The FINANCIAL — The University Clinic Aachen (UKA), one of Germany’s most reputable university clinics, announced that it has successfully deployed the SAP BusinessObjects Risk Management application from SAP AG (NYSE: SAP).
The clinic’s goal is to differentiate itself from other hospitals by providing patient-centric healthcare, as well as thorough medical research and teaching at the highest level. With comprehensive IT support for risk management from SAP, the UKA is better positioned to take on a leading role in both German and international hospital management.
SAP BusinessObjects Risk Management will help support the identification, monitoring and governance of key risks for the UKA’s nearly 5,700 employees and 44,700 in-patient cases per year. These could, for example, include the early detection of staff shortages or securing the medication supply. Using standardized, unified evaluation guidelines, the SAP software is able to bundle significant risks in the form of performance indicators and can make them accessible to the clinic’s management in a clear format. Currently, the risk management system provides data to approximately 100 clinic managers. Future plans include providing system access to all employees, including 750 doctors, more than 1,000 employees in the medical-technical services and more than 900 nursing staff employees.
“In order to more accurately manage risk, we defined early warning indicators for specific risks,” explains Götz Hemicker, consultant to the medical director and project head at the University Clinic Aachen. “These indicators are continuously monitored by the system, which is configured to inform the persons responsible as soon as a certain threshold is exceeded. Additionally, the system guides the user in a step-by-step manner through the regular reports on known risks.”
A key requirement for UKA was that the SAP software needed to be tailored to the current particular needs of the university clinic while remaining flexible enough to adapt to future changes. SAP BusinessObjects Risk Management can access many different application systems and data sets. From these sources, the data can be selected, analyzed and presented in a meaningful way. As a result, UKA will use SAP BusinessObjects Risk Management to produce and analyze periodic reports on short notice.
“Risk management is an important component of our integrated governance and information system, and it contributes to strengthening identification with our business goals,” says Volker Lowitsch, head of the IT Management Unit at the UKA. “It was logical to integrate the risk management system into the university clinic’s already established platform strategy and map via SAP BusinessObjects Risk Management, which, within the scope of our overall strategy, is being integrated into the Balanced Score Card of our business intelligence platform. This creates a consistency for the risk, quality, financial, personnel and process indicators that are relevant for governance in a single user interface.”
In implementing the risk management software, the University Clinic Aachen was able to build on a comprehensive SAP system landscape consisting of the enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, SAP® ERP, the SAP ERP Human Capital Management solution, the SAP Supplier Relationship Management (SAP SRM) application and the SAP Solution Manager application management solution. In addition, the University Clinic Aachen has chosen to implement the SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application in order to better promote the exchange of information with patients and resident doctors.
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