The route to cancer cure is cloud and clear!

Can advanced technologies like predictive analytics reduce the number of cancer death in India?

SAP says a resounding 'yes'. Flowing from its global focus on Connected Healthcare and Medical Research Insights, SAP has committed itself to what it calls the One Billion Lives initiative, with the aim to deliver sustainable, commercially-viable social impact, improving the lives of 1 billion people across the Asia Pacific and Japan region by 2020.

Interestingly, this initiative has a strong Indian connect. In association with the Ramesh Nimmagadda Cancer Foundation (RNCF), SAP has started to generate credible patient data for better cancer treatment. The company is ensuring that patient medical data is recorded and accessed effectively, using predictive analytics, forecasting behaviour based on existing data.

Basavatarakam Indo American Cancer Hospital & Research Institute, Hyderabad, and Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute and Research Centre, New Delhi, are the first two hospitals in the country to have come forward to be part of this effort. The project already has pilot data from 50,000 patients and is expected to produce ground-breaking research insights in the battle against cancer to benefit patients in India.

SAP believes that disease behaviour and care behaviour should never be combined. There should be two different systems that handle data on symptoms and a totally different system that handles cures. Also, cancer patients in India require a totally different schedule of treatment compared to their Western counterparts. Even though the number of cancer patients in India is growing in large numbers, advanced technologies from India, a combination of cloud computing, analytics, and artificial intelligence, are there to fight cancer.

The project from India was shortlisted from 170 others from APJ. SAP has invested Euro 200,000 in the overall programme management which includes the setting up of a robust process to crowdsource ideas from employees, as well as enable employee voting to shortlist the best ideas based on their likelihood of success in terms of feasibility, scalability and ease of implementation.

India’s entry titled “Clinical Data Collection and Research for Cancer” primarily deals with the application of treatment regimens prescribed for Western populations could lead to incorrect dosage, higher toxicity, and higher expenditure for Indian patients. Recognizing this disparity, a team from SAP India reached out to RNCF, to help study trends and clinical data that will eventually drive the delivery of evidence-based medicine for the Indian population. Working together with the RNCF, the team aims to improve cancer diagnosis through the development of an open platform powered by SAP HANA ( a platform for processing high volumes of data in real-time).

Using analytics and visualisation to convert patient data into meaningful insight, the project aims to maximise patient outcomes for patients in India and throughout the region in the months to follow.