AOK selects SAP HANA platform to increase focus on preventive care

SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced that AOK, Germany's largest health insurance provider, has chosen the SAP HANA™ platform to further its focus on preventive care. The deal, signed in the third quarter of 2011, is the largest of its kind globally to date. AOK plans to use SAP HANA to conduct real-time analyses of mass medical data in order to identify patterns of illness in its often regional variants early on and offer individualized pre-emptive programs. In doing so, the company aims to become even more attractive to its customers and even more efficient. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE® NOW + SAP® TechEd, being held as a co-located event in Madrid from November 8-10.

Like each of Germany's statutory health insurance funds, AOK must deal with a vast and constantly growing ocean of data: 12 independent regional health insurance funds with 24 million insurants, over 370 million outpatient treatment cases, 1.5 billion diagnoses to go along with them – plus untold amounts of other medical data. In Germany's liberalized healthcare market, approximately 150 statutory health insurance funds wrangle for the attention of customers. It is increasingly difficult to tell one provider from the next, especially since the establishment of a central healthcare fund on January 1, 2009, which standardized the insurance contribution rate. In the competitive environment, having superior healthcare programs and services has become decisive. This has led to a rise in the importance of managing medical and preventive care, which is precisely where AOK intends to leverage SAP HANA.

"True to our credo as a healthcare fund, we want to help our clients' to avoid illnesses in the first place — our existing and diverse preventive care programs are aimed at doing exactly that," said Uwe Deh, deputy director of the Federal Association of the AOK. "However, as an innovative company, our goal is to continuously improve those services and increase their efficiency and impact. We will develop tailored programs corresponding to the insurants' individual risks. To do so, we need tools we can use to conduct real-time analyses of the tremendous amounts of medical data we receive, recognize potential health risks, assemble various preventive care programs and respond to those risks appropriately and ahead of time. SAP HANA meets all of these requirements."

In addition to the ability to process and analyze data in real time, AOK was interested in the evolutionary approach of SAP HANA, which enables the company to constantly evolve its existing data warehouse solutions. Those solutions are based on oscare®, an industry solution for statutory health insurance funds developed by AOK. The SAP HANA platform is designed to install on top of an existing infrastructure and work with the available data. In the medium term, the SAP HANA database could replace the conventional relational databases used in connection with the SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse component.

With these capabilities, AOK sees itself in a position to conduct real-time analyses and simulations on an exceptionally broad base of data in the immediate future. Preventive care for diabetes and heart failure patients is just one of the traditional fields in which such efforts could be applied. With the help of the early detection system it hopes to assemble, AOK aims to bolster a number of medical and preventive care models, including those centered around general practitioners. The company also intends to achieve significant cost reductions through tailored prevention, which will help prevent expensive unneeded treatments.

AOK has pursued a dedicated strategy based on standard SAP software in its business and IT since 2001.

"Over the past 10 years, AOK has found great success time and again in being among the first to take advantage of SAP innovations," said Michael Kleinemeier, CEO, SAP Deutschland AG & Co. KG, and president, DACH region, SAP. "The company's trust and the role it has played as a development partner have helped us to fine-tune our industry solution for the statutory health insurance market, as well as make constant advancements with its supplementary solution oscare. Seeing an early adopter like AOK choose SAP HANA demonstrates how much potential there is in-memory computing technology."