the patient payment experience, which has recently become mission critical. In the age of Covid-19, the need for a digital-first approach to patient billing has come to the forefront. Working in conjunction with SAP, Salucro provides an industry-leading solution for improving financial management for healthcare providers and providing today’s consumers with the convenience, safety, and functionality they expect.

When asked what capabilities they would like to see in an online bill payment experience, survey respondents favored several key options — from having a variety of payment types to choose to being able to save their card information on file. However, only 11% of patients² replied that they were unwilling to make payments online.

“People mostly think about quality of care when evaluating a provider, but the financial journey can have just as much of an impact on patient satisfaction. Healthcare practitioners that don’t prioritize billing and payment processes are putting themselves in a position to lose patients and erode loyalty to their brand.” Clayton Bain, Founder & CEO, Salucro

Overcome the Challenges of Legacy Payment Systems with Fully
Secure Integration with SAP to Power Your Workflow-Specific Needs

Salucro’s SAP integration allows providers using SAP ERP to better meet patients wherever they are – online, at the point-of-service, or anywhere in between. Throughout the healthcare market there is massive room for improvement in traditional payment delivery systems. Hospitals, health systems, physician practices, and ancillary service providers are often plagued by limited capabilities. Inefficient routing of patient payments and manual posting to their accounts can lead to errors and significant delays in reconciliation. This means that providers often have to wait for extended periods of time to get paid, while patients are all too often hit with late, “surprise” bills they didn’t expect, all leading to decreased patient satisfaction and loyalty. Salucro’s payment solution overcomes these shortfalls by enabling:

Automated reconciliation with real-time posting of patient payments back into SAP

An online patient self-pay portal

Automated recurring payment plans

Agent-assisted payments across the revenue cycle, including pre-service, at point-of-sale, and for back-office call centers

Secure, PCI-compliant transmission of credit card information

A better patient payment experience with live chat support, electronic statements and receipts, and mobile-friendly payments from any device

Studies have shown major improvements in payment results for providers using the Salucro payment solution, including significant increases in collections, transaction volumes, speed-to-payment, patient self-service, and in the utilization of self-pay monies.

As a Level 1 PCI DSS service provider, Salucro is a leader in cloud-based, patient payment technology solutions that offer advanced payment options, insightful reporting, and cohesive payment experiences for providers and patients. The company’s payment platform can be integrated into any existing EHR/EMR system, helping to streamline collection workflows while bringing retail-like payment experiences to the revenue cycle.

To learn more, visit the SAP Store.

Address Clinical Trial Failures to Improve Patient Outcomes

2022-04-26T19:53:54+02:00

Clinical trials are essential, but unfortunately only 14% of all drugs in clinical trials are successful. SAP is working closely with its partners and customers to utilize technology to help the many stopgaps that could terminate a clinical trial. One partner specifically, SyMetric focuses on a clinical trial execution phase is when many stakeholders in the process are needed to collaborate and make real-time decisions. The stakeholders are investigators, the clinical research organizations, the warehouses, the labeling agents, and the statisticians, where a break in this chain can lead to a failed clinical trial. Of the 14% of trials that fail, 10% are due to data quality issues.

Based in India, SyMetric is a software products company focused in developing world-class products that are modularized, flexible, affordable at the same time. The products are designed, developed, and deployed and run by our expert teams based out of Bangalore in India. One of the founders of SyMetric Uma Janapareddy, was named the woman leader revolutionizing the clinical research IT solutions for the pharmaceutical sector by CEO Insights.

I had the pleasure of speaking to Uma about how SyMetric; with the help from SAP and other technology partners are working together to revolutionize the clinical trial process to improve patient care.

Watch my interview with Uma.

May 31st, 2022 Out of Office message: Today is SAP Mental Health Day and so I will be taking the day to unplug and recharge with friends and family

2022-06-07T09:04:08+02:00

#SAPMentalHealthDay #FutureOfWork #SAP4Good @LifeAtSAP

What is your purpose and how can you achieve it? It’s an interesting and thought-provoking question that often pops in my head when I lose focus, especially today on SAP Mental Health Day! Often we lose track of what drives us and what truly brings us happiness, but perhaps the difficulty is in identifying what that is? The other day, I had this very discussion with some friends

and some conveyed that being a parent embodies this fulfillment. For me, becoming a mother certainly is an important part of the equation but social work will always be the piece that realizes my purpose. Today I was lucky enough to enjoy both – a day off to play with my 1 year old Lili and write this blog about my most recent project.

It is with that in mind that I decided to join SAP’s Pro Bono for Economic Equity program which was founded in early 2021 as part of SAP’s response to the social justice movement. As Chris Putvinski from SAP explains, putting to use a decade-long experience running social sabbatical pro bono consulting programs, SAP decided to develop a program to help strengthen Black-owned businesses and social enterprises by providing them with support and expertise from its employees. The Pro Bono for Economic Equity program was launched as a six-week initiative supporting Black-owned businesses in four U.S. cities: Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York City. SAP employees spend one week working full time with their assigned business, and five weeks working at least eight hours per week. In many instances, given the businesses supported are typically newer and smaller scale, the arrival of SAP volunteers leads to the doubling of an organization’s staff.

The program kicked off in March of 2021, with 48 SAP employees volunteering with 16 businesses. The initial results showed that 95% of businesses felt the program met their expectations and were satisfied with their experience. Meanwhile, 92% said they felt more prepared to address future challenges for their organization.

This year, I have the pleasure of working with Rochelle Porter Design and my amazing colleagues, Rick Isom and Dominic Brennan from SAP. Rochelle is a talented artist and passionate about sustainability. She creates striking patterns you can wear or sprinkle her sunshine in your home. I love her art and had fun matching with my daughter today in Rochelle Porter Design Mommy and me leggings! For SAP Mental Health Day, we did a workout at our local WowMoms in Montreal and then spent the rest of the day gardening and napping. My team and I have less than two weeks to complete our final project for Rochelle Porter Design which I hope will help her run better and lead to sustainable business success. Thank you, SAP for giving us a mental health break and the opportunity to use our “superpowers” to help Black-owned businesses like Rochelle’s. And thank you, Rochelle for introducing us to the beauty that is your art and allowing us to embark on this adventure with you.

Happy Tuesday & Mental Health Day!

Caroline & Aurélie (Lili)

Building the Path for Managing Health Data and Foster Healthcare Interoperability along Business Processes

2022-11-28T20:33:32+01:00

In this blog post, I want to follow up on the recent post on the SAP Health Product Strategy and focus specifically on the updated plans in the context of healthcare-related services on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP).

Healthcare provider landscapes are traditionally heterogeneous and have always included highly specialized subsystems and modules. Even so, there is an ongoing and continuous modularization of these landscapes, including the hospital information system. Interoperability is the ability that ensures that these different information systems can “access, exchange, integrate, and cooperatively use data in a coordinated manner”^[1]. Often the integrations between these systems are built as custom interfaces in projects, are tailored and designed to their specific setting, and frequently require ongoing monitoring and maintenance, resulting in continuous effort and cost.

Several years of working on different healthcare solutions made it clear to me that interoperability has various dimensions and is much more than a technology problem at its core. It requires an alignment of standards, terminology, processes, and the motivation to work with each other. On the journey towards composable business processes, SAP has planned to address these dimensions step by step and engage the partner ecosystem along that way.

Integration and Extensibility

The team I am working with wants to address two needs of our customers and partners. First, we want to support our partners and simplify hospital information system integration with SAP S/4HANA, analytics, and the broader SAP portfolio of solutions along end-to-end processes such as Patient-to-Reimbursement, Record-to-Report, Finance, and others. Hospital information system partners could position the integration between their solutions and the SAP Intelligent Suite enabling value-add and innovative use cases as a strong value proposition. Consequently, customers could benefit from an improved user experience through the integrated solution and an improved TCO. Second, we want to support customers and partners in developing healthcare cloud applications. We want to help customers to leverage SAP technology to create required extensions within their business process and allow partners to build software extensions and distribute them on the SAP App Store.

FHIR on SAP Business Technology Platform

As an essential service to satisfy these needs to some extent and better support interoperability, we plan to leverage the HL7® FHIR® standard on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). SAP BTP is the Choice (please also see the highlights from Jürgen Müller’s Keynote at SAP TechEd) to accelerate innovations. At the same time, FHIR is the leading candidate for an open and standard API ecosystem to connect with the broader healthcare ecosystem. Similarly, both SAP BTP and the HL7® FHIR® standard are designed to foster integration, extensibility, and scalability.

