SAP and Accenture announced a global agreement to co-develop a collaborative health network (CHN) solution, which is designed to help healthcare organizations improve patient care by streamlining the way they access, integrate and share information.
Based on SAP’s NetWeaver, the solution will integrate people, information, business processes and technology standards. The goal is to enhance the quality of care and control healthcare costs by providing the infrastructure to link a range of information and data, and to create cross-organisational collaboration helping to avoid dangerous medical mistakes and improve patient care.
Today, government-driven initiatives are underway to improve healthcare delivery through collaboration between providers, insurance payers, policy makers and pharmaceutical companies," said Thomas Shirk, president, SAP Global Public Services. "CHNs are the highways on which healthcare information will flow in the future. Together with Accenture, we look forward to delivering a comprehensive healthcare network solution, which integrates people, information, business processes, and technology standards to create collaboration beyond organizational boundaries."
SAP and Accenture will work together to market, support and service the new solution. The two companies expect the first release of the solution to be available mid-2007. As appropriate, the CHN solution will also be a component of the Accenture Electronic Health Record (EHR) Connection Platform, the company's global approach to providing information management and exchange services to the health care industry. SAP has more than 15 years of experience in the health care industry, and the SAP for Healthcare solution is installed in more than 800 sites throughout the world.
As mentioned in an earlier blog entry, industry experts expect the global healthcare industry to continue on its path of rapid technological advances. Gartner research projects that with a 4.6 percent increase in IT spending, healthcare will lead all other industry sectors in the growth of information technology in 2006,