Five Things to Know about Healthcare Technology

SAP employees working in healthcare were interviewed to tell us what the world should know about healthcare IT.  A consistent thread was personalized care for patients.

Getting to personalized care is doable in the healthcare industry.  It’s about better management of massive amounts of data to make it usable and, more importantly, valuable by finding patient trends to provide better treatment options.  The industry faces a lag time in processing the data, leaving many people waiting by the phone to hear about test results.  In-memory technology, like SAP HANA, can process data in seconds instead of days.  This is powerful; a patient can be on a treatment path instead of waiting by the phone for days.

In today’s world interoperability between healthcare systems does not exist. This is why it takes too long for data to be processed.  But hospitals don’t need to disrupt their structures; they need a technology that can pull data from all of their disparate systems. Data that can be cross-referenced, analyzed and displayed on devices anywhere and anytime.  Personalized care is a significant benefit of technology in healthcare; another benefit is the reduction of costs. Cutting down the cost of processing data will save money, and providing better treatment options reduces the amounts of time and money wasted on treatments that did not work.  This cost savings is transferred to patients. This is possible today with technology.

This is the time for patients first, a time where everyone is in control of their own health.