Accenture & SAP to develop collaborative health network
- 2 October 2006
German software providers SAP are to partner with National Programme for IT system providers Accenture to co-develop a collaborative health network (CHN) solution designed to help healthcare organisations improve patient care by streamlining the way they access, integrate and share information.
The solution will be designed to integrate people, information, business processes and technology standards to create collaboration beyond organisational boundaries, help avoid dangerous medical mistakes, reduce costs and improve patient care.
Thomas Shirk, president of SAP Global Public Services, said: “Today, government-driven initiatives are underway to improve healthcare delivery through collaboration between providers, insurance providers, insurance payers, policy makers and pharmaceutical companies. CHNs are the highways on which healthcare information will flow in the future.”
The CHN will be a component of Accenture’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) Connection Platform, and will aid organisations in maintaining reliable, accurate records that are accessible by multiple parties.
It will use an enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA) to help reduce IT costs and enable automated collaborative processes among industry participants – who include all healthcare services and healthcare insurance providers.
A spokesperson for the CHN told E-Health Insider that it will help patients, clinicians and insurers work together to ensure that the patient was getting the best medical care available to them, and that they can claim the costs for treatment on their insurance.
“The problem to date has been that the masses of information needed to guide healthcare decisions and processes for all parties have been stored in disparate and disconnected systems.
“The creation of a CHN solution will integrate all the parties together, and keep the patient in-the-know of what is being prescribed for them and whether their insurance will cover the costs.”
Ken Lacey, global managing partner of Accenture’s Health & Life Sciences practice added: “As the industry moves into the digital age, healthcare organisations must streamline their approaches to information sharing by collaborating and organising around patient needs…to improve the accessibility, quality and affordability of healthcare.”
The two companies will work together in the Accenture Innovation Centre for SAP NetWeaver at SAP’s headquarters in Walldorf, Germany and hope to release the first release of the solution in mid-2007.