Hence, SAP plans to provide an HL7® FHIR® service on SAP BTP. If and when available, partners and customers can leverage this platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to support the design, implementation, and operation of a native cloud application or service relying on health-related data. Moreover, it is planned to support applications to satisfy their integration needs with SAP solutions and the SAP partner ecosystem. At its core, it is designed to represent an FHIR service for managing health data. The service is meant to provide a synchronous REST and asynchronous messaging-based API capable of supporting the necessary FHIR capabilities. Naturally, it is planned to use the in-memory database SAP HANA Cloud as persistence to be able to fulfill the needs for high-performance transactional applications.

In summary, the service intends to provide capabilities to address challenges faced by the healthcare industry, such as, e.g.,

A reliable and secure environment to manage personal information and protected health information (PHI)

Need for integration to different systems and applications in the landscape, within and across healthcare organizations, government authorities, and other industries such as life science and insurance

Manage the varying complexities and regulations in the healthcare industry by providing flexible and customizable services, applications, and tools

When released, this service is planned to be the perfect starting point for customers and partners to build new healthcare cloud applications on SAP BTP and the necessary basis to address further integration needs with SAP solutions along end-to-end processes.

What comes next?

Next month we will update the Road Map Explorer with corresponding innovations. We plan to make a beta version of this service available in the second quarter of the coming year. Once the intended beta starts, all you will need to participate is an SAP BTP global enterprise account and a beta-enabled subaccount. Please get in touch with me if you are interested in participating in the beta. I am looking forward to learning more about your scenarios and use cases.

Also, I invite all interested current and prospective partners to join the SAP partner ecosystem. I am excited about this new development and would love to hear your thoughts on expanding our ecosystem’s reach in the healthcare industry. Feel free to share your comments and questions below.

HL7, FHIR, and the Flame Design mark are registered trademarks of Health Level Seven International.

My time with Strategic Workforce Planning: a healthy experience!

2023-03-15T13:04:40+01:00

Let’s start with a confession: I’m a big fan of SAP! And now also of Strategic Workforce Planning within SAP’s Future of Work team. As some might know I’m currently on a post-sabbatical fellowship, supporting and learning. My recent sabbatical gave me the chance to see the world from different perspectives including a longer Eastern Canada trip with my wife in 2022. Making a dream come true after 15 great and very active years in different Total Rewards/Market Intelligence roles at SAP.

But why do I like Strategic Workforce Planning so much!? Let me share a true story:

Currently working, post-covid routine, most of the time from home, unless in the office for meetings, workshops with colleagues. Recently I went to my doctor. A routine check after a longer time.

Few things immediately draw my attention when shortly waiting at the reception: The multilingual doctor and front desk receptionist acted as one team. Living diversity from team and patients’ sides. All good organized and no ‘traffic jam’, communication working very well.

My name was called. A younger staff member prepared me for a stress electrocardiogram on a bicycle, asking if I need a towel to keep warm until doctor appears - I was impressed about her empathy and caretaking despite the obvious busy work environment.

The doctor came in. I shared my gratitude. She was telling me that this former apprentice got a regular job offer from her recently including extra holiday days. Overall, 35-45 per year plus higher than usual salary, both reward elements above industry norm. Why? The doctor suffered from high turnover in past and had no bandwidth to deal with the loss of knowledge any longer, therefore the doctor wanted to motivate this young talent which obviously worked out. I was surprised that the war for talents has reached my own microcosms in the meantime as well.

The doctor afterwards checked my belly via ultrasound. I was joking, pointing at my grown post-covid belly: do I get twins? She was laughing and telling me that the previous day another patient was checked by her via ultrasound too. The doctor was afterwards able to tell the patient the surprising but very well perceived news that she was pregnant.

After this heartwarming story my medical check-up fortunately ended for me as for the most of you hopefully: all good, eat a bit healthier, but for the age all in good shape.

So far so good. You might ask now with good reason: what does all of these have in common with Strategic Workforce Planning? A lot! Let me illustrate my key takeaways with a comparison against the 7 key strategic workforce planning dimensions of SAP!

Workforce composition along key workforce dimensions

My key learnings from my recent ‘journey’ and check-up are:

Skills: Reskilling and upskilling requires a ‘step out of the box‘ attitude, creating areas of uncertainty, but the reward is great for the brave. Like my fellowship, offered with new insights. Staying cozy ‘at home’ might work, but not in case of undetected risks. Company employees who are neither working on their skills nor leaving comfort zone might be left behind in the long run.

Roles: Roles and career paths might vary (nurses might become doctors, apprentices eventually front desk receptionists) but there is always a need for various roles in an organization. Not all people can become doctors, at least not at the same time - a healthy mix is key, requiring a proactive talent pipeline management. Workforce Planning departments in larger organizations can help to develop talent gap ‘remedies’, e.g., strategic hiring guidelines for Recruiting to ‘cure’ role shortages or imbalances.

Career-Level (Mix): Giving early talents the chance to stay and grow in rewarding environments cannot only solve doctor’s talent pipeline challenges. The chance to practice is key to reach next career path step. A junior level nurse might be better in dealing with specific patient groups, a more seasoned doctor has strengths in reading complex health data results due to the experience level - and we detect the same pattern in companies! Companies also need to be prepared for non-linear career-paths’. Shortage of talent requires this flexibility.

Age Demographics: SAP gives employees the chance to step out of the box in order to grow, and this is not limited to age, even generation 50+ are targeted! Sabbaticals and fellowships keep those employees young! And in the long-term the company as well, cross departmental ‘fresh blood’ knowledge transfer included!

Locations: It’s often important to speak the ‘language’ of the customer - therefore location and staff decisions need to be taken wisely. Teams with intercultural background are an asset to each company. A healthy place to give impact can be either home office, another country (during sabbatical) or other department/office. SAP supports with Pledge to Flex concepts Future of Work - powered by SAP Booklet to balance private and business live which I think is great!

Employment Models: We see new work models arising supported by digitalization (at doctor: tele health, at SAP maybe AI/robots for job screening). Anyhow: there is still a need for on-site full or part time support by local employees. Doctor’s and companies likewise might route customers to second level experts after the first ‘health diagnoses’. For companies’ contingent workforce or remote Shared Service Center abroad can be mentioned here. In my perception all concepts should have one thing in common: customers’ needs are key! For example, board area needs in Sales and Development might be different as health symptoms often vary among man and woman during doctor’s sessions.

Organizational Health: I know from own experience now that you should never take health for granted and assume to know the results upfront already. Past good health conditions - similar like historic success of a company or department - is also no proof to be in good shape at present or even more in the future. In analogy, the current economic turmoil and headcount adjustments shows this drastically for many companies. Companies tend to lose these days weight quickly like a price boxer before the fight - better is to prepare potential org changes of all kinds in the long run with upfront scenario modeling, if possible. A healthy organization lives from diversity, inclusion, and equality driven by values like empathy for others, a dimension supported by SAP as well in a very nice way, in my perception.

All in all, I am convinced: Staying physically and mentally ‘fit’ (for future) is important for individuals like me - but it is also key for companies like SAP to check the own organizational health status regularly. Strategic Workforce Planning plays here a crucial role like a medical advisor. The Strategic Workforce Planning ‘prescriptions’ supports the set-up of a desired mix of future healthy workforce dimensions, making SAP resilient for the future. ‘Blood measures’ to find out how well the cure is progressing are for example Key Performance Indicators (e.g., x% female workforce share achieved in a time period y, as needed). As ‘blood markers' can be compared among patients, SAP’s workforce KPI data should be regularly checked against key market peer data in a process of benchmarking of ‘workforce health’.

You see: The story mirrors key learnings during my first fellowship weeks quite well! My blog post hopefully illustrates the importance of Strategic Workforce Planning to you, also!

In this sense: Stay (or get) healthy!

At this point a big “thanks” to the Strategic Workforce Planning team and Future of Work colleagues for the warm welcome and great onboarding support, you rock!

More #FoW insights to come soon, stay curious! In the meantime: For the strategy of SAP’s #FutureofWork, check out Future of Work - powered by SAP Booklet.

