Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
Customer Solution Case Study
Doctors Improve Patient Healthcare With
Knowledge Management System
Overview
Country or Region: Germany
Industry: Healthcare
Customer Profile
The Asklepios Group, founded in 1984, has
become one of the largest clinical
operators in Germany, with a significant
healthcare portfolio abroad, including six
clinics in the United States.
Business Situation
Asklepios wanted to provide its own
doctors and GPs with efficient, innovative
support in the diagnostic and treatment
process.
Solution
SyynX Solutions developed a tool based on
Microsoft technologies to access and
search for central knowledge services and
professional publications with the doctor.
Benefits
 Doctors and clinicians share knowledge.
 Easier administration for patience care.
 Faster access to second opinions for
patients.
 External partners access in-house data.
 Expertise profiles for doctors online.
“Our treatment results on patient care depend directly
on the experience base of our doctors. Augmenting
and developing this wealth of knowledge is, therefore,
of central significance for Asklepios.”
Jörg Weidenhammer, Managing Director, LBK Hamburg
The Asklepios Group operates hospitals and highly specialised
rehabilitation clinics in Germany and the United States. With the
partial privatisation of LBK Hamburg in 2004, Asklepios became,
according to its own data, the largest German clinical operator with
a significant commitment abroad. Asklepios wanted to provide its
own doctors and general practitioners with efficient, innovative
support in the diagnostic and treatment process. It developed a
central knowledge and skills management system implemented as
SharePoint Web Parts using the Microsoft® eHealth Interoperability
Platform. Doctors providing treatment to patients can now receive
at any time case-specific information and contact data from the
appropriate specialist. They can also make more timely and
accurate clinical assessments. Furthermore, the group can use
profiles of its clinicians to show their medical competencies.
Situation
“Asklepios faces the
same challenge as all
clinics. It has access to
a network of specialists
working across the
whole country, but
without them
necessarily forming a
community.”
Uwe Pöttgen, Head of Central IT Services,
Asklepios Group
Founded in 1984, the Asklepios Group has
become the largest clinical operator in
Germany, with a significant healthcare
portfolio abroad, including six clinics in the
United States. It happened at the end of
2004 when, with the partial privatisation of
LBK Hamburg, Asklepios became, according
to its own data, the largest German clinical
operator. The group currently has about
32,000 employees and 92 medical facilities
providing care for acute and sub-acute
medical conditions in Germany. In 2004,
together with LBK Hamburg, the Asklepios
Group took a stake in another large
healthcare organisation in Europe with seven
hospitals and more than 20 subsidiaries.
The Asklepios Group has responded fully to
recommended changes to the German
healthcare system outlined in
PricewaterhouseCoopers’s “HealthCast
2010” report, which identified clear
weaknesses in communications for
professionals, patients, and carers.
According to the report, the German
healthcare system requires significantly
closer cooperation among practitioners, more
intensive communications, and better crossinstitutional knowledge transfer. For a private
hospital group such as Asklepios, these
criteria are the relevant factors in remaining
competitive with state-of-the-art healthcare
support systems.
Asklepios was looking for a solution which
would make professional information, past
experience with patients, their disease
patterns, and treatment methods quickly
available to doctors. The solution needed to
be capable of integration into the Future
Hospital Programme, which involves a
partnership between Asklepios, Intel, and
Microsoft.
Solution
The Asklepios Group wants to ensure patient
care is improved by enhancing the efficiency
of treatment processes and reducing costs.
To achieve this goal, Asklepios worked with
Microsoft® Partner SyynX Solutions to
implement a knowledge and skills
management system for its hospitals
integrated in the eHealth Interoperability
Platform (eHIP).
To do this SyynX Solutions, a specialist in text
mining and text mining-based applications for
medicine and life sciences, developed a
solution for the automated, software-based
content analysis of medical and scientific text
documents which is based on the
Collexis.Fingerprint Core Engine. SyynX
developed a complex knowledge and skills
management suite based on Microsoft
technologies and the Collexis Fingerprint
Engine. It can access and search for central
knowledge services or scientific publications
and provide health professionals with
information push services with doctors.
It can be made available as a Web
application on the intranet or produced using
the Microsoft .NET Framework and Web
Parts, which ensure users access the SyynX
information system through the portal.
The SyynX Solutions deployment for Asklepios
uses an interlocking stack of Microsoft
technologies:
● Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007
for the collaboration functions and shared
spaces
● Windows Server® 2003 for the operating
system
● Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 for the
database
Benefits
The Asklepios Group is using the fingerprint
based solutions from SyynX integrated in
SharePoint Server 2007 to help its doctors
and clinicians to share knowledge. These
benefits have also been extended to external
partners including general practitioners (GPs)
who send patients to the group’s clinics. The
new system provides fast clinic-wide and
case related support to doctors. It also
significantly simplifies quality assurance
irrespective of location.
“The system helps
doctors provide the
requisite medical quality
and offers additional
service, particularly to
GPs.”
Uwe Pöttgen, Head of Central IT Services,
Asklepios Group
Shared Knowledge Helps Doctors Improve
Patient Outcomes
As a cross-regional healthcare operator, the
Asklepios Group shares its knowledge across
many different locations. In all its clinics, the
quality of patient care depends on its
employees’ knowledge and experience.
Expertise is spread across hundreds of
specialist departments. However, doctors are
increasingly facing multiple diseases, which
do not necessarily fall within the specialist
field of the doctor who happen to be on duty.
Uwe Pöttgen, Head of Central IT Services for
the Asklepios Group, says: “Asklepios faces
the same challenge as all clinics. It has
access to a network of specialists working
across the whole country, but without them
necessarily forming a community.”
Project partners are thus confronted with the
question of how they can support doctors
with virtual-knowledge services when treating
patients. At the Asklepios Barmbek Clinic in
Hamburg, Germany, the eHealth
Interoperability Platform based on SharePoint
Portal Server—is already functioning as the
central IT environment on which all
applications connected with clinical
knowledge are to be based.
Expertise Profiles Are Available Online for All
Doctors
In the project’s first phase, SyynX used the
analysis of publications and documents as
well as fingerprint technology to draw up
expert profiles for all doctors working in the
Asklepios Group.
SyynX used the Collexis Fingerprint engine to
analyse publications and documents, to draw
up the expert profiles for all doctors. The
group uses these profiles for external
presentation of their skills on the Internet.
Internally they are valuable for creating a
map of medical knowledge, which is called
upon by doctors in different departments.
As the second phase in the project, SyynX
designed a virtual reference book in
SharePoint Portal Server. With the Asklepios
Group “