SAP Helps Healthcare Organizations Heal Reporting Woes

ATLANTA, March 1 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- In an effort to improve patient safety and reduce healthcare costs, government bodies worldwide are mandating that hospitals track and report on core measures of quality and use them to improve processes and patient outcomes. To help healthcare organizations meet these requirements, while also improving the patient experience and reducing operational costs, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today released a new business intelligence solution for quality management in healthcare. Based on solutions from the SAP® BusinessObjects™ portfolio, the new offering optimizes data collection and reporting processes across an organization's operating systems, helping it to gain new levels of insight to identify potential areas of quality improvement. The announcement was made at the HIMSS10 conference, being held in Atlanta, Georgia, March 1-4.

(Logo:  http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20050310/SFTH009LOGO-a)

Quality improvement departments at healthcare organizations are often made up of small teams working with outdated legacy systems. They are sorely in need of systems that allow them to track and report efficiently on core measures. The pre-configured, integrated offering from SAP BusinessObjects pulls data such as patient care information, administrative information and financial information from across a healthcare organization's various back-end legacy systems. It then aggregates and summarizes core measures based on this data, and generates standardized and custom reports to provide a consolidated view across the entire organization. With this new level of visibility, hospital administrators can understand and swiftly address the root causes of inefficiencies, improve patient care and safety, and report core metrics to government bodies with greater accuracy and timeliness.

Virtua, a leading healthcare organization, selected solutions from the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio to gain greater insight into internal operations. Following the implementation, Virtua has been able to quickly and readily understand where problems might occur and immediately take the appropriate action.

"At Virtua, the provision of high quality healthcare is part of our core mission, and SAP BusinessObjects solutions are helping us achieve insight into our quality measures," said Alfred Campanella, vice president and CIO, Virtua. "We met with SAP's healthcare team on creating transparency into our key performance indicators and the result is an intuitive dashboard that fosters quick decisions."

This new offering for quality management in healthcare consists of key performance indicators (KPIs), dashboards, a data model, data mapping tables and queries that were developed to sit on top of existing SAP BusinessObjects solutions. Healthcare organizations can purchase this offering as a stand-alone solution from SAP and its business intelligence partners, or through SAP Global Services.

For more than 35 years, SAP has been delivering comprehensive, fully integrated applications to help healthcare enterprises achieve their strategic goals. Recent developments in SAP's track record in the healthcare sector include a reseller agreement with Siemens Healthcare announced in December 2009 that addresses the growing market of IT solutions for healthcare and U.S.-based Emergency Medical Associates' (EMA) use of SAP software, announced in September 2009, to stay ahead of swine flu outbreaks.  

"For many hospitals, analyzing the significant amounts of patient and clinical information required to understand the quality of care provided to patients is monumental," said John Papandrea, senior vice president of the Global Healthcare Sector at SAP. "Teams need to extract data from a variety of clinical, administrative and financial systems to compile meaningful quality information. The new offering from SAP BusinessObjects helps by transforming fragmented data-collection activities into a streamlined, automated business flow. It uses a prebuilt data model designed to support healthcare-specific 'actionable insights' – allowing hospitals to immediately understand the level of quality they are providing to patients and the potential causes of any issues, along with the best approach required to rectify the issues. With this new solution, healthcare organizations can automate their data collection and analysis for quality, increase efficiency and allow staff to focus on what matters most: providing high-quality patient care."

For more information on SAP BusinessObjects solutions for the healthcare industry, please visit http://www.sap.com/sapbusinessobjects/healthcare

About SAP

SAP is the world's leading provider of business software(*), offering applications and services that enable companies of all sizes and in more than 25 industries to become best-run businesses. With more than 95,000 customers in over 120 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE, under the symbol "SAP." For more information, visit www.sap.com.

(*) SAP defines business software as comprising enterprise resource planning, business intelligence, and related applications.

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

Copyright © 2010 SAP AG. All rights reserved.

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

SOURCE SAP AG