SAP Solution Brief
SAP for Healthcare
Delivering quality care is the
primary mission of any health-
care organization. But today,
healthcare organizations must
also be efficient, innovative,
and market driven. Pioneered
by SAP, enterprise service-
oriented architecture (enterprise
SOA) is a business-driven
software architecture that
provides increased adaptability,
flexibility, openness, and cost-
efficiency. Enterprise SOA helps
healthcare organizations achieve
their primary – and business –
missions for healthy patients
and healthy profits.
ENTERPRISE SERVICE-
ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE
FOR HEALTHCARE
A Prescription for Innovation
Today’s healthcare providers must contend with fierce com-
petition, increased regulatory pressure, rising costs, and
customer demands for high-quality care. Many organizations
are responding to these pressures by expanding operations
beyond traditional boundaries – forging strategic and opera-
tional partnerships with suppliers, physicians, insurers,
and patients. But creating this enhanced level of collaboration
and interoperability requires new standards, new processes,
and new ideas.
The IT Challenge
Virtually all healthcare organizations view IT as a key enabler
for innovation, collaboration, and process improvement. But
most healthcare providers also have a variety of incompatible,
isolated systems in place. Many of these applications do a
good job of supporting dedicated processes like radiology, lab
tests, and medication schedules, but it’s expensive and time-
consuming to compose new applications that can support
innovative processes – especially when they span system or
organizational boundaries. With applications rigidly coupled
to dedicated business processes, it’s also difficult to improve
existing processes in response to new market demands or to
gain access to information that resides in disparate, far-flung
systems.
Barriers like these limit the potential for innovation and
hamper collaboration between internal departments or the
many external partners involved in patient treatment. The net
result of an inflexible IT landscape is inefficiency: redundant
lab tests, duplicate data entry, long processing times, and
cumbersome admission, treatment, and billing processes.

Common IT Pain Points for Healthcare
Organizations
Healthcare organizations often face the following
difficulties:
• Cumbersome interfaces
The links between specialized clinical, patient
management, and administrative systems require
constant, costly maintenance.
• Redundant data
Medical and patient-related data may be stored in
many places, resulting in inefficiency and errors.
• Lack of visibility
Clinical staff may not have access to unified patient
and treatment information, and decision makers have
difficulty accessing enterprise data.
• Inflexible IT resources
Tightly coupled IT components and applications make
it difficult and costly to enhance existing assets to
support innovation or to respond to changes in the
business climate.
Enterprise SOA: A Pathway for Evolving Healthcare
Processes
Pioneered by SAP, enterprise service-oriented architecture
(enterprise SOA) is a business-driven software architecture that
provides increased adaptability, flexibility, openness, and cost-
efficiency. Enterprise SOA can help you leverage your existing
IT assets to quickly and cost-effectively respond to market
requirements, improve patient care, and manage costs. Enter-
prise SOA serves as both vision and road map, enabling clinics,
hospitals, and healthcare networks to create cross-departmental
and cross-enterprise software solutions that deliver increased
levels of efficiency, flexibility, and innovation.
Turning Web Services into Enterprise Services
Much of the power of enterprise SOA begins with a basic yet
powerful entity: the Web service. Simply put, a Web service is a
self-contained package of functionality – an independent piece
of software based on open standards that does something useful.
You make a query or request to the Web service, it performs
an action, and then it responds with a result. For healthcare
organizations, a Web service could be a single command to
schedule an MRI scan, restock a particular medication, or
request patient information from a third-party provider.
Web services, while extremely versatile, need to be orchestrated
and combined to become valuable on an enterprise level. That’s
the role played by enterprise SOA, which provides business logic –
information about what services do and how to combine them
quickly to achieve a desired result. Thanks to this built-in brain-
power, enterprise SOA aggregates many low-level Web services
and turns them into enterprise services – functionality that can
support complex scenarios like a complete inpatient stay or
coordinated diagnostics and treatment. All enterprise services are
published in a central enterprise services repository, so they are
available to everyone who needs them, including SAP partners,
customers, and other participants in your value chain.
How Enterprise SOA Works in Healthcare
Organizations
Let’s take a closer look at how enterprise SOA and enterprise
services might support an inpatient stay in a hospital. The primary
activities in this scenario include admission, diagnosis entry, proce-
dure scheduling, treatment, providing medication, discharge, and
invoicing. The links between many of these processes are currently
made using handwritten forms, faxes, telephone calls, and data
reentry. With this many handoffs, managing the complete patient
cycle tends to be inefficient, laborious, and error prone.
In the past, many IT departments tried to integrate processes
like these by hard coding the interfaces between underlying
applications. This approach worked, up to a point, but it was
costly, time-consuming, and difficult to make changes later on.
With enterprise SOA, composite applications based on existing
functionality provided via enterprise services integrate the
steps involved in an inpatient stay. Composite applications are
modeled, not programmed, which makes them more flexible
and easier to implement than traditional applications. Once
the underlying applications are service enabled and linked by
a composite application, information flows seamlessly across
organizational and system boundaries.
This enhanced visibility gives everyone involved a unified view
of relevant information. It also gives process owners the ability
to improve existing methods and procedures. If, for example,
hospital administrators decide to link additional processes to
the inpatient stay – such as automatic drug ordering or posting
information to insurers – applications that support these processes
can be composed and integrated quickly by reusing existing enter-
prise services, without the need for costly programming.
Patient
User Role Admission Staff Physician Pharmacist
Accountant
How Enterprise SOA Enhances Healthcare Activities
Here are some additional examples of how an enterprise SOA–
enabled IT landscape can enhance the utility of healthcare
applications:
• A doctor can use a composite application to determine the
appropriate medication for a patient, order the drug without
logging onto another system, check the status of pharmacy
approval, and monitor how the drug is dispensed while at the
patient’s bedside.
• A physician can review a patient’s complete medical history
by drilling down to access encounter notes, lab results, or dis-
charge summaries – even though this data resides in several
otherwise incompatible systems managed by diverse providers.
• healthcare provider with clinics in multiple sites can use a
A
portal to enable external physicians to select a treatment site
for their patients based on the patient’s preferences and
medical information.
• Groups of hospitals – whether allied informally or part of
a cooperative network – can use strategic sourcing techniques
to jointly manage demand planning, contract negotiation,
and fulfillment for drugs, supplies, and equipment.

