What is shaping health care today

Healthcare delivery is becoming more coordinated, collaborative and centered on the patient. Healthcare providers are growing in size, complexity and operating multitude of capabilities. As such, they are focusing on the strategies and technologies that reduce costs and enable the organization evolve new operating models to scale, bring together, and leverage financial and clinical information to drive performance and quality.

Healthcare stands to derive the greatest benefit from the seamless capture and transmission of data. IT systems can be employed to digitally model medical, nursing, and administrative processes – not just as an end in itself but to cut costs, accelerate workflows, and improve care.

Strong drivers for integrated healthcare system in society

Healthcare leaders worldwide are confronted with a myriad of challenges that is transforming the industry with new models of care delivery and payment. These forces include:

• Reforms and changes in the role of government in healthcare
• Changes in the nature of healthcare delivery and the practice of medicine, making it more personalized, precise, collaborative, evidence-based and outcome-driven, and extending care beyond hospitals and physicians' offices
• Structural changes in the industry resulting in the emergence of integrated health enterprises
• Patients expect automation and information accessibility
• Redefined healthcare demands, changing payer expectations, more patient choices

The Healthcare Provider IT Solution Map

The healthcare provider market consumes a wide and expanding array of solution segments. The solution map details the broader solution areas (foundational; corporate and institutional administration; revenue cycle; core care delivery; ancillary care delivery; and mobility) that contain individual solutions. The figure below details the healthcare providers' solution map.

Information Systems in Healthcare

Today, healthcare provision is primarily organized centrally, and is concentrated on the provider. Moving forward, the focus will be much more on the individual. Both organization and treatment will be geared more strongly to patients’ personal needs. In addition, with digital communication tools and remote monitoring technologies, it will be possible to treat patients in their homes - cutting costs and improving quality of life. Healthcare providers who currently operate in isolation, and store patients’ data in their local, siloed IT systems, will increasingly share information and insights. In the future, seamless data exchange and secure direct communications with patients and healthcare providers will avoid the duplication of tests and examinations. This, too, will save time and improve the quality of care.

Advantage SAP in healthcare

This is where SAP for Healthcare might fit Solutions comes into the picture. SAP Healthcare Solutions help to transform patient care and enable you to deliver personalized, cost-effective care. Our solutions cover everything from healthcare analytics and electronic medical records (EMR) to health information exchange (HIE) and beyond. You harness leading technologies to build effective information systems, practice evidence-based medicine – and improve the overall patient experience.

SAP’s End to End Solutions for the Healthcare organizations deliver high – value care and the personalized experience expected by today’s healthcare consumers, all while achieving operational experience. The SAP solutions connect processes in the healthcare industry by integrating horizontal lines of business with healthcare solutions on premise, in the cloud, and through mobile devices.

SAP solutions provide real time access to relevant information at the point of care, enable information exchange among patients and care providers, and establish full visibility and transparency of operational support. These help customers with

• Patient Care: Enable a personalized healthcare experience with integrated patient access, billing, and clinical records.
• Care Collaboration: Collaborate with patients and providers to manage consumer health outside of the hospital setting
• Healthcare Analytics and Research: Use advanced analytic applications to drive insights for better outcomes and research.
• Human resources: Empower, engage, and develop your workforce to drive value for patients and financial outcomes
• Finance: Gain forward looking, organization wide insight from automated, real time financial processes and analytics.
• Procurement: Streamline sourcing and procurement processes to drive compliance and control while cutting costs and risks.

  Major Benefits of SAP solutions are that they help healthcare organizations deliver high quality, cost effective care through:

  • Better collaboration and real time information sharing among care providers and patients
  • More personalized patient interaction from prevention to diagnosis and treatment

Seamless Integration of Complex IT systems

Healthcare providers face stiff competition and mounting cost pressure. An effective hospital information system (HIS) such as SAP® creates the ideal basis for integrated workflows and data sharing, and eases the pressure on internal resources. It reduces the workload for physicians and nursing staff, makes processes leaner, improves quality of care and can be linked optimally with other SAP systems. Both medical and administrative processes have become more complex in recent years. SAP platform modules help to cut the associated costs by providing

comprehensive digital support for patient management, financial accounting, logistics and HR management. The result is an end-to-end process chain that enables the timely invoicing of services and the effective monitoring of financial resources. i.s.h.med® from Siemens is a powerful, global hospital information System (HIS) that is already integrated into the SAP platform, forming an ideal combination.

Challenges

Inhibitors to investment include:

• The direct (licensing) and indirect (IT infrastructure upgrades, integration, personnel, support and so forth) costs associated. With healthcare solution
• The difficulty of predicting and measuring an systems clinical and financial benefits of healthcare solutions
• The difficulty in developing a business case necessary to procure funds for an enterprise healthcare solution
• The lack of adequate staffing levels within local hospitals to deploy, sustain and develop system
• The lack of clinical leadership to help drive implementations of enterprise wide solution
• The poor track record of vendors in some countries
• The unwillingness of clinical leadership to change clinical processes to derive value from system
• The complexity of creating and maintaining clinical content

Considerations concerning vendor selection

Healthcare has been, is and will for the near future increasingly be a multi-vendor-dominated industry for its core needs. Many Healthcare providers have begun or completed at least the first phase of implementing their enterprise healthcare systems, and most vendors are using an 80/20 out-of-the-box implementation plan. Vendors developing, marketing and selling healthcare solutions for local geographies are facing increased competition from larger companies that compete internationally. Some aspects to consider are:

• Larger pool of technical and functional resources and leveraging of experience from specific countries exposure
• End to end Capability
• Local knowledge - greater insight and understanding of local regulations and conditions that set standards and requirements to systems and focus for evolution
• Arm’s length reach – Makes communication and required attention far easier.
• Local vendors are small and heavily dependent on the market they operate in.Thus, they are more likely to give existing and local customers due attention.

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