Health Application Development using HL7 FHIR on the SAP Business Technology Platform

2023-04-21T09:01:55+02:00

In my recent blog post, I gave some insights into the impact of SAP’s updated strategy for healthcare-related services on the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). Today, I want to raise your curiosity and interest and invite you to explore and provide feedback to shape this service further. Hands-on experience and collaboration are the prerequisites to achieving this best. Hence, we provide access to a beta version of our new service SAP Health Data Services for FHIR today.

I write this blog post primarily for our customers, the partner ecosystem, and independent software vendors who plan to build new cloud applications on the SAP Business Technology Platform or have already developed healthcare applications and are looking for integration or extensibility options. Why is that the case? SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (beta) supports designing, implementing, and operating an application or service relying on health-related data. It is a cloud-native implementation of the HL7® FHIR® standard. That said, it supports product owners, architects, and developers to realize services and applications quicker and with the necessary cloud qualities. Still, I will come to this in a second.

In this blog post today, I want to cover three topics:

Explain the advantages of innovating using the SAP Business Technology Platform.

Give a short primer about FHIR and describe the benefits.

Explain how SAP Health Data Services for FHIR can be used as a first-class citizen on the SAP Business Technology Platform for health-related application scenarios.

I want to conclude this blog by describing how you can use SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (Beta) by yourself.

The Need for Innovation for Healthcare-Related Applications

Undoubtedly, SAP Patient Management (IS-H) is a successful and essential industry solution for the healthcare provider market. It is a monolithic application that caters to healthcare-related administrative processes, including billing interwoven with ERP core processes. SAP Patient Management is only available on the SAP Business Suite ECC, and SAP decided at the end of last year to leave the development of patient accounting, administration, and further healthcare applications to our partners. At the same time, two aspects are essential to consider for our future healthcare strategy:

While SAP Patient Management is not a development platform, SAP partners and customers have built numerous essential and valuable software extensions.

Similarly, SAP Patient Management is currently used as an integration engine for integrating third-party clinical systems along end-to-end business processes.

Moving from this architecture to the future, SAP BTP is the innovation platform of choice: connecting the hospital information landscape with the broader SAP portfolio of solutions while providing a place for innovation. In essence, SAP is working to build an open healthcare ecosystem, delivering a future modular healthcare system landscape that allows the creation of new, innovative business process capabilities in areas such as patient engagement, supply chain management, and business networks.

SAP BTP, as a robust and multi-cloud-enabled platform foundation, makes it easier for customers to evolve and adapt to the needs of these innovations. Applications are created using a modular approach and are not tied to the underlying technology. Hence, there is no vendor lock-in. This flexibility is true for both SAP BTP and the FHIR industry standard, which also has the notion of portability in mind.

FHIR – Primer & Benefits

In the healthcare IT ecosystem, the not-for-profit, ANSI-accredited standards-developing organization HL7® is well-known for establishing industry standards, such as, e.g., HL7v2, the cornerstone for interoperable data exchange, for multiple decades. Healthcare applications use this standard to facilitate the exchange of health-related information between different systems. At the same time, the standard leverages concepts which influence the design of the own domain model. Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (HL7® FHIR®) is a more modern standard that replaces and improves previous interoperability approaches. It has gained significant traction in recent years thanks to its simplicity, ease of implementation, and flexibility.

There are the following advantages to utilizing FHIR:

It is easy to understand and implement.

It uses modern technology and concepts like RESTful APIs, JSON, and XML.

It is modular and flexible, building on resources representing healthcare information.

It fosters interoperability demanded by customers and regulations, such as ISIK, ONC 21^st Century Cures Act, and the European Health Data Space.

It has an inbuilt extensibility methodology.

It is part of an active community with many tools.

It is crucial to enable EHR vendors worldwide to support the FHIR standard and provide the corresponding interfaces and necessary capabilities to work with third-party systems along defined business processes. Many EHR vendors already offer some level of FHIR API.

At the same time, it is, for some use cases, more convenient to utilize a dedicated FHIR server or services – I will use the word “service” from now on. An FHIR service can provide an environment to foster innovation and realize new cases that cannot be as easily fulfilled within a legacy architecture. A cloud-based FHIR service can offer the following benefits:

Simplified data management: It manages the storage, retrieval, and updating of FHIR resources, simplifying data management and reducing the development effort required.

Enterprise readiness: It is designed to handle large volumes of data and can be scaled up or down according to the organization's needs, ensuring efficient performance even as data grows.

Enhanced security: It implements robust security measures to protect personal health information, including authentication, authorization, and data encryption.

FHIR as a First Class Citizen on the SAP Business Technology Platform

With the introduction of the SAP Health Data Services for FHIR, we can genuinely say, that FHIR will be a first-class citizen on SAP BTP. SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (Beta) supports you in designing, implementing, and operating an application or service relying on health-related data. The service allows the profiling and storing of resources according to your business and localization needs. It lets you manage health data using provided REST APIs and messaging endpoints and offers extensibility with custom resources, FHIR extensions, and business rules.

The following picture depicts what a typical solution architecture for an FHIR-based application can look like:

Typical Solution Architecture of an application utilizing SAP Health Data Services for FHIR

This figure shows the future hospital information landscape with solutions, such as an EMR system connected via a communication server to the SAP Health Data Services for FHIR. SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (Beta) internally utilizes several other BTP services, such as SAP HANA Cloud, for persistence.

As the web application in this example uses the OpenUI5-FHIR library, the application can utilize FHIR resources all the way from the client (i.e., the browser) to the database.

Join the Beta and Provide Feedback

As mentioned above, we started a beta phase for the SAP Health Data Services for FHIR today. The beta program is open for any SAP BTP customer who wants to evaluate and work with this upcoming service. You can find further information about the road map in the road map explorer. The service will be only available on AWS EU10 region on SAP BTP. After 90 days, the beta program ends, and created instances will no longer work.

You will need an SAP BTP global enterprise account, e.g., a Pay-As-You-Go or CPEA account, to participate in this beta. In addition to that, you will need to create a beta-enabled subaccount. Please note that the general rules for using beta functionality apply during the beta timeframe.

Together with the service, we will provide access to comprehensive documentation, mainly targeted at application developers. We also plan to give more information in the coming days, such as details about an extensive SAP Discovery Center mission, and provide more insights on compelling use cases.

Please tell us what you think. We are interested in any feedback, feature requests, or ideas. Thank you!

HL7, FHIR, and the Flame Design mark are registered trademarks of Health Level Seven International.

Get on your healthcare mission – Hands-on experience with SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (Beta)

2023-05-04T19:49:23+02:00

On April 21, 2023, the Open Beta Release of SAP’s new BTP service SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (Beta), was made available.

In Thorsten’s blog post you can learn more about the benefits of the HL7® FHIR® standard and its cloud-native implementation on SAP BTP, the SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (Beta). The service allows the profiling and storing of resources according to your business and localization needs. It lets you manage health data via REST APIs and FHIR messaging endpoints and offers extensibility with custom resources, FHIR extensions, and business rules.

During the Open Beta, you have the chance to get a hands-on experience with SAP’s cloud-based FHIR server for 90 days. Our mission will support you in this endeavor.

What are missions?

To ease your first steps with SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (Beta) we have created a mission in the SAP Discovery Center for you. Missions include best practices and step-by-step guidance for implementing business use cases, with well-established support from the community and mission experts - free of cost.
The goal of this mission is simple: experience the capabilities of SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (Beta) and leverage them to build and deploy a healthcare application on SAP BTP.
The context is a fictitious retrospective clinical study analyzing the association of obesity and cardiovascular outcomes in patients with pacemakers. The app is a prototype selecting patients that are eligible for the study so that clinical researchers can list them based on certain inclusion and exclusion criteria.

What can you expect from this mission?

The mission will help you to develop your first app on SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (Beta) by guiding you through the implementation and capabilities of this new service. Throughout the mission, you will:

Gain an understanding of FHIR and its importance in the healthcare industry.

Learn how to set up SAP Health Data Services for FHIR, load your data and integrate it into your existing systems.

Explore use cases and best practices for leveraging FHIR to drive innovation and improve patient care.

Receive step-by-step guidance and support from SAP experts, helping you to successfully complete the mission and create cutting-edge healthcare applications and services.

