Among the country’s top five health systems you’ll find Mercy, a group of 40-plus acute care and specialty hospitals with an army of over 2,100 physicians serving millions of patients each year across the Midwest region.
Adapting to an ever-evolving healthcare landscape, Mercy has seen positive results through the use of SAP HANA and SAP’s BusinessObjects platform to find ways to improve its efficiency while upholding its strict standards in quality of care.
MedCity News spoke with Curtis Dudley, VP of Integrated Performance Solutions at Mercy, who said SAP’s software was essential to the real-time exploration of valuable data points.
How did Mercy know that SAP was the right way to go?
A lot of the decision has to do with SAP’s size, scope and experience with organizations both within and outside of health care. We knew we had to be more timely with delivered information and have more opportunity to explore various options. About five years ago, we started using business development metrics using another software platform but couldn’t get the acceptable performance from an end-user perspective.
How was SAP different?
We introduced SAP’s software as part of our search to be able to drill down into item-level detail. With SAP, rather than waiting 30 minutes to find financial benefits of specific decisions, we could explore more than 40 million data rows of records in real time. It really accelerated our decision-making process, and we started to explore areas of high costs to ask questions, such as: Why can different doctors spend different amounts or use different medical instruments per similar cases?
It’s easy to fall into abstractions when it comes to talking about decisions in healthcare. What are some specific ways SAP has helped Mercy cut costs?
There are plenty of examples, but a lot of them have to do with analyzing variations from procedures. For example, during hip or knee replacements the data showed that the use of different kinds of mixing bowls drove the use of more or less cement in procedures. Another example has to do with autotransfusion devices. When we looked at the costs, there was no outcome difference between using these devices versus less costly blood from the blood bank, so we did away with them. In surgeries like laparoscopic cholecystectomy, some doctors used disposable tips during procedures that added more costs and no different outcome. In all these cases, what we’re able to do is understand the different variations and present decision makers with credible data to support a specific choice.
What was a way you were able to get clinicians to join this effort and understand the importance of this work?
The case to be made is simple: This platform lets you make needed decisions in the moment. Our old work process was writing a report, making a query, and then waiting three minutes for an answer. SAP has automated the delivery mechanisms so that it takes just three or four seconds. That’s opened a lot of doors for us.
What about customer support? How has SAP responded when Mercy has needed help in understanding the software?
In the last five years, we’ve made an attempt to align with SAP strategically, plugging in with the leaders there to learn how their tools can enable game-changing decisions for us. Since that alignment, we’ve been able to do what’s needed. We’ve had a very positive experience with their team of highly-skilled engineers and designers.
What’s the next layer of complexity in the use of SAP at Mercy?
We’re looking at natural language processing and machine learning components. We’re continuing to build our future atop SAP HANA and running predictive models. One example is a predictive model on clinic no-shows. We built a model and then the dashboard picks it up and shows end users: Here are the patients that might not show up. We believe the next big step is about building predictive modeling and machine learning into the delivery of our data, and we see SAP as a key enabler to do that.
