SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced an expanded commitment and significant progress in its effort to make the benefits of personalized medicine available to more patients fighting cancer and other serious illnesses. The announcement was made at HIMSS15, being held April 12–16 in Chicago.

“We’re focused on improving people’s lives with simple solutions to complex problems, and we recognize that the most universally relevant challenges are in healthcare,” said Martin Kopp, vice president and head of the global healthcare industry unit, SAP. “Co-innovating with partners of all sizes on our technology platforms, we’re working across the board to improve health and make a rapid, direct impact on quality of life.”

Transforming Cancer Care

The American Society for Clinical Oncology recently announced that its wholly owned subsidiary, CancerLinQ LLC, has chosen the SAP HANA platform for the development of ASCO’s CancerLinQ™. CancerLinQ is intended to be a groundbreaking health information technology (HIT) platform that will harness Big Data to deliver high-quality care to patients with cancer. It is one of the only major cancer data initiatives being developed and led by physicians with the primary purpose of improving patient care.

“CancerLinQ is the kind of innovation needed to advance the vision of precision medicine,” said Dr. Peter Paul Yu, MD, president, ASCO. “By collecting and analyzing data from almost every U.S. cancer patient, CancerLinQ is intended to uncover personalized insights that will benefit oncology practices and patients across the United States – no matter what their affiliation or choice of electronic health record systems may be – and accelerate medical advances.”

SAP also announced in June 2014 that it will offer a personalized treatment recommendation service to its employees fighting cancer. The service, called COPE (Corporate Oncology Program for Employees) and offered through a partnership with MOLECULAR HEALTH GmbH, delivers decision support for targeted cancer treatments, aiming for better results with fewer side effects.

The ASCO relationship builds on last year’s early deployment of Medical Research Insights, a service based on an oncology clinical data platform that SAP developed in partnership with the German National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) and now in use for testing purposes at its facilities in Heidelberg, Germany. At this time, Medical Research Insights is intended for use in medical research only and not the treatment of patients.

The COPE service will initially be used for the benefit of SAP employees with a cancer diagnosis. In the spirit of SAP’s mission of making the world run better, it is SAP’s hope that providing this service will create a standard that will be adopted by other employers. The service has already been made available for employees in the United States and Germany, with the intent for employees in additional countries to gain from this benefit in the near future.

Enabling Targeted Care with Analytics

In another example, Dartmouth-Hitchcock health system (D-H) is working with analytics solutions from SAP and the SAP HANA platform to help predict surgical outcomes for its patients experiencing chronic knee pain. The initiative, named GreenCare, is aimed at improving the patient care experience by allowing physicians to help improve surgical outcomes, address costs and help avoid unnecessary surgeries. GreenCare combines real-time data analytics with patient-focused, science-based surveys to give patients the best outcomes.

Making Sense of Big Data

To deliver highly targeted care, research and healthcare organizations need technology that gathers and shares very large volumes and varieties of health data and information. PHEMI, an SAP partner that offers an enterprise-grade Big Data warehouse, supports healthcare organizations with a solution that helps researchers and clinicians find the information they need quickly and easily.

“Healthcare organizations are transforming unprecedented volumes and types of data into medical insights,” said David Delaney, chief medical officer, SAP (Americas). “The challenge isn’t just to gather the information, but to organize it and make it available to researchers across the country or around the globe and at the same time enforce data sharing and consent agreements.”