How to get started?

To engage in your journey, follow these simple steps:

Visit the SAP Discovery Center and navigate to the mission catalog. There, search for “Build a healthcare app with SAP Health Data Services for FHIR”. As a shortcut you can simply follow this link. Click “Start mission” there.

Explore the mission's overview to better understand the solution.

Follow the steps in the different phases as depicted below.

Engage with the SAP Community to learn from the experiences of other SAP partners and share your own insights.

Below are the phases you can go through when performing the mission (the picture shows the first ones to give you an idea how it looks like):

First phases of the mission

The DISCOVER phase provides you with the necessary background information on the mission, HL7®FHIR®, SAP BTP, and SAPUI5.

In the GET STARTED phase, you are guided to configure your BTP account, create a service instance of SAP Health Data Services for FHIR and configure the necessary authorizations.

During the CONNECT phase, you will upload sample data into our service and try out multiple queries like reading the capabilityStatement, searching for patients with specific characteristics, counting the number of patients, reading valueSets, and implementing a rule selecting patients eligible for the clinical study. This phase is a major milestone where you can experience the FHIR REST API.

In the BUILD phase, you reach the core of the mission, which is the app development. You have two options: either build the app displaying the list of eligible patients by yourself based on sample code or simply deploy a ready-to-use app. You will also experience the extensibility features of SAP Health Data Services for FHIR by profiling, enhancing the created rule, and by displaying the patient instances complying with the new profile.

You can lean back a bit in the GET INSPIRED phase and learn about potential other use cases, and projects going on in the FHIR community. You can also try out FHIR messaging as an advanced step.

Finally, it’s time to CELEBRATE and share your success. We are looking forward to your feedback, to learn what you achieved during the mission and about your ideas for improvements, use cases and potential.

Through labels on the steps, you can see if a step is essential or optional and get some hints on its content.
In each and every step, you can reach out to an SAP expert when you have a question or face an issue or to the SAP community. We will help you to overcome it and to execute the step successfully.
Once you are done with a step, you can mark is as complete to keep the status if you would like to take a break and continue later.

How to engage?

We believe that the mission “Build a healthcare app with SAP Health Data Services for FHIR” is an excellent opportunity for our customers, the partners in the SAP ecosystem and independent software vendors to get a hands-on experience with SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (beta).
We are looking forward to your comments and feedback – directly via the mission, via email or as comment to this blog.

Don't miss out on this exciting opportunity – join the mission today!

Application Development in Healthcare

2023-05-19T20:34:50+02:00

In this blog, we'll demystify the art of application development in healthcare. Before, I go into details of the topic, I'll dissect the title into two parts, “application development” and “healthcare.”

Application development

Technology and innovation keep on simplifying things, but at the same time brings new challenges and is key aspect of a typical software application development. Decades ago (pre “as-a-Service” era), one had to write everything from scratch, assemble different software components and use some framework to develop applications. When I started programming, luckily, we had various frameworks though most of them targeting specific use-cases. As a developer, we need to go to all technical details of those frameworks, and libraries and figure out the right fit required for the application.

Fast forward to today, we've various “as-a-service” offerings from different vendors to choose from along with added benefits of ease and flexibility. Platform provides services, which range from purely technical, integration, cross-domain, and industry-specific services. With platform and offered services, it's easy to develop an application. It provides you with all the necessary ingredients like persistency, APIs, transaction, security, events, logging, cloud qualities, analytics, and so on, to mix and match and build your application.

Now that I've talked about the basics of application development, summarising it with one key takeaway in today’s technology era:

“You don’t have to start from scratch as all the heavy lifting is done by the underlying platform”.

Healthcare

Coming to the second part of the title that is “Healthcare”. One of the oldest, even when it wasn't formally called “healthcare”. One of the complex industries as it deals with one of the most precious and delicate thing called “LIFE”. It wasn't complex, centuries ago, but meant to provide care for health and a better life.

Today, we've numerous challenges (and thanks to digitisation and technology as well) which we need to deal with. Healthcare is highly regulated and a highly localised industry. Different countries/regions with specific laws and regulations, government reforms, policies, disparate operational aspects. There are varied ways of treatment and protocols, numerous standards, and terminologies to handle, security, and data breach aspects and the list goes on. The way radiology department works is different from Oncology, Cardiology etc., and have dedicated systems (applications) from different vendors to manage department-specific activities. But in the end, these systems also need to collaborate and hence integration is equally important.

Just look at the potential scenarios and the need for applications, which we've, primarily considering two broad areas.

Healthcare care provider as a business.

Healthcare care provider as provider for “Delivery of care”.

Systems at the Business area need to integrate and exchange with Delivery of Care area and vice-versa. This is important for business operations and to make decisions accurately.

Key takeaway after understanding basics of healthcare industry is:

“Challenges in the healthcare industry aren't easy and trivial to solve. There are too many disparate systems, stakeholders, and organisations in play along with localisation needs.”

Stitching the Title Together

In the two sections, I've tried to highlight challenges (if not all) for application development and healthcare. Literally if I combine them, it looks even more challenging and complex. So instead of talking about problems, let us talk about solutions.

Imagine a platform, which takes care of the basic needs of application development and at the same time addresses all the complexities of the healthcare industry. I'm talking about platform as a service, which is fine-tuned to understand healthcare nuances. Like domain-specific entities (patients, visits, billing etc.), extensibility and configurability to address localisation needs, interoperability with systems in standard manner, high security, and cloud qualities and resilient application and so on. All packaged together such that you don't have to bother about “Application development in healthcare,” but let that be taken care by “SAP Health Data Services for FHIR”.

SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (Beta) - Overview

This is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). An enterprise grade service for the healthcare industry and deeply embraced with FHIR. FHIR is a global healthcare interoperability standard, which provides various specifications and good practices. It's in terms of APIs, information exchange, extensibility, security, bulk data and more importantly all the necessary entities for healthcare (and beyond) which are called “Resources.”

With FHIR as a base, we're solving critical challenges for healthcare. With SAP BTP and its services as base and coupled with some specific enterprise features like extensibility, configurability, content packages, rules, which come as part of SAP Health Data Services for FHIR. This makes application development simpler and easier.

I'll talk about more features for SAP Health Data Services for FHIR in subsequent blogs. You can have a look at the comprehensive developer guide at “help.sap.com”.

Partner Ecosystem

This is truly enabling our partner ecosystem and independent vendors, who also come with lots of ideas and potential use case to solve the healthcare needs. For simplicity, I would like to visualise this with a typical set up in a hospital and where does SAP Health Data Services for FHIR fit in to developing applications (including integration if needed).

Two major areas, which we can deduct from the preceding diagram:

It's easy to integrate and exchange with any system within hospital landscape via a communication server that is FHIR-enabled.

SAP Health Data Services for FHIR, available on SAP BTP and integrated with other SAP BTP services allows you to develop applications. With in-built APIs, persistency, healthcare extensible and configurable domain model, security and cloud qualities and several other features.

Conclusion

This was just an introductory blog post for SAP Health Data Services for FHIR. I described it as the enterprise grade platform for healthcare embraced with FHIR. Leaving you with some final statements:

SAP Health Data Services for FHIR isn't just a typical FHIR server but also serves as comprehensive application development platform for healthcare use cases.

Provides you with the convenient to use “content-driven” development mechanisms hence reducing development time and operations effort.

Easy to extend with metadata-driven architecture and configure for you to adapt your applications with ever-changing business needs and healthcare regulations.

In future blog posts, we'll dive into potential application examples and how to realise them with SAP Health Data Services for FHIR capabilities.

I would love to hear your reactions and feedback through comments.

Inspiration for Use Cases based on SAP Health Data Services for FHIR

2023-05-23T15:54:27+02:00

Did you already get a chance to start the mission helping you to build a sample app using the SAP Health Data Services for FHIR? See this blog post for more details. In this mission, we guide you through implementing a sample app that can serve as a blueprint for real-world use cases that you could think of.

Below are some other potential use cases for inspiration. We would love to get your thoughts on them and – even better – your own use case ideas.

Use Case #1 “Waiting Time Management”

Background: Patients in the emergency department often have no idea how long it will take to see a physician. An app could calculate an estimated waiting time. It runs on a large monitor visible to all patients and potentially also on their smartphones.

