SAP has partnered with the National Cancer Centre Singapore (NCCS) to further clinical research, through the deployment of the SAP Connected Health platform to integrate both structured and unstructured data such as clinical and genomic data.
The SAP Connected Health platform, built on SAP HANA, will open access to the critical data held through the healthcare system, to provide researchers and physicians/oncologists with real actionable insights that can advance the treatment and care of cancer patients.
NCCS will also use SAP Connected Health for Clinical Research, patient insights option, which will deliver real-time analysis and reporting that together help to produce personalised treatment options.
According to SAP, the platform is similar to innovation projects that have been successfully implemented elsewhere, including at CancerLinQ LLC, a subsidiary of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and Seoul University’s Bundang Hospital.
For the initiative, SAP Co-innovation Labs Singapore (SAP COIL) provided the project framework under which systems, infrastructure and the SAP Connected Health platform were made available locally in Singapore to comply with data privacy concerns.
SAP COIL’s global sponsors Cisco, NetApp, Intel, and VMware provided the dedicated environment for NCCS and SAP Connected Health customer implementation teams to configure and customise the solution based on local requirements.
NCCS provides knowledge and domain expertise into the R&D pathway for computational big-data tools to impact R&D in cancer and precision medicine. This R&D effort will be piloted in anonymised datasets of cancer patients comprising clinical parameters integrated with cutting edge molecular profiling information.
“Today marks a significant milestone in our collaboration on health initiatives with partners in Singapore, in line with SAP’s objectives of providing the best underlying technology to power tomorrow’s medical advancements. We’re confident that this collaboration with NCCS will help to improve connected care and precision medicine, and demonstrates clearly how big data can help to advance cancer treatments.
“By leveraging our experience in working with healthcare organisations throughout the world, Singapore stands to expand its capabilities in connected health technologies in a very meaningful way,” said Andy David, director for healthcare in the Asia Pacific region, SAP.
Dr Iain Tan, senior consultant medical oncologist at NCCS, said: “We seek to co-innovate this cutting-edge connected health platform to link up genomic and clinical data for R&D. This research prepares us to play a leading role as digital and computational platforms to empower us towards the future of data-informed healthcare decision making which we envision will be applied to our individual patients.”