Health Care Coverage From SAP AG (SAP) Senior VP; Discover Future Trends In The Sector
October 6, 2010 - The Wall Street Transcript has just published Health Care IT Report offering a timely review of the Application Software sector. This Special Report contains expert industry commentary through in-depth interviews with public company CEOs, Equity Analysts and Money Managers. Please find an excerpt below.
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John Papandrea is Senior Vice President of SAP's health care industry business unit. With vast experience managing people and resources, as well as building business cases for information technology investments in health care, Mr. Papandrea joined SAP from Deloitte Consulting, where he advised large health care organizations on information technology strategy, effective use of technology and technology innovation. Previously Mr. Papandrea worked with Capgemini and Ernst & Young, driving strategic partner relationships and advising clients on the value derived from the use of information technology in health care, particularly in the clinical arena. Mr. Papandrea holds a bachelor's degree in biomedical science from the University of Technology Sydney and a master's degree in health Administration from the University of New South Wales, located in Sydney, Australia.
TWST: Please start with a broad overview of SAP.
Mr. Papandrea: We have been in business about 35 years, headquartered in Walldorf, Germany, and we are the largest application provider in the world. We've had quite substantial growth; we serve a multitude of industries, including health care and including life sciences, but also automotive and other industries as well.
TWST: How long have you been servicing the health care industry?
Mr. Papandrea: SAP (SAP) started entry into the health care provider industry in the mid-1990s with solutions that were originally marketed to hospitals in the German-speaking region, that being Switzerland, Austria and Germany. Since that time, we've expanded our presence globally, not only to other parts of Europe, but also Middle East, South Africa, Asia Pacific, North America and Latin America.
TWST: How do you differentiate the health care and life sciences sectors?
Mr. Papandrea: Let me talk a little bit about how they are related first. There is a definite value chain between the life sciences industry and the health care provider industry. The life sciences industry produces all medication, medical devices and biotechnology that are used in the treatment of patients in the course of any illness they may have. When you think about a pharmaceutical company or a pacemaker company, or a company that makes glucometers for taking blood glucose levels, etc., they fall into the life sciences arena. And basically health care providers are those that provide the direct care to patients, both in the hospital and outside of the hospital setting.
TWST: What products and services do you provide to the health care and life sciences sectors?
Mr. Papandrea: Let's start with life sciences. We provide a full range of solutions to the life sciences companies. Virtually all of the major life sciences companies run various components of SAP solutions that take into consideration their analytics, their supply chain, manufacturing, financial, human capital management and customer relationship management processes. On the provider side, it's also supply chain, so that's one link between the two, but it's also the same type of functionality from human capital management supply chain procurement. We also have industry-specific solutions that are used in the direct care of patients - a patient administration system that takes care of the administrative components of looking after a patient - and also a clinical system that we do not market in the U.S. today that takes care of the clinical aspects of looking after patients worldwide, at least it enables the physicians and the nurses to do that.
TWST: What is your competitive advantage?
Mr. Papandrea: We have several. Our architecture is certainly one - the broad spectrum of solutions that we have that we can leverage to bring new solutions to market, so we don't need to start from scratch on. In many circumstances, we can leverage a lot of what we have to do that. If you are speaking to one of our CEOs, dramatically increasing our speed of innovation and bringing in solutions to market, with the strength of SAP and with the depth of our solutions in a much more accelerated fashion, and solutions that we will be bringing into market this half will be an example of that.
TWST: We talked about new products and services. Are there specific areas of opportunity that you are hoping to exploit over the next several years?
Mr. Papandrea: There is a growing opportunity in Latin America, as some of those countries have growth in their economies, even countries like Mexico, Colombia, Brazil are experiencing rapid expansion of expenditure and technology in the health care space. That's one area that we are working diligently on; the same thing in regions of Asia-Pacific. And as regards to the U.S., it's really focused on taking advantage of the current economic climate and the stimulus funding, as well as the changes that are going to emerge in health care delivery between now and 2012. I believe we are positioning quite well for that.
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