SAP HANA EFFECT
Title: Episode 17 – Mercy Health Takes Care with HANA
(Duration: 06:32)
Publish Date: May 18, 2015
Description: Jamie Oswald, Data Analytics Lead at Mercy Health,
shares their BI on HANA use case to improve operating room care and
reduce $2 million of costs in the first few months
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL
FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JEFF:
Welcome to The HANA Effect. I’m your host, Jeff
Word, from SAP. Each week, we bring listeners the
real stories of how companies are taking advantage
of real-time computing to transform their
organizations and let them share the lessons they’ve
learned along their journey. Welcome to another
episode of The HANA Effect. I’m your host, Jeff
Word, and I’m very pleased to be sitting here with
my good ol’ buddy, Jamie, from Mercy Health. How
you doing, man?
JAMIE:
I’m good. How are you doing?
JEFF:
For those of you who don’t know, Jamie is a longtime SAP expert out in the world. And you’re doing
some really cool stuff with HANA. So, give us a quick
idea of what Mercy Health is for the people that
don’t know and what you do there.
HANA Effect Episode 17 – Mercy Health Takes Care with HANA 1 JAMIE:
So, Mercy Health is a 35-40 ish hospital system in the
Midwest. So, we operate in Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas,
and Kansas and we’re a religious organization, non-profit,
and we do a lot with community care and obviously a lot of
things like that. We’re also heavily invested in our
communities. We really view ourselves as a mission and
we were really on the forefront of the electronic medical
record, Vanguard. Back in 2006, we really decided that to
be successful, we needed to get on one system and really
stick with that. And so, we were with Epic EHR, the market
leader in that. And, after eight years of being on it, we’ve
gotten really good at it, and we’re really pushing the
envelope on some of our analytics with it. We’re a big
enough company that we can make a difference and we’re
a small enough company that we can get things done, is
what we like to say. And with that, we use SAP Business
Objects. That’s been our BI backbone for years and years
before we even had Epic. Although, them being a huge
partner with SAP is a great deal for us. Recently, we’ve
started using HANA as sort of an analytics sidecar with
some of our things. So, we really like the ability and
opportunity to not only speed up our analysis, but speed
up how quickly we can get analysis out to people. So, it’s
not just when I click the button, it’s superfast. It’s also if I
have a question, I don’t need to wait six months for you to
come back and I’ve forgotten what question I asked and
why I asked it and what my business problem was and all
HANA Effect Episode 17 – Mercy Health Takes Care with HANA 2 that. So, just being able to deliver those solutions faster is
a big plus for us.
JEFF:
It enables a lot more self-service as well, right?
JAMIE:
It does.
JEFF:
So, tell us a little bit about the HANA system. First of
all, there’s no SAP data going into it, right?
JAMIE:
That’s correct. We don’t own any SAP besides Business
Objects and we do use Concur.
JEFF:
Little bit of SAP, but, in general, most of this stuff is
coming from non-SAP systems. You stick it into
HANA kind of a standalone and you through BOBJ on
top of that. What was the business reasons that led
you guys down that path, driving things, just take a
look at HANA.
JAMIE:
So, in healthcare, our margins are razor thin. You know,
every year Medicare and Medicaid are big payers and those
reimbursements keep going down and, at the same time,
we provide a ton of free care and so, our margins are 23%. So, anywhere we can find an opportunity to save, we
want to go ahead and do that. So, one of our big pushes
so far has been with our perioperative services, basically
operating rooms, right? Surgeons have their own business
but then they need a hospital to come in and perform or
HANA Effect Episode 17 – Mercy Health Takes Care with HANA 3 an outpatient surgery center or something like that. So,
we move a lot of supplies through there. We have a lot of
logistics related to getting patients in, patients out,
blocking doctors and things like that. And so, just having
that information at our periop expert’s fingertips, has
really made a difference. You know, we’ve done things in
just a couple of months running live with this. We’ve cut
$2 million out of our annual budget, just on redundant
supplies or using perhaps more supplies than they needed
or putting the same sort of hip that you would put into an
NFL linebacker into an 85 year old. Right? They just don’t
need the same sort of stress. And so, getting the
appropriate pieces to the appropriate people has been
really great. We’ve also looked at our continuum of care,
right? And we say, well maybe we don’t need this step in
that process, maybe we don’t need to use this one thing.
The example I can think of is an auto transfusion device.
We looked at physicians who are using it in the operating
room and those who weren’t and we found that their
outcomes were the same and so we’ve cut that cost out for
the patients that it’s appropriate for. That’s less
complications, less costs, all sorts of good things by doing
that.
JEFF:
It’s not just good business; it’s smarter and safer
and providing better outcomes too.
JAMIE:
Absolutely. You know, at the end of the day, it’s about the
patient care and, as a ministry, as a mission, we do what
HANA Effect Episode 17 – Mercy Health Takes Care with HANA 4 we do, so that we can afford to do it for those who can’t
afford it themselves. And so, if we can save that cost
there, that allows us to give more care on the other side.
JEFF:
And that’s phenomenal. Saving money in the rest of
the business world goes to the bottom line, but you
guys used HANA to get more visibility into what’s
going on to make better decisions and save more
money. That actually gets turned around into helping
more people.
JAMIE:
Right.
JEFF:
Saving move lives, that’s pretty phenomenal. So,
what are you guys thinking about doing next? That’s
gone live recently; what’s kind of next on your
roadmap? Where you guys headed with this next?
JAMIE:
Well, so we really want to take more advantage of some of
the predictive capabilities. We do have a couple of things
out there where we’re using some of the integration with
stats in HANA, not even super complicated things, but look
at which providers are spending a lot more money for a
given procedure and which are not. We’re looking at, okay,
if I can get all of my providers down to the cost of the 50th
percentile, what do those savings look like? Right? And so,
then you can target and say, here are the outliers, here’s
who we can go after, really just being able to get a more
holistic view of our supply chain, of our patients. I mean
HANA Effect Episode 17 – Mercy Health Takes Care with HANA 5 there’s really no limit to what HANA could do for us. It’s
really just, where do we prioritize it? Where do we go
next?
JEFF:
Give us a little idea of what the users said. You’ve
been using BOBJ for a longtime. What did some of
those old BOBJ users say when you stuck HANA
under the hood?
JAMIE:
So, they’ve been very happy and a lot of that actually is
around Explorer. We’ve had it for a while and weren’t
really sure where to go with it because our data sets are
just big enough that you can’t put them in the old
traditional Explorer, right? And so, we needed an
accelerated version and with HANA we can do that. So, I
can put eight years’ worth of periop data, every supply
that’s been used, into one HANA enabled information
space. People can slice and dice. They can go look at
whatever procedures they want, whatever provider they
want, whatever supply they want and immediately get that
back.
JEFF:
Awesome. Well, listen, we’re thrilled that you guys
have gotten so much value out of it, thrilled that you
stopped by to chat and wish you guys much, much
success in saving money and saving lives. Thanks a
lot, Jamie.
JAMIE:
HANA Effect Thank you.
Episode 17 – Mercy Health Takes Care with HANA 6