The app would listen to the HL7 v2 stream of the Clinical Information System via SAP Health Data Services for FHIR as shown in the figure below. Those messages would be mapped to FHIR messages in the communication server and then be consumed by the app.

It would use the rules service to define rules that calculate the expected waiting time and visualize them in an appropriate UI that you develop.

Use Case #2 “Bed capacity reporting”

Background: In many countries hospitals have to report their (intensive) bed capacity to a central authority for the purpose of routing ambulances to free beds, and also for statistical purposes. Example DEMIS in Germany (link).

The app would take care of the regular reporting of bed capacity to an authority.

The Information on actual/planned encounters could be read via REST API of the Hospital Information System (HIS) (outbound call to be developed) or via inbound messaging of HIS occupancy data like encounter-created.

The app would take care of the scheduled generation of QuestionnaireResponse instances (based on HIS data), develop a UI to visualize the generated instances and schedule the outbound communication to the centralized solution of the corresponding authority.

Use Case #3 “Hospital Meal Management”

Background: Inpatients typically get three meals daily during their hospital stay. They can choose among different menus or building blocks, which also depends on the planned treatment and their personal preferences and medical restrictions. In addition to the patient, multiple parties are engaged in this process: the hospital caterer defines the base menus, plans and prepares the food based on the patients’ choice, and the nurses distribute the ordered menus.

You could develop multiple apps here for the different personas involved, like an app for the caterer/kitchen to define and plan menus for the next period, an app for patients to order their meals based on their dietary preferences and treatment-based restrictions, an app for nurses to distribute the ordered menus on the ward.

The information on actual encounters and patient's allergies could be read via REST API of the HIS (outbound call to be developed) or via inbound messaging of HIS occupancy data like encounter-created.

You would take this data into account for developing your various apps using the rule service and the core service or inbound messaging service.

Use Case #4 “Patient Selection for Clinical trials”

In the mission we published in the SAP Discovery Center, you can create a sample app for selecting patients eligible for a clinical trial.

Further process support could be offered by an app for enrolling patients in a clinical trial, an app for performing the clinical trial or an app for handling the financial part.

Use Case #5 “Supply Chain for Surgeries”

Background: Material planning and availability check in the context of surgery planning is very important. The necessary materials must be ordered in time and be available for the surgery.

The app could take care of checking the availability of the necessary materials a given number of days before the planned surgery. Depending on the status of the materials, the app could create a material reservation or trigger a purchase request in the hospital’s material management system.

The app would listen to the HL7 v2 stream of the HIS and consume those messages via the inbound messaging service. For the integration with the materials management system, outbound messaging would need to be developped.

Let us know your thoughts, comments, and questions on these use cases. Do you miss a service or component? Do you have any questions on how to implement a certain aspect?

Just get in contact with us by commenting on this blog or by writing an email.

Benefits of the HL7 FHIR Industry Standard

2023-05-30T08:41:03+02:00

In this blog post, I want dive deeply into the benefits of HL7® FHIR®. I have also planned a follow-up post, a practical how-to about using FHIR on the SAP Business Technology Platform. Specifically, the second part will be about utilizing our new cloud-native service SAP Health Data Services for FHIR, currently available as part of an open beta to our partners and SAP BTP customers. But first things first. I want to start with FHIR and its benefits, and I want to start with the beginning: What is FHIR exactly? What are the benefits of using it?

The not-for-profit, ANSI-accredited standards-developing organization HL7® is well-known for establishing industry standards for multiple decades in the healthcare IT ecosystem. Healthcare applications use these standards to facilitate the exchange of patient-related information between different systems. The predominant approach for this has been the messaging standard HL7v2. Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (HL7® FHIR®) is the modern standard that replaces and improves previous interoperability approaches. It has gained significant traction in recent years thanks to its simplicity, ease of implementation, and flexibility.

The FHIR Manifesto or the Fundamental Principles

While the often quoted "FHIR Manifesto" did not exist at the inception of FHIR, some important efforts resulted in an official document called the Fundamental Principles of FHIR.

FHIR prioritizes implementation

FHIR provides a flexible framework for interoperability

FHIR keeps complexity where it belongs

FHIR supports but does not mandate tight specifications

FHIR leverages open source development principles

FHIR is free to use

FHIR supports multiple exchange paradigms/architectures

FHIR leverages common web technologies

FHIR is forward and backward compatible

Tooling requirements are mainstream and minimal

These principles are well understood in the community and nicely explained in the above link. There are a few focus points that you can derive from these principles:

There is an evident focus on implementers. Only standards that are implemented and adopted by others are beneficial. As various environments and use cases use FHIR, it must be able to adapt to these. And there is also the notion of following the 80% principle, e.g., "the core specification only includes those elements used by approximately 80% of implementers - other elements are handled using extensions". Finally, many other principles focus on the community and ensure scalability throughout a potential FHIR-based ecosystem.

Benefits of FHIR

In my last blog post, I outlined some advantages of using FHIR. Now, I want to drill down into each of these and explain them in more detail. Naturally, these benefits also mirror the principles outlined above.

Easy to Understand and Implement

Implementability is one of the main priorities of the FHIR specification. Hence, many aspects listed below help to facilitate this goal precisely. To start with, the FHIR specification is also well structured. The FHIR R4 specification is layered in five levels and contains detailed content about the various sections. By the way, the name R4, which you can often see, refers to the version of the specification.

Layering of the FHIR Specification (source)

In addition to the core definition, various summaries, introductions, and examples are available to help implementors get started immediately.

Modern Concepts

FHIR uses web standards, such as RESTful APIs, JSON, and XML, which are widely used and familiar to developers. This familiarity makes it easier to understand and implement than legacy standards like HL7v2 or CDA. Ultimately, any FHIR-compliant app can communicate with FHIR-enabled systems, building the foundation for interoperability.

Modular and Build on Resources

FHIR is based on modular components called "resources," representing different aspects of healthcare information (e.g., Patient, Condition, Procedure, Consent). It is the format to provide the content and build the domain model. The 80% principle also guides the specification regarding what is defined and needs to be delivered to implement the standard. Hence, these resources can be combined and extended, providing high flexibility and customization.

Let’s have a detailed look what this could look like. Imagine we want to exchange patient information between two applications. The standard Patient resource of FHIR R4 already provides an excellent starting point. It also renders the model as a UML Diagram - see the screenshot below.

FHIR Patient Resource - UML Diagram (source)

Based on this domain model and some sample data set of a given patient, we can represent a patient using the JSON format like this:

{

    "resourceType": "Patient",

    "identifier": [

        {

        "use": "official",

        "system": "http://example.org/fhir/Patient",

        "value": "t-1"

        }

    ],

    "active": true,

    "name": [

        {

        "use": "official",

        "text": "John Putz",

        "family": "Putz",

        "given": [

            "John"

        ]

        }

    ],

    "gender": "male",

    "birthDate": "1970-07-30"

}

As many properties are optional, this very lean data structure is sufficient to let me create a patient in a system. By directly supplying my known identifier to the system, I also ensure I can use this identifier to search for the data later. This approach is already an excellent cutover to the topic of interoperability.

Fosters Interoperability

Overall, health information sharing is becoming increasingly important. As data is collected in multiple places, physicians, nurses, but also patients require this data to be available at any point. Without standardization, the necessary point-to-point integration is becoming too complex and costly.

Following the data representation above, let's consider how best to publish this into a given FHIR server. The FHIR standard is open to security, transport, and persistence approaches. In doing so, it helps to ensure that FHIR is flexible and capable of being used with ever-changing technologies. The standard defines four exchange paradigms: REST, document, messaging, and services.

Let’s take REST for our example above, which is also the most adapted exchange paradigm. So, creating a patient in a given FHIR server can easily be accomplished using REST. A simple POST request of the Patient resource with the JSON constructed above in the request's body will do the magic.

POST https://fhir-core-service.ondemand.com/myinstance/fhir/Patient

The server's response includes additional data, such as how the Patient will be identified internally. However, as I have already supplied my form of identification, I can look up the Patient easily using a GET request with one of the defined search parameters, like this:

GET https://fhir-core-service.ondemand.com/myinstance/fhir/Patient?identifier=t-1

While REST is a perfect approach to updating and accessing data in real-time, there are many processes where asynchronous communication like messaging, is more suitable.

