Vancouver startup PHEMI Health Systems has partnered with SAP AG to do analysis on the healthcare data it collects with its software product, according to a report on our sister site IT World Canada.
PHEMI Clinical is a young company that has trials in just two hospitals at the moment, editor Howard Solomon writes, but SAP AG sees the potential and is willing to do some cross-promotional marketing with the firm that targets the health care industry. Solomon describes the products:
-
PHEMI Clinical, which captures data from different hospital information systems like EMRs, lab results, medication, imaging;
-
PHEMI Central, a digital asset library letting institutions collect data from PHEMI Clinical, as well as from SQL databases.  Its key feature is that it stores data against a governance, security and privacy methodology so data can be used safely – for example, identifying patients for a drug trial, or building a disease registry.
You could describe the combination of SAP’s HANA in-memory database to sift through the information collected by PHEMI as a big data solution. As hospitals get into the habit of collecting more data about patients, what treatments they are receiving, and how they are reacting to those treatments, patterns could emerge in the data that reveals which ones are working most effectively.
SAP has shown an active interest in encouraging startups to adopt its big data platform, HANA, and build applications on top of it. In 2012 is hosted a startup competition encouraging as much, and it also launched a partner eco-system program that more than 150 startups planned to join. At the same time, SAP started its own venture fund of $155 million to sweeten the deal for startups that could find applicable uses for big data products.
The health care industry is a prime candidate for such a solution, as it seeks ways to reduce costs by finding the most efficient ways to treat patients.
