SAP Health Engagement connects patients to healthcare providers

Germany-based software firm SAP introduced last week the SAP Health Engagement technological solution, which directly connects patients to physicians and health-program managers. 

This solution gives health providers, health insurers and pharmaceutical companies the ability to build custom applications to help patients keep track of their health through goal-setting, as well as pull personalized assessments for chronic diseases and conditions.

By linking patients to healthcare professionals with real-time data and high-speed analytics, the solution will let physicians and health-program managers make early interventions to improve health outcomes and help lower healthcare-related costs later in life.

“SAP is advancing technology that improves people’s lives and places them at the center of care,” said Werner Eberhardt, general manager of personalized medicine at SAP. “The SAP Health Engagement solution enables healthcare companies to develop applications that help patients manage chronic conditions, offer personalized home care, and engage patients in clinical trials.”

“When they have a 24/7 connection to their doctors, patients can more effectively partner with healthcare professionals on managing their health,” he added.

As a precursor to SAP Health Engagement, SAP partnered with Roche Diabetes Care Germany to develop SAP Health Link, a solution that can help prevent diabetes. It intends to enable healthcare professionals to connect, through digital services, to patients at risk of developing type 2 diabetes (T2D) and, thus, accompany these patients on their journey to making lifestyle changes.

Based on what was learned from this partnership and feedback from a broad range of customers, SAP Health Engagement was created to offer a flexible development toolkit that can be used to create applications tailored to any chronic disease or condition. Such applications can also address clinical-trial patient engagement and personalized home care.

According to Ryan Poggi, managing director of SAP Philippines, this new innovation will complement the medical evolution needed in the country, and can support the efforts made to curb the growing number of diabetic patients in the country.

The Philippines has become a diabetes hotspot, making it the eighth leading cause of mortality in the nation. While an estimated 4 million people are diagnosed with the disease, even more remain undiagnosed.

“A higher number of people need to be more aware of their disease in order to take the right course of action in curing them,” Poggi said. “With SAP Health Engagement, we are aiming for a better patient outcome, since both the patients and their healthcare providers are able to manage their disease through a more personalized setup.”

“In principle, this platform has the potential to improve and individualize the cooperation between physicians and patients for any kind of chronic disease,” said Dirk Uebelhör, head of Roche Diabetes Care Germany.

For more information, visit www.news.sap.com.