Inbuilt Extensibility Methodology

Given the principles outlined above, there is the consequence that extensibility is a key priority. It is essential to understand that data collection and data exchange are done within their context. Still, it is good to use a single set of Resources to collaborate within a given end-to-end process from patient admission to reimbursement. And while there is too much unstructured information in healthcare, the approach supports structured information that can be validated and analyzed.

In FHIR, this approach is called "Profiling". This is the tailoring of a resource type for a specific need or process. It supports, e.g., the following:

Changing cardinality: define what is required, what is optional, and where we would support multiple values.

Change binding: there is a whole concept of how to work with "Terminologies," which is about selecting a value out of a predefined set of options, like, e.g., the "gender" used in the example above. Without going into much detail, it is vital for some of the attributes to be flexible bound against a specific source.

Introduce new elements: Extensions are the way to add new elements to resources. While this creates a high level of flexibility, it is essential to reflect that there is also the need to consider reuse for extensions.

I think it helps to understand the capabilities of profiling when you consider some examples:

International Patient Summary (IPS) defines an electronic health record extract containing essential healthcare information to support the use case scenario for 'unplanned, cross border care.' The IPS data set is minimal but still clinically relevant. The corresponding FHIR implementation guide now clearly defines which attributes must be supported, e.g., see the profile of the Patient

There are various profiles for national implementation guides, such as, e.g., the US Core Profile, the DE profiles by gematik, or the HL7 Deutschland

One level deeper, there are also project-specific, vendor-specific, and even institution-specific agreements.

The result of such profiling is often an implementation guide or a FHIR Package, which can be found in a public or private package registry.

Part of an Active Community

To conclude this overview, it is essential to mention the importance of the healthcare IT and FHIR community. Standardization requires participation and collaboration from the ecosystem that wants to utilize these standards. This open-source development principle is imbued in the FHIR approach itself. At the same time, FHIR is the core of some prominent open-source offerings and toolings.

There is also a vivid exchange on https://chat.fhir.org/ regarding all matters on the specification or beyond. If needed, we can also get development-related questions answered on StackOverflow.

To round it up, the most prominent healthcare IT-related conferences, such as HIMSS or DMEA, usually feature FHIR or interoperability-related networking events. And if more is needed, there are also FHIR-centered conferences to learn more about the standard and upcoming developments. From June 6-9, 2023, I will attend the FHIR DevDays, one of the most significant FHIR-centric events. So, if you are there too, please let's connect.

Please tell us what you think. We are interested in your feedback: Are there other benefits you feel that are missing? Do you want to learn or share some disadvantages as well? Please add a comment! Thank you!

HL7, FHIR, and the Flame Design mark are registered trademarks of Health Level Seven International.

How to use the HL7 FHIR REST API of the SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (Beta)

2023-06-20T16:16:09+02:00

Recently, I wrote about the benefits of the HL7® FHIR® industry standard. After participating in the FHIR DevDays, where I experienced the vivid developer community centered around this important topic, I wanted to publish my follow-up post. This blog post will be a practical how-to tutorial on using FHIR on the SAP Business Technology Platform. The new cloud-native service SAP Health Data Services for FHIR, currently available as part of an open beta to our partners and SAP BTP customers, plays a crucial role in this tutorial.

Are you asking yourself at this point one of the following questions: Why is FHIR a vital standard for SAP? Why does it matter for healthcare provider organizations? What is in for SAP partners? If so, I can recommend reading the following blog posts:

What does the SAP Health Product Strategy update “to support hybrid, modular healthcare system landscapes” mean to customers and partners, and why they should evaluate and adopt now?

Building the Path for Managing Health Data and Foster Healthcare Interoperability along Business Processes

SAP Health Product Strategy Gains Momentum with Initial Group of Partners

SAP Any-EMR Partner Strategy – what is in it for customers, partners and SAP?

In Life Sciences and Healthcare, SAP’s Industry Cloud Is Key to Innovation

During its beta phase, you can try the new SAP Health Data Services for FHIR. In addition to the service, we have published a mission in the SAP Discovery Center, which can be one approach to learning more about the service and potentially realize other use cases.

But now, let's go into the practical usage of FHIR with the SAP Business Technology Platform. The most straightforward approach to interacting with the service is leveraging the REST API, which most FHIR servers usually provide. Below I will explain in detail how to access and use the REST API of SAP Health Data Services for FHIR using two different tools. To simplify things, we just want to create a “Patient” with the first tool and then access it later with the second.

FHIR REST Client

While various REST Clients are available, I prefer to use Visual Studio Code, as it's very transparent about what happens.

To perform the subsequent steps, you need to get the following tools:

Microsoft Visual Studio Code

REST Client by Huachao Mao

FHIR Tools by Yannick Lagger

As you might know, Visual Studio Code is a code editor. The REST Client mentioned above allows you to associate with it and then execute calls directly from the editor via the “Send request” command. Additionally, you can define variables and use them throughout subsequent calls.

To continue, you will need a configured instance of the SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (Beta). Please follow the steps outlined in the documentation to create the instance. Then we need the service key file from the SAP Health Data Service for FHIR (Beta). The contents of the service key file are described here in detail. We will only need the following contents. From the “endpoint” section, we will need the URL of the “coreservice”. And from the “uaa” section, we will need the “url” to authenticate against, the “clientid” and the “clientsecret”.

The security functionality of SAP BTP is based on the OAuth 2.0 specification. Specifically, the User Account and Authentication (UAA) component is the central infrastructure component of the runtime platform for, e.g., authentication. The following text fragment will perform the OAuth authentication using the services’ client credentials and store the corresponding token for subsequent requests.

@url_auth=<uaa_url>

@clientId=<uaa_clientid>

@clientSecret=<uaa_clientsecret>

@url_core=<url_coreservice>



# @name get_token



GET {{url_auth}}/oauth/token?grant_type=client_credentials

Authorization: Basic {{clientId}} {{clientSecret}}





###



@authToken = {{get_token.response.body.access_token}}

Please read the documentation of the REST Client for the overall syntax. It's surprisingly easy. The three hashtags "###" separate requests, and the @name tag helps to associate the response to some context.

Visual Studio Code then adds a small text “Send Request” after the “@name” section, which allows you to execute this when you click on it. After the three dashes, the next line assigns the access token to a variable, so we can use this when executing our requests.

When we are this far, we can execute our first FHIR request and create a patient with the following fragment:

# @name create_patient

POST {{url_core}}/Patient

Content-Type: application/json

Authorization: Bearer {{authToken}}



{

    "resourceType": "Patient",

    "identifier": [

        {

        "use": "official",

        "system": "http://example.org/fhir/Patient",

        "value": "t-1"

        }

    ],

    "active": true,

    "name": [

        {

        "use": "official",

        "text": "John Putz",

        "family": "Putz",

        "given": [

            "John"

        ]

        }

    ],

    "gender": "male",

    "birthDate": "1970-07-30"

}



###

After executing the request, a "Response" window opens, where I can see the result. You can copy the "response content" in another editor window, e.g., use the FHIR tools to query, manipulate, validate, and so on.

Similarly, I can now also query the FHIR service for resources, e.g., by executing the following lines, I can retrieve the Patient again:

# @name get_patient_by_identifier

GET {{url_core}}/Patient?identifier=t-1

Authorization: Bearer {{authToken}}

Please have a look at the recording showing the steps I just described here:

If you are interested in additional capabilities of the FHIR REST API, watch out for the step "Try out the FHIR API and work with SAP Health Data Services for FHIR" in the abovementioned mission. You can find examples of how to work with conformance, patient, and terminology resources.

Firely Terminal

Let's conclude our tour using the Firely Terminal command line tool from Firely. We will first need to authenticate again using the client credentials of the SAP Health Data Services for FHIR. One approach to accomplish this in the command line is to use the CloudFoundry UAA Command Line Client. Naturally, this command line tool supports OAuth 2.0 natively.

To retrieve the patient data you created above, please execute the following steps in the command line terminal. I used macOS and the standard shell (zsh) in this example. It should be easy to adapt it to the Windows command line. Remember to replace the brackets, e.g., <url_auth>, with the information you get from your service key.

