SAP SE has pledged an initiative to touch one billion lives in the Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) region by the year 2020. As part of this employee-led, crowdsourced initiative, SAP India has adopted the cause of bettering cancer research in the country.
To mark the occasion of completing 20 years in the country, SAP India has announced their collaboration with the Ramesh Nimmagadda Cancer Foundation (RNCF), an NGO focused on cancer data research. RNCF provides its custom made data collection software OncoCollect, to institutions across India and also assists them with resources such as hardware, and manpower.
“At SAP, everything we do is guided by our vision to help the world run better and improve people’s lives,” said Deb Deep Sengupta, President and Managing Director, SAP Indian Subcontinent. “Together with RNCF, we aim to speed up data collection and analysis for better cancer treatment for patients in India and make a significant social impact in the country. I am confident that as we move towards a cloud economy, initiatives such as 1BLives will help India rise economically, socially and digitally, while technology will help address many of the gaps.”
Cancer is one of the leading non-infectious causes of mortality in the world. In India, 1 million new cancer cases are being diagnosed each year, while only 36% of patients receive treatment. Mortality rates are higher in India than those in western countries with close to 700,000 deaths every year due to this disease. All these years, Indians have largely depended on data derived from western countries; however, their treatment doesn’t always suit patients belonging to the Indian ethnicity.
Working together with RNCF, the team at SAP aims to improve cancer treatment leveraging the capabilities of SAP Medical Research Insights and SAP Connected Health platform powered by SAP HANA that expedites data extraction, computation and visualization to convert patient data into meaningful insights including Predictive Analytics. The project aims to maximize patient outcomes for populations in India and throughout the region. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has joined SAP in this cause and will host the SAP Healthcare solutions and RNCF Software.
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.
Talking about how this technologically-driven research will help Indian healthcare, Dr. Ramesh B V Nimmagadda, Managing Trustee, Ramesh Nimmagadda Cancer Foundation said, “Indian patients react differently to some drug regimens and exhibit more side effects and low tolerance while some of the diseases behave differently based on the ethnicity. I am excited to be a part of the team that gets to work on innovative technologies like SAP Connected Health platform and SAP Medical Research Insights, powered by SAP HANA, to integrate real world datasets, and give the user – a researcher or clinician – the freedom to perform analysis and gain insights from data to arrive at optimal treatment under the given local conditions.”
This initiative not only showcases SAP’s commitment to healthcare in the APJ region, but also aligns with their global pledge and the CEO, Bill McDermott’s vision to revolutionize healthcare industry.
