SAP SE announced SAP Health Engagement, a new solution to connect patients directly to physicians and health program managers.

The solution gives health providers, health insurers and pharmaceutical companies the ability to build custom applications to help patients track their health through goal setting, as well as pull personalized assessments for chronic diseases and conditions. By directly linking patients to healthcare professionals with real-time data and high-speed analytics, the technology will let physicians and health program managers make early interventions to improve health outcomes and will 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, 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 24x7 connection to their doctors, patients can more effectively partner with healthcare professionals on managing their health."

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

“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 Uebelhor, head of Roche Diabetes Care Germany.

Capturing Patient-Generated Data

SAP Health Engagement captures patient-generated and wearable sensor data in a mobile application and securely synchronizes the data in near real time. Wearable sensor data can be integrated into the application using Bluetooth through, for example, Apple HealthKit or native integration. Customers can easily be onboarded by scanning a unique QR code using the mobile applications, automatically allowing data to be pulled from the back-end database into the mobile device.

Transmitting and Storing Secure Health Information

SAP Health Engagement, built on SAP HANA Cloud Platform, allows for high-speed, in-memory data analyses for research purposes. This helps ensure rapid creation of new hypotheses under stringent conditions that support the highest standards of data security and privacy. The solution gives patients full control of their personal health data, giving them the ability to decide who will have access to this information.

Simplifying Program Management

Program managers can create customized managed wellness programs, which encourage and improve self-care. These programs help patients live a healthy lifestyle through use of a mobile healthcare consumer application and collection of the necessary (anonymized) data to drive insights for better research.