Step 1: Configure

uaac target <url_auth> --basic_auth

fhir server add hdsf <url_core>

Step 2: Get the access token and add it to the header

uaac token client get '<uua_clientid>' -s '<uaa_clientsecret>'

ACCESS_TOKEN=$(uaac context | awk '/^ *access_token: / {print $2}')

 

fhir server remove-headers hdsf

fhir server header hdsf Authorization "Bearer $ACCESS_TOKEN"

Step 3: Work with the FHIR Terminal

fhir search hdsf Patient given=John

fhir show

The "fhir search" command finally executes the FHIR GET request against our configured FHIR service and stores the results in a stack. The "fhir show" command retrieves the contents from the stack and shows it. And, magically, you will get back the Patient, we've created above.

Here you can find the recording demonstrating the usage of these tools:

Please see the documentation of the Firely Terminal to find out what else you can do with it.

Conclusion

This blog post should give you a better understanding of how you can leverage FHIR to fulfill many use cases. This post focused on using a basic editor or a command line tool. Do you instead want to use a low-code/no-code solution as a basis to create an application? This is a great idea, and you can either get started or wait a couple of days and read more in a subsequent blog post.

If you have further questions about potential use cases you can realize using the SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (beta), please look at the links linked above or comment on this post! Thank you!

HL7, FHIR, and the Flame Design mark are registered trademarks of Health Level Seven International.

Getting Started Booster for SAP Health Data Services for FHIR

2023-07-04T22:09:40+02:00

“When you start something new, it's always nice to have a partner to guide you.”

Getting started with SAP Health Data Services for FHIR is now much easier and hassle-free. In this blog, I'll talk about the Booster that will guide you in every step like a partner.

Booster is a guided way that helps you set up services on SAP Business Technology Platform. In general, if you want to know more about Booster, visit here.

There are many boosters available for different services on SAP Business Technology Platform. Now we've Booster for SAP Health Data Services for FHIR, which helps you to prepare an account in simple steps.

In the next section, I'll describe all the steps in this specific Booster in more detail.

Search Booster

Go to your global account in the SAP BTP Cockpit. In the left navigation pane, select Boosters. Search for “Prepare an Account for SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (Beta)”.

Booster Landing Page

Click on the Booster card for “Prepare an Account for SAP Health Data Services for FHIR (Beta)”. This will display initial view for the Booster. There are three sections in this view that are described as follows.

Overview: Provides you with summary for this Booster.

Components: Provides you with different services that are consumed with the Booster.

Additional Resources: Links for the detailed documentation about the booster steps and service.

Booster Execution

After reading and understanding all the information about the Booster, click on “Start”, top-right corner of the page, to begin booster execution. This will perform all the necessary step as described in the overview section. Outcome of the booster execution is a consumable instance of SAP Health Data Services for FHIR.

At each step, you can also view more information using the icon

If there's any error condition at any step, you'll get detailed message about the issue on the page.

Let’s dive into each of the steps. Additional information could be found here at the onboarding section.

1. Check Prerequisite

This is an automated step with no manual input. It checks if all the necessary authorisations and entitlements are available. You need to be “Administrator” for your SAP BTP global account with necessary privileges to manage entitlements and quotas. This step will check and return error in case some privileges are missing. In case, all privileges are assigned, it will show you successful message as follows.

2. Select Scenario

This step helps you to setup a Subaccount. There are two choices as shown. Let’s have a look at both the options.

Create Subaccount: Using this option, you can create entirely new subaccount. All the necessary inputs required can be entered manually in simple manner.

Select Subaccount: Using this option, you can select existing subaccount. For this, you need to be a member of the selected subaccount. Other inputs can be provided as shown.

3. Configure Subaccount

This step allows you to configure Subaccount based on your need. This is already covered previously based on the selection of the option for the Subaccount.

4. Add Users

Using this step, you can add users as “Administrator” and “Developers”. You need to have Identity Provider configured as prerequisite. Note that this is an optional step. As described here, this is applicable only for the business user flow.

5. Configure Service Instance

In this step, you'll provide onboarding and configuration parameters for SAP Health Data Services for FHIR and Event Mesh. For additional details about the parameters, check documentation.

Parameters for SAP Health Data Services for FHIR: You must provide parameter in the JSON format. Example parameter:

{

    "namespace": "instance123",

    "packagename": "sap.fhir.r4",

    "ems_credentials": {}

}

Parameters for SAP Event Mesh: You must provide parameter in the JSON format. Example parameter:

{

  "emname": "<emname>",

  "namespace": "<namespace e.g. a/b/c>",

  "version": "1.1.0",

  "options": {

    "management": true,

    "messagingrest": true,

    "messaging": true

  },

  "rules": {

    "queueRules": {

        "publishFilter": [

            "${namespace}/*"

        ],

        "subscribeFilter": [

            "${namespace}/*"

        ]

    },

    "topicRules": {

        "publishFilter": [

            "${namespace}/*"

        ],

        "subscribeFilter": [

            "${namespace}/*"

        ]

    }

  },

	"xs-security": { //optional//

     "oauth2-configuration": { 

      "credential-types": [

        "binding-secret",

        "x509"

      ]

    }

  }

}

6. Review

The final step provides you with summary for all the selections and inputs. Once you confirm, booster will set up SAP Health Data Services for FHIR service instance, as you need and ready to use.

Progress

Booster execution progress is available right in front of you. Based on selection, steps will vary. It will take only few minutes to set up fully usable SAP Health Data Services for FHIR service instance.

If there are errors, you'll also get inline information on the progress window.

Successful execution will provide you with option to navigate to the Subaccount containing instance of SAP Health Data Services for FHIR.

Check your Service Instances

After successful completion of the booster execution, you can navigate to the corresponding subaccount and space to view instances. Based on input and selection, result could differ. You'll see result as following along with corresponding service keys.

Conclusion

With this, I would like to highlight key takeaway from this blog as “ease of consumption”. Booster significantly reduces any entry hurdle for you to consume SAP Health Data Services for FHIR. With few clicks, inputs and less than few minutes, you've an instance of SAP Health Data Services for FHIR, ready to use.

Have interesting challenge to solve in healthcare, it just takes few minutes and clicks. Get started, like booster, we're there to help and guide you. Read my blog on Application Development in Healthcare.

I would love to hear your reactions and feedback through comments.

New Mission available for SAP Health Data Services for FHIR

2024-02-02T11:12:01.393000+01:00

You may have seen that SAP Health Data Services for FHIR has been generally available as a platform-as-a-service offering since the end of last year (see blog).

SAP Health Data Services for FHIR is SAP's FHIR server in the cloud implemented on the SAP BTP. It supports you in designing, implementing, and operating an application or service relying on health-related data. It enables you to build interoperable applications that store, process, and exchange health data using the HL7® FHIR® standard.

If you want to get started with SAP Health Data Services for FHIR, perform this mission as we've described here for the mission during the beta phase.

This new mission covers setting up and configuring SAP Health Data Services for FHIR and deploying a simple app provided with the mission. The app lists patients with their attributes on a detail screen.

This little end-to-end sample use case helps you understand how to use SAP Health Data Services for FHIR. We hope the mission inspires you to realize your use case delivering value for your customers.

Boost Employee Satisfaction and Performance with SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing

2024-05-10T12:59:31.066000+02:00

Discover how the SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing Software Solution Allows Defense and Security Organizations to Monitor and Manage the Welfare of their Personnel in a Holistic Way

Figure 1: Example illustration

1) Thematic Background

Employees are the most important asset of almost every organization. This is even more true for Defense and Security (D&S) organizations, like armed forces, emergency organizations or relief organizations. The personnel of these organizations is typically confronted with high stress situations, high physical strains, and often times also long working hours. What is more, certain employees undergo life threatening situations throughout their career, or experience situations of high psychological stress during missions. Another important aspect of organizational health and wellbeing is physical fitness and injury prevention. What matters in this context is not only having the necessary fitness level to accomplish tasks and missions, but especially also the positive long-term effect on personal health. The importance of organizational health and wellbeing can be further underlined by different statistical data. According to a survey among first responders 85% of them have expected symptoms related to mental health conditions. Another survey shows that emergency responders think of committing suicide twice as often than average adults. Additionally, a survey conducted by the British National Police Wellbeing Service indicates that 69.6% of the British police officers and 56% of police staff have high levels of fatigue, and around 30% even very high levels. However, initiatives that want to promote wellbeing are not limited to the D&S organizations itself. The Firefighters Charity organization in Great Britain is a good example for a private institution, that is dedicated to the wellbeing of British fire fighters. Their services include telephone or online counselling, guided relaxation or reset programs for fire fighters, which are experiencing health problems.