Enterprise SOA Delivers Key Benefits for

Composite Admission Treatment Medication Invoicing Discharge
Application Healthcare Organizations
Like most healthcare providers, you rely on diverse legacy and
Enterprise Portal
Guided Procedures Based on specialized third-party systems. You can’t just rip out and
Platform Workflow SAP NetWeaver®
Patient Master Index
replace those solutions. That would cost too much and cause
Message Integration incredible technical difficulties. Enterprise SOA reduces the
need for costly and complex system interfaces, which must be
adjusted every time a linked solution is upgraded or altered.
Supplier Enterprise
Existing Patient Patient
Clinicals Relationship Resource
IT Assets Administration Financials
Management Planning
With enterprise SOA, you can:
• Leverage IT assets to achieve business goals
Figure 1: Scenario of an Inpatient Stay Captured in a Coherent, Easy-to-Change You can create composite applications based on strategic or
Composite Application tactical objectives without having to reprogram or replace the
underlying IT assets. New applications can be composed easily
(by SAP, by customers, or by third-party providers) because
they are built using a model-driven approach, recycling the
functionality provided by existing applications.
 www.sap.com /contactsap

• Create a more flexible, market-driven enterprise Powered by SAP NetWeaver®

Enterprise SOA helps you deploy innovative solutions that Enterprise service-oriented architecture is powered by the
result in a sustainable competitive advantage. The flexibility SAP NetWeaver® platform. SAP NetWeaver unifies technology
and agility provided by enterprise SOA protect your current components into a single platform, allowing organizations
and future IT investments while allowing you to meet ever- to reduce IT complexity and obtain more business value
shifting legal requirements, respond to healthcare consumer from their IT investments. It provides the best way to integrate
demands, and add innovative services to your portfolio. all systems running SAP® or non-SAP software.
• Improve security and minimize risk
Enterprise SOA enables you to separate the definition of SAP NetWeaver also helps organizations align IT with their
interfaces and processes from the underlying applications. business. With SAP NetWeaver, organizations can compose and
The result is faster implementations and more cost-effective enhance business solutions rapidly using enterprise services.
upgrades, which you can deploy as needed. Enterprise SOA As the foundation for enterprise SOA, SAP NetWeaver allows
also supports incremental improvement and enhancement, organizations to evolve their current IT landscapes into a strate-
without the interruptions associated with big-bang gic environment that drives business change.
implementations.
• Leverage opportunities for collaboration SAP NetWeaver also powers the SAP for Healthcare solution
Enterprise SOA allows you to connect with external partners portfolio, the SAP xApps™ family of composite applications, and
in formal or informal healthcare networks that can include qualified SAP partner solutions. Designed for interoperability
other hospitals, physicians, pharmacies, government institu- with a wide range of operating systems, development languages,
tions, and insurers. This interoperability improves the quality middleware, and business applications, SAP NetWeaver allows
of patient care and enhances efficiency while allowing you to you to take full advantage of existing IT assets, integrating all
retain visibility and control of critical processes. systems running SAP or non-SAP software. SAP NetWeaver also
helps improve process efficiency, providing a substantial level
Learn How Enterprise SOA Can Make a Difference of automation and consolidation for the applications that
With enterprise SOA, SAP blends technology with business con- support activities such as procurement, training, and financial
tent, providing a business process platform that helps your management.
healthcare organization save time, money, and lives. To learn
more about how enterprise SOA can help you meet current and
future challenges, please call your SAP representative or visit us
on the Web at www.sap.com/netweaver.

50 079 293 (07/02) Printed in USA.

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