Anna Nerz

SAP Health Care Industry Expert , Heidelberg University Hospital

2021

Overview

Winner of SAP's 2020 Innovation Award for Adoption. Heidelberg University Hospital consists of 40 specialist departments offering medical care that meets the highest international standards, with a focus on oncology and other specialties that require complex treatments. Heidelberg University Hospital’s active collaboration with national research facilities attracts patients from around the globe and has produced several Nobel Prize winners. It’s no surprise that our group of 18 hospitals was tapped for emergency response during the pandemic. We are proud to have led the regional fight against COVID-19 with a quick and efficient solution for optimal management of beds and equipment during the surge of seriously ill patients. 

Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

Like healthcare institutions everywhere, Heidelberg University Hospital faced one of the biggest challenges in its long history when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Medical staff needed a way to inventory ICU beds on the fly so that growing numbers of emergency patients could receive life-saving treatment quickly and efficiently. Heidelberg University Hospital knew the pandemic would present unique challenges to the management of workloads and supplies. We could foresee a surge in urgent-care cases unlike anything we had ever faced before, and the new challenge called for new action. The aging and time-consuming manual processes then in place for routing patients would not meet the emergency successfully. With only a few weeks' notice, we had to expand and streamline emergency services within the city of Heidelberg to direct ambulances transporting COVID-19 patients to clinics with appropriate human and material resources. And our larger 18-hospital system needed a transparent, real-time overview of bed occupancy across the RhineNeckar region to coordinate care and keep federal authorities informed of levels of infection and use of critical ventilation options.

The Solution

The primary objective, as always in healthcare, was securing optimal treatment for each patient. When the pandemic complicated fulfilment of that mission, we turned to digitalization to accelerate underlying processes.  SAP was approached to deliver a scalable and extensible solution built expressly to address our bed management use case using the SAP® Analytics Cloud solution on the SAP Integration Suite. Agile development of cloud-based analytics presented under secure authorization in an attractive interface across all devices replaced cumbersome manual processes and gave managers powerful mechanisms to centralize, analyze, and publish distribution of equipment in real time across 48 wards in 25 hospitals.

The results

Up-to-the-minute data underpins optimal distribution of the patient load and routing of ambulances across the Rhein-Neckar region, helping ensure that healthcare providers received timely information for resource planning and that each patient received an appropriate bed and the best possible care during the pandemic surge.

The solution is a portal on the SAP Integration Suite that provides easy access to 10 separate applications. Two applications manage the registry of roles, one for managers and workers in hospitals who can see and edit data from their hospital, and one for reporting viewers who can see data across various hospitals and wards. A third application lets managers maintain data for hospitals and wards and confirm onboarding requests for new users. A fourth allows appropriate managers and workers to edit the number of patients and the number and type of beds per ward. The SAP Analytics Cloud solution manages the analytics required to make sense of the data. Two applications aggregate the data for each hospital and display it according to hospital-specific requirements. 

 

Metrics

- 45 Wards subject to required occupancy reporting

- 40 Specialties available to serve patients with underlying conditions

- 25 Clinics with appropriate beds for severely afflicted COVID-19 patients

Business Benefits: Patients across the Rhine-Neckar region enjoy optimal access to appropriate care. Government agencies receive timely information to help them track the course of the pandemic. Secure, real-time data support critical decisions and protects lives. The control center for patient distribution has accurate geo-mapping information. The solution supports less complicated sharing of information with external parties such as the health department and the fire department and ambulance service.

Human empowerment benefits: Medical staff members have a far lower risk of overload, helping ensure that they remain healthy themselves. The solution helps protect public health across a large region of a country hit hard by COVID-19. Onboarding and self-registration of new users is a simple guided procedure. The solution builds a stable and reliable basis for employees to create visual reports that deliver actionable insights quickly. All stakeholders can reach the data through a Web portal accessible by desktop, laptop, and smartphone anytime, anywhere.

 

The Technology

SAP Integration Suite, SAP Fiori user experience, SAP Cloud Programming Model and SAP Analytics Cloud

SAP Analytics Cloud solution: Manages the conversion of aggregated data into actionable insight in a breakdown of ward capacity combined with geolocation data on hospitals and visualization of occupancy rates over time. In addition, includes features for time-series data on occupancy rates and geolocation of hospitals and is easily extensible to include forecasting functionality. 

Disruptive Factor

The COVID-19 coordination center at Heidelberg University Hospital allows doctors to control and manage all the information they need to coordinate patient care and transportation more effectively during the pandemic. At the push of a button, regular district offices can also supply any required reports in real time to the state and federal authorities on the availability of COVID-19 hospital beds with and without ventilation options. The project stands out through fast and purposeful collaboration. Together with the Integrated Control Center Rhein-Neckar/Heidelberg and expert staff from SAP, we set up the platform for COVID-19 bed management in about a week. Working with their real-time overview of capacity, managers can now assign patients according to the availability of space, protective clothing, and beds with and without ventilation options in all 18 hospitals in the region. All hospitals and relevant transportation and health authorities used this solution free of charge for six months. The cloud-based, scalable, and extensible bed management solution includes a highly secure authorization methodology and is easily accessible through a Web browser and a wide variety of devices — desktop computers, laptops, or smartphones — regardless of user location

SAP Health Care Industry Expert

Topics Covered

Submission Details

Year
2021
Category
Data to Decisions
Result