Spire Healthcare is a leading provider of private healthcare, with 38 hospitals and 10 clinics throughout the UK. The company is built on a proud heritage of over 25 years’ experience of running successful private hospitals and specialist clinics.
Spire employs over 7,600 people nationwide and treats over 930,000 patients each year. They work with over 3,000 of the country’s most experienced consultant surgeons and other specialists to deliver tailored, personalized care to patients.
As one of the UK’s leading healthcare service providers, Spire face an unprecedented challenge – balancing high-quality healthcare services with increased government regulations, rising patient expectations and a demand for cost control.
As part of a systems modernization program, started in early 2012, Spire has embarked on the implementation of SAP solutions for their back office administration. The SAP solution being implemented includes SAP Enterprise Resource Planning, SAP Supply Chain and SAP IS-H.
SAP IS-H is a state-of-the-art software solution tailored to the specific standards, processes and unique challenges of the healthcare industry. It supports patient management, medical and nursing documentation, and patient accounting, and integrates these with evaluations of patient and hospital data that can be used both internally and externally.
IS-H works in unison with SAP’s best business practices and process, alongside SAP back office applications and has been developed from many years of working with major global healthcare providers and industry leaders to help organizations such as Spire improve patient services.
Organizations such as Spire are under pressure from their respective partners, legislative bodies and patients to meet increasing compliance standards. The range of services they offer result in Spire being directly answerable to a number of bodies who all enforce different statutory regulations. As such, their systems, processes and reporting must comply with increasingly complex and ever-changing demands.
Experior, a QualiTest company, is an independent testing company – whose proven methodology, strategic partnerships and collaborative approach are industry benchmarks for the delivery of testing services for SAP with clear and tangible benefits. The quality and speed of access to patient data remains at the core of Spire’s business requirements. Any modification, upgrades or changes can introduce significant risks and require detailed planning, analysis and testing. Experior is working with Spire to re-think existing problems and provide innovative and creative solutions to mitigate the impact of any potentially disruptive processes.
Experior’s unique understanding of the Healthcare IT environment has allowed them to work closely with all stakeholders in the Spire organization, including their external Systems Integrators, project managers, the SAP IS-H development team and end users to ensure a positive outcome.
Spire is moving to SAP from a 15 year old legacy computer system. The SAP system being implemented comprises ECC6.0, IS-H, and BI – including Business Objects and Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC).
This project, the first implementation of IS-H in the UK, started with a ‘pilot’ installation for one hospital followed by the implementation of the remaining 36 sites going live successfully on April 2013.
Spire made extensive use of the HP LoadRunner performance tool together with Experior specialist SAP testing services in the pre live testing phases with great success. Experior consultants were deployed on site within days of the initial engagement and the SAP Account team were able to provide a temporary license key for LoadRunner which allowed Experior to immediately begin work defining the required performance scripts.
The performance tests immediately started to show some issues with the SAP systems performance. Spire is renowned for their high level of customer services and the data gained from the LoadRunner input enabled these problems to be quickly resolved.
Further analysis and remedial work has been on-going and Experior continued to provide advice and guidance on several subsequent issues.
This program of work proved to be a valuable learning experience – as the first IS-H implementation in the UK, responsive collaboration with the SAP development team was crucial.
As a result a large number of additional enhancements were implemented; many delivered as a direct result of the work done by Experior.
“During the latter stages of the performance testing undertaken, the ‘Clinical Report’ (a key report for each hospital operation), was found to be taking an excessively long time (minutes) to run which would have been unacceptable in the live system. The consultants took ownership of the issue and were instrumental in working closely with the SAP IS-H development team to deliver a fix which reduced the run-time down to below two seconds. The engagement has been a very positive experience.”
Sean Conroy, Head of IT Technical Strategy & Business Projects