2) The Impact of Health and Wellbeing Problems

Figure 2: Health and wellbeing problems can pose serious threats to D&S organizations

Wellbeing and health issues do not only harm the affected people, but also their employers. D&S organizations in this context typically experience the following difficulties:

1) An Inability to Identify Mental Trauma and Stress

Many D&S organizations find it difficult to recognize and measure stress and potential mental traumas among their staff.

2) Rising Absences of Employees

Employees that are experiencing health problems show more days of sick leave than average workforces.

3) Rising Employee Attrition

When the physical and psychological burdens become too great for staff members, they often decide to leave their employer.

4) Real risk to the Delivery of Service

With extremely high fluctuation rates of up to 30%, Defense and Security organizations start to be confronted with a real risk to the successful delivery of their service.

According to a study published by the nonprofit organization RAND the attrition rate after three years of new recruits of the US military amounts to 29.7% for the US Army and 23.6% for the US Navy. This high labor turnover rates do not only harm the operational readiness of the military, but also lead to significant knowledge loss and costs. The author of the study in this context estimates the turnover expenses for the US Military to up to $479mn for the US Army and to up to $220mn for the US Navy. He also emphasizes in that regard, that the costs for one single enlistment ranges from $11,000 to $20,000. What is more, D&S organizations do also need to consider additional costs for personnel search and selection, onboarding, and training. A similar development can also be seen for emergency services organizations. The ambulance service organizations in the United States of America, for instance, have an overall turnover rate in the year 2021 of between 21% for supervisors and 36% for full-time emergency medical technicians. By contrast, dedicated frontline forces like the British Columbian Wildfire Service in Canada reported a turnover rate of about 25% in 2022. Although there are of course also other reasons why people leave a company or organizations, it is unquestionable that health and wellbeing problems are among the most important ones.

3) How Organizations are Trying to Approach the Problem

Figure 3: Example illustration

Luckily, this problem has not remained unrecognized by the employers. The British Ministry of Defense, for instance, has successfully addressed it by offering stress management courses or access to medical support. Corresponding offers for individual military units, the soldiers’ families, women, or veterans have also been successfully established by the Ministry. Emergency organizations have similarly approached the issue during the recent years. The British National Police, for instance, has created wellbeing solutions like a peer support for wellbeing, wellbeing dogs, or even wellbeing vans, that tour through the country for raising awareness about the topic. However, nowadays many organizations still do not have implemented comparable health and wellbeing solutions for multiple reasons, such as budget constraint, the highly decentralized orientation of their organization or simply a lack of awareness. But this is exactly where SAP wants to come into play with its holistic software solutions for Health and Wellbeing.

4) The SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing Solution

Figure 4: Example illustration

We at SAP are a company with more than 100,000 employees worldwide, and it is absolutely clear for us that our organizational performance depends on the performance of each employee. We for this reason recognized a long time ago how important it is to have a healthy and happy workforce, which is why we created the SAP Solution for Employee Health & Wellbeing. With this software solutions we want to enable our customers to run their organizations in a better, more efficient way, that enables its employees to unfold their full potential while also achieving a better work-life balance. The Employee Health & Wellbeing software suite was build on the foundation of SAP’s decades-long experience in business software solutions for diverse industries, and can be used either as a single solution or as a full enterprise intelligence solution.

5) The Functionality and the Major Benefits of SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing

SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing allows D&S organizations to easily monitor, analyze and improve the wellbeing and health of its workforce. The software solution, as the below illustration shows, is thereby easily integrable into existing systems and is also connectable with diverse other databases, such as HR systems. For measuring the health and wellbeing data of the individual employees, the application uses regular surveys, that are directly transferred into the application. The user then has a data collection of health data for everyone in the case management, which enables him to analyze and monitor it in detail. As a result, the organization can initiate individual mitigation and treatment plans for each employee. These action plans are highly customizable and can for example entail measures, such as medical support, trainings, the assignment of other tasks, vacation, the use of different work equipment or reduced working hours.

Figure 5: The high-level process behind SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing

Our SAP Solution for Employee Health & Wellbeing entails the following helpful characteristics and features for organizational health management:

One Single Platform for Wellbeing and Health Management

Our application allows you to manage all health and wellbeing issues centrally with one single, intuitive platform.

A Digital, Data-Driven Approach

SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing allows you to completely digitize your health management and make related decisions on the foundation of reliable data.

The Provision of Customizable Forms and Surveys for Measuring Wellbeing

Create highly customizable surveys and forms for successfully measuring the wellbeing of your workforce and make use of peer-based triggers.

A Single View of Employee’s Wellbeing

Monitor the wellbeing of each individual employee at a glance, with the ability of integrating employee data from your existing systems. Also easily provide access to the data to authorized groups, such as doctors or physical therapists.

Figure 6: Effective performance diagnostics with SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing

Efficient Human Performance Tracking

Profit from the ability to track the wellbeing of your employees, even of those that are operating in physically demanding environments. Easily integrate all available data sources like, for instance, from medical records over input from coaches to real-time performance data.

Figure 7: Holistic wellbeing tracking

Easy Integration of 3rd Party Applications

Easily integrate 3rd party applications and related services into the application.

Access to Comprehensive Case Management Functions

Make use of an advanced access management solution and easily enable cross agency collaboration.

Advanced Functions for Risk Analysis

Perform detailed risk analyses and trigger interventions based on user-defined indicators.

Discover how Activities Affect your Employees

SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing allows organizations to understand how certain day-to-day activities influence the wellbeing and health of their staff.

Figure 8: User-friendly case management with SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing

As the above benefits show, SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing is a truly holistic health management solutions, that not only allow you to perform better health management, but also to better care for each of your individual staff members. This way your organization can raise the employee satisfaction, better prevent the workforce from injuries and diseases, but also decrease absences and labor turnover. This, of course, also leads to significant cost savings, especially when considering the above-mentioned costs that can arise from fluctuation and health problems. Furthermore, SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing can also be an effective tool for the retainment of experienced employees with individual needs or for attracting new employees.

6) A Role Model for Effective Employee Wellbeing Management: The Australian Police Forces

The Australian Police Forces successfully integrated SAP Employee Health and Wellbeing into their organization. The software solution enabled the D&S organization to record, manage and report all health and wellbeing data with one single platform. In addition, SAP Wellbeing allowed the law enforcement organization to integrate much more health-related processes than initially expected. For example, it was even possible to build individual health management systems for the organization’s police dogs and horses.

Figure 9: SAP Wellbeing is even extendable to police dogs

All in all, the implementation of SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing allowed the Australian Police Forces to:

--> Reduce employee churn by up to 10%

--> Lower HR costs by up to 8%

--> Increase employee engagement by up to 20%

--> Improve HR reporting by up to 10%

7) Why Wellbeing Should not be Ignored by Employers

Although there are many ways how companies and organizations can theoretically manage organizational health and wellbeing, this blog post has hopefully highlighted what the advantages of a scalable and comprehensive software solutions, like SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing, are. The software suite not only allows organizations to manage health matters for every employee with one single solution, but also improves the wellbeing and health of your staff, which in turn also raises organizational performance measurably.

Additional Information

SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing Video: Let's Talk - Public Services Wellbeing (sap.com)
Summary of SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing: 4 Page Executive Summary
L0 Presentation for SAP Employee Health & Wellbeing: L0 Deck

References

Health, Performance and Wellbeing in the Army. (2024). The British Army.

Mental health support for the UK armed forces. (2023, November). UK Government.

Wellbeing vans. (2024). Oscar Kilo.

Injury Prevention. (2024). HPRC.

Mental health. (2024). The Fire Fighters Charity.

Wellbeing Overview. (2023). City of London Police.

Predicting 36-Month Attrition in the U.S. Military: A Comparison Across Service Branches. (2020, April). RAND.

4th Annual Study Shows Worsening EMS Turnover. (2022, October). American Ambulance Association.

Burned out: pressures are taking a toll on wildfire fighters. (2023, August). Canadian Firefighter Magazine.