Health IT

Like Salesforce and others, SAP wants to take on healthcare

"The electronic medical record is a disaster," SAP CEO Bill McDermott said in a meeting with financial analysts this week. He knows from personal experience.

Bill McDermott

Every other big software company, it seems, has jumped into healthcare. Why not SAP?

The German enterprise management firm doesn’t have a formal healthcare product yet, but CEO Bill McDermott reportedly sees SAP’s year-old HANA S/4 database as ideal for this industry. HANA S/4, according to ReCode, is made to handle both structured and unstructured data.

“Context-aware data-driven machine-learning applications are the future of the enterprise and in no industry is this more relevant than healthcare,” McDermott was quoted as saying Thursday in a New York meeting with financial analysts. “Most of the information that moves from first responders, nurses and doctors is voice and text. In other words unstructured data, and we’re going to have to have a database that is a column-stored in-memory database to manage not just the structured stuff, but also the unstructured stuff.”

For the U.S.-born McDermott, it’s personal. He lost an eye last summer in what ReCode called “a freak accident at the home of relatives in Pennsylvania.” Despite being a highly paid Fortune 100 CEO, McDermott couldn’t buy himself a great care experience.

“Not only do you get tortured in the medical system, but when you go to renew your insurance policy, they want you to fill out forms with a list of every doctor you’ve seen and every prescription drug you’ve taken. And if you don’t remember it and don’t get it right, they’ll challenge your claim when you file one someday,” McDermott complained.

“Today if you look at the healthcare industry, and you can talk to anybody, there isn’t a single person who thinks it works,” he reportedly said. “The electronic medical record is a disaster. It was designed to create a billing event and a compliance event,” not to improve care or workflows.

SAP, according to McDermott, wants to be the hub for better data flow in healthcare. “This can fundamentally change the healthcare experience for the patient,” he said.

McDermott plans on appointing a senior executive to oversee healthcare, according to the ReCode article.

Many of McDermott’s comments echoed those of Salesforce execs. When Salesforce announced its Health Cloud product in September, CMO Dr. Joshua Newman also complained that EMRs were built for billing, not for accountable care or care coordination. “Anything that docs don’t get reimbursed for might not be in the EMR,” Newman said then.

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