Hello blog visitors, sorry it took a long break to the follow-up blog. In this blog I would like to share our studies of understanding standards with you. Our understanding of standardHealthcare Standards are already existing and being used for a long time in the entire healthcare world. However the use of the standards is different from hospital to hospital and this causes large integration cost. One example would be HL7; there is a Z-Segment in HL7 message segments which originally provides a flexibility of using HL7 message, and it is exactly this flexibility that causes the complexity of the message exchange among hospitals. So in this case HL7 standard does not fully help how to use the standard. IHE (Integrating Healthcare Enterprises)is different, because it provides the integration profiles based on healthcare standards like HL7. The focus of IHE is to recommend the healthcare vendors to implement their solutions in a common integration “way”. Vendors shall know which Integration Profiles will be supported by their products, which roles the products play in the Integration Profiles. IHE defines the typical healthcare use cases with some basic standard message transactions for that role in that Integration Profile, which shall be supported by the products. In this way IHE simplifies the cross enterprise integration, guide the healthcare vendors how to use standards on a process-oriented way. For customers IHE statement is becoming one of their criteria when they acquire products. Our StudySAP’s Enterprise Services and Netweaver technology provide the customers and partners an open and flexible process-oriented platform. This platform is also the backbone in supporting standards. Standard means not only the standard message, but also standard service content. To define the Healthcare Enterprise Repository Services, we have leveraged the possible resources to help us understand the standard processes. Our start points were: talking to partners, customers, learning from the standard organization, which is in our case IHE. We have compared the business scenarios and process from our Healthcare Solution Maps with the IHE Integration Profiles. Please see the following slide as a first result. 
Our understanding of Standards – After our studyIHE has comprehensive Integration Profiles which cover 10 healthcare domains, however some of the typical business scenarios which from our point of view would be very important are still need to be supplemented. For example: Billing, Resource and Supply Chain Planning, Logistic and so on. SAP healthcare based on ERP powerful functions supports the processes from resource and logistic planning to patient treatment and patient management; most of them are currently not described in IHE. At the end we focused first on the IT-Infrastructure domain and the Patient Administration Management (PAM), Patient Demographic Query (PDQ) profiles, which could be supported by the Enterprise Services and Netweaver Platform. Our study showed us, IHE has provided a very good chance to gather healthcare vendors together, to use the standards, to share their experiences to optimize using of standards. The Integration Profiles with basic standard message granularity are good guidelines for vendors; however there are still a lot to do to complete the healthcare scenarios. SAP as one of the active healthcare service providers with his long experiences and many successful stories in healthcare industry, SAP shall and will play more active in the IHE, to help us to follow up the standard, to share our experience and knowledge with other healthcare providers. The nextWe would like to invite you to our Healthcare BPX forum, see the link SAP for Healthcare , to share your opinions and experiences with us. My colleagues and I would be happy to meet you there. In the next blog I would like to tell you some of our experiences about how the SAP Enterprise Services enable healthcare standards. I hope to see you next time! Jing
Our understanding of Standards – After our studyIHE has comprehensive Integration Profiles which cover 10 healthcare domains, however some of the typical business scenarios which from our point of view would be very important are still need to be supplemented. For example: Billing, Resource and Supply Chain Planning, Logistic and so on. SAP healthcare based on ERP powerful functions supports the processes from resource and logistic planning to patient treatment and patient management; most of them are currently not described in IHE. At the end we focused first on the IT-Infrastructure domain and the Patient Administration Management (PAM), Patient Demographic Query (PDQ) profiles, which could be supported by the Enterprise Services and Netweaver Platform. Our study showed us, IHE has provided a very good chance to gather healthcare vendors together, to use the standards, to share their experiences to optimize using of standards. The Integration Profiles with basic standard message granularity are good guidelines for vendors; however there are still a lot to do to complete the healthcare scenarios. SAP as one of the active healthcare service providers with his long experiences and many successful stories in healthcare industry, SAP shall and will play more active in the IHE, to help us to follow up the standard, to share our experience and knowledge with other healthcare providers. The nextWe would like to invite you to our Healthcare BPX forum, see the link SAP for Healthcare , to share your opinions and experiences with us. My colleagues and I would be happy to meet you there. In the next blog I would like to tell you some of our experiences about how the SAP Enterprise Services enable healthcare standards. I hope to see you next time! Jing
2 Comments