Starting with cancer, Personalised Medicine the next frontier SAP aims to transform

SAP has announced the SAP Foundation for Health and the SAP Medical Research Insights solution, its solution that aims to transform treatment outcomes for patients by leveraging technology. Built on the SAP HANA platform, SAP’s new solutions aim at unlocking the value of patient data, from biomedical data to electronic medical records to clinical trials. They facilitate data integration and provide real-time analysis and reporting that together lead to improved personalised medicine and patient care.

SAP Foundation for Health provides a clinical and genomic data warehouse model, data integration management, real-time analytics on large-scale structured and unstructured data. By leveraging patient data to gain insights in real time through the HANA platform, life sciences companies and healthcare organisations will be able to develop and target new drugs, devices and services to populations and individuals, get real-time, flexible R&D analysis, genomics, patient cohort building and analysis, patient trial matching and extended care collaboration solutions. Because of data privacy and security issues in the healthcare domain, SAP says it has worked security and data privacy into the core of the solution–even anonymous, non personally identifiable patient data require sign offs from patients before they can used in the data sets.

Speaking to media at the SAP HANA Forum in Frankfurt, Germany, Bernd Leukert, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE said that the new SAP health solutions are not another hospital management system but aimed at giving doctors who barely get 15-20 minutes per patient to decide on treatment methodologies for diseases like cancer, the ability to deliver personalised medicine based on Big Data. In demos at the event, medical researchers showed how they could analyse large sets of data in real time to find matches that could provide insights to doctors treating individuals. “Personalised medicine is bigger than hospital IT spending and this is not just for R&D but for actual use in hospitals–insights come from research data, but should benefit individual patients,” Leukert explained.

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

Another example is the National Centre for Tumour Diseases (NCT), which delivers patient care, cancer research, and cancer prevention. The old system required medical staff to search multiple databases, compile patient lists, print patient files and manually check if patients matched criteria for clinical trials by reviewing each file individually. This made accessing and analyzing patient data an extremely complex and time-consuming process. To simplify and streamline the process, NCT and SAP co developed SAP Medical Research Insights — a solution based on SAP Foundation for Health that allows fast, easy and secure access to patient data and comparison of patient profiles from various sources.

“With SAP Medical Research Insights, medical staff can visualize and analyze patient data in real time due to the speed of SAP HANA and simple app design. This provides a holistic view of a patient’s medical history in a graphical timeline, allowing physicians more time to care for patients instead of going through paperwork. It also dramatically reduces the turnaround time for clinical studies, which can ultimately lead to life-changing discoveries,” said Prof. Dr. Christof von Kalle, managing director of the National Centre for Tumour Diseases and head of Translational Oncology.