SAP’s Data Warehouse Strategy for Healthcare Providers

In this blog post, I am going to present SAP’s latest strategic statement of direction for data warehousing and show the consequences for typical health care providing companies. The goal is to establish a common understanding of requirements and to show a way forward for healthcare companies on their way to become intelligent enterprises and data driven companies. With this, you will get clarity and confidence for future investments in the BI field.

Requirements and Challenges

Time To Value: Fast development and deployment cycles are key for healthcare companies to react to changing environments and new challenges. Self-service capabilities like modelling in non-tech business languages or a common business catalog describing the data foster the collaboration of business and IT and help to accelerate BI projects.

More Data: Typical BI landscapes in hospitals consist of a well-established management information system (MIS) with a financial focus combining financial information with occupancy rates fulfilling quarterly reporting requirements. Gain new insights and develop new business ideas with the combination of medical data from EMR and other medical systems with the before mentioned MIS, other line-of-business data, and external data.

Fast Data: Ingest data in real time for faster insights.

Targeted data: Leverage medical data to improve patient outcome and run medical research projects.

Compliance: Even before GDPR was a hot topic for many businesses, health care companies have been faced with strict regulation to protect patient data. Local legislation varying from country to country, or even from region to region strict laws led to great reluctance with innovations and almost paralysed many promising analytics initiatives. Today’s BI solutions offer much more capabilities to comply to GDPR and other regulations which can now also be leveraged in health care use cases.

Reuse of investment: Reinventing the wheel is far too expensive. We enable customers to transfer existing data warehouse capabilities to new solutions to protect your past investments.

Reluctance to cloud: SAP accelerates the transition of its customer base to the cloud. While this is a smart move for many companies to speed up their transformation to an intelligent enterprise, health care providers typically are more reluctant to cloud solutions due to – again – local regulations. SAP’s data warehousing strategic direction allows an on-your-timeline transformation.

SAP’s answers to these and more challenges and requirements can be addressed by following our strategic statement of direction for data warehousing.

SAP Data Warehousing – Statement of Direction

SAP continues to innovate industry leading data warehousing technologies with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, SAP SQL Data Warehousing, and SAP BW/4HANA to enable the Intelligent Enterprise. SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is our strategic direction for Cloud-based SAP Data Warehousing.

SAP Data Warehousing – Statement of Direction

Next, we will focus on SAP SQL Data Warehousing as an on-premise alternative for an agile and powerful data warehousing.

SAP SQL Data Warehousing

SAP SQL Data Warehousing – Tools and Components

The toolset allows an agile and data driven building approach starting with the planning and modelling phase with a full support for graphical data models. The development cycle supports state-of-the art source code version management with Git integration.

Why should you choose SAP SQL Data Warehousing using SAP HANA

Co-Existence of SAP BW and SQL Data Warehouse in a Healthcare Provider Setup

Healthcare Provider Solution Architecture Blueprint

A combined solution with SAP Business Warehouse and SAP SQL Data Warehousing allows to access model artefacts in both directions to reuse existing models and views. From a frontend perspective both data warehousing components can be abstracted by a virtual data mart within SAP Business Warehouse and a common frontend tool solution.

Outlook

The bi architecture described in this post is a powerful and agile solution for health care providers to become intelligent enterprises. It can easily be extended to the cloud with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, once the move to the cloud will gain traction in the health care industry.

Many topics like data modelling health care data in SAP SQL Data Warehousing, integrating high-volume data like pathology images or genomics data into this landscape, the extension of this landscape with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, or how to extend this architecture with machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities could be covered in a loose blog post series. Drop a comment below, what topics you are interested in.