Use OpCon Automation to Run a Hospital’s SAP Environment

Taking an excellent SAP solution and making it even better

SAP Healthcare is a robust platform that provides the healthcare IT solutions that hospitals and hospital systems need to operate their businesses. SAP for healthcare is, like all SAP environments, a modular environment. Hospitals and healthcare systems can enable the modules they need right now with the flexibility to adapt, later on, adding or removing modules as necessary.

SAP environments are powerful healthcare technology tools, but they are necessarily quite complicated. Running an SAP environment will be resource-intensive, and the complex environment can become unwieldy without automation.

Manage your SAP environment with SOAP

To get the most performance out of their SAP investment, most large healthcare organizations have moved to an automation tool called a SOAP, which stands for System Orchestration Automation Platform. More and more hospitals, including small and midsized organizations, are adopting SOAPs to gain these same efficiencies.

SOAPs are powerful software platforms that combine batch processing skills with deeper capabilities, including these:

• Data flow management
• Workflow orchestration
• Event-driven automation
• Scheduling, monitoring, visibility, and alerting
• Self-service automation
• Resource provisioning

Hospital systems need the ability to automate tasks and orchestrate the many processes and protocols that exist within their Healthcare IT infrastructure. This is precisely what SOAPs accomplish.

SMA Technologies’ flagship product, OpCon, functions as a SOAP in SAP Healthcare environments (among others). OpCon enables you to automate numerous functions in the Healthcare IT ecosystem, empowering your SAP environment to achieve new levels of efficiency in patient care.

SAP healthcare solutions can be automated and orchestrated

SAP environments can be incredibly powerful tools, pulling in wide-reaching swathes of data and functionality. The following is only a partial list of the solutions that SAP provides:

• Drug safety and compliance
• Patient administration and billing
• Patient management
• PPE and other medical supply logistics
• Employee payroll and benefits administration
• Human resource management (staffing and training)

As powerful as a hospital’s SAP environment may be, the platform won’t reach full potential without automation and orchestration.

Aspects of every module listed above can benefit from automation. Doing so aids the organization in achieving cost-efficiency goals and smooths the process of administrating the host of applications in use by both staff and patients.

Automation also enables higher agility. IT administrators can make swift changes based on demand, and they achieve significant scalability. Once the team builds automation in a module, that module can scale and even exist as multiple environments with little to no direct human interaction.

At SMA Technologies, our automation platform, OpCon, integrates well with SAP. Below we’ll focus on just three areas: how OpCon enhances billing, patient flow, and application orchestration in SAP Healthcare.

OpCon automation enhances billing in SAP healthcare

SAP’s enterprise resource planning and finance modules have as their goal to “unify business processes and data with finance at the core.” Across their entire ERP suite, organizations see an average 50% reduction in manual processes, according to SAP. Organizations realize even more significant time savings in accounting and financial close, as well.

In billing, revenue management, and accounts receivable, SAP tools enable healthcare organizations to lower expenses from uncollectable accounts by an average of 50%. The platform supports the usage-based models that are most common in Healthcare as well as the complex billing realities unique to the industry.

SAP does all this with some automation already built in. But to get the most out of the billing experience, you need workflow automation software that can orchestrate all the modules and processes together.

This is what OpCon does to enhance billing in the SAP healthcare environment. Instead of creating isolated automated workflows within specific SAP modules, OpCon Automation users create repeatable, reliable workflows that can access multiple modules. Users can manage these workflows from a single platform, using them to integrate billing with other SAP modules in whatever ways make sense for the organization.

OpCon Automation Enhances Patient Flow in SAP Healthcare

SAP offers many tools that can enhance the patient experience to create a seamless patient experience built on value-based care. Think of patient flow like a customer journey, in a way: through all steps of the patient’s journey in the healthcare system, the patient has a quality experience and feels well cared for.

This patient journey starts with both patient and provider engagement. It progresses through the diagnosis, care, and recovery phases and then proceeds to patient administration and billing.

The opportunities for missteps along a patient’s journey are many. At nearly every point in the process, a single missed communication can derail patient flow and negatively influence customer experience.

The more automation a healthcare system can build into the patient flow process, the fewer opportunities for missing those crucial patient and provider communications.

Here too, OpCon Automation extends SAP’s existing capabilities. OpCon empowers users to build workflows that transcend departments, systems, and modules. Users can customize patient flow to whatever degree makes sense for their organization.

OpCon automation enhances application orchestration in SAP healthcare

To make the most of your SAP Healthcare environment, you need more than the ability to automate. You also need the tools to orchestrate various modules, automation, and processes together into a powerful, multifaceted workflow.

As a SOAP integrated with SAP, OpCon Automation is an ideal tool for Healthcare IT teams looking to orchestrate applications and workflows, creating powerful technology solutions that reduce manual work and save cost and time.

Interested in seeing what OpCon can do for you? Schedule a demo today.