Thursday, 21 September 2006

SAP, Accenture Partner to Develop Health Care Software on SOA

Accenture and SAP AG have agreed to co-develop a Collaborative Health Network (CHN) solution, which is designed to help healthcare organisations improve patient care by streamlining the way they access, integrate and share information.

Under this agreement, the CHN solution will be based on SAP NetWeaver and designed to help the industry with quality of care and control healthcare costs by providing an infrastructure to link a range of information and data. It will use an enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to help reduce IT costs and enable automated collaborative processes among industry participants including healthcare providers, health insurance companies, public health authorities, pharmaceutical companies, physicians and pharmacies.

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.

"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.

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 approach to providing information management and exchange services to the healthcare industry.

This collaborative effort will utilise the Accenture Innovation Center for SAP NetWeaver, located at SAP's development headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. This is Accenture's global hub for developing and delivering SAP-based solutions.