SAP and LSI provide ERP solution for small and mid-size healthcare providers

Newton Square, Pa. - July 07, 2010 - The need for efficient operations in the healthcare supplier industry isn't isolated to large health systems and surgery chains. Smaller and midsize healthcare suppliers are also under stress to constantly become more effective while at the very same time offering top quality care. SAP along with LSI Consulting today announced the supply of a healthcare-based solution that leverages the power of the enterprise resource planning (ERP) application SAP® ERP and SAP Best Practices packages for tiny to midsize hospices in the U.S. Market.

The organizations team at SAP worked closely with LSI to examine the techniques and processes of prior successful SAP integrations at bigger medical centers, including those hooked up to higher-learning establishments running SAP technologies. The team then assembled the best practices identified to build the solution, which should be offered through both the conventional on-premise and convenient on-demand models.

The software is designed for hospices and medical centers in the tiny to midsize segment, outlined as offering four hundred beds or less, that may use it to reach similar business worth in a shorter period of time and at a lower price point than their bigger opposite numbers.

As a trusted healthcare consultancy and implementation firm, LSI recognized the requirement for classy technology in these smaller, usually community-based centers. But with little budgets and resources, little to midsize surgeries need help in securing a speeded up time to business worth from their IT implementations, with flexible deployment options, without losing quality or a customer-focused approach. The new result was thus developed using the lessons learned from multiple on-time, on-budget implementations performed by LSI. The result's a portfolio of pre-packed templates and accelerators that enable repeatable success through proved solutions that engineer most of the time-intensive choices out of the realization process.

"Due to our long history of providing SAP solutions to large healthcare service organizations, we are in a unique position to identify and gather the best practices for implementation across an organization's core business processes," said the director of Healthcare Solutions, LSI Consulting, Steve Roach. "The solution we have now packaged is designed to address the base set of essential functionalities needed by hospitals enabling them to remain viable in the smaller community setting. That functionality includes financial accounting, supply chain management, including exchange cart processing, and analytics."

Various Deployment Models
As a consequence of the booming popularity and importance of diverse hosting techniques, the new solution, which can on occasion be bought through LSI, will be offered through both an on-premise and on-demand model. A hosted model is available, making allowances for the solution itself to be managed, monitored and maintained by SAP professionals in top-class hosted info centers. This option cuts down on the requirement for IT executives to maintain the system on site, reducing the capital cost burden that can forestall smaller affiliations from benefiting from leading edge technology. Licensing for a subscription-based model will be available in coming months.

"SAP has an established reputation globally as a provider of healthcare solutions to large medical centers, and has worked in recent years to develop equally beneficial solutions to small and midsize hospitals around the world," opined John Papandrea, senior vice president at the Global Health Sciences Sector, SAP. "The introduction of this jointly developed solution, specifically configured to meet the needs of the U.S. market, shows our commitment to this segment as we apply best practices, articulated within a template, to offer a comprehensive solution with flexible deployment options that would mitigate risk and enable rapid time to value for smaller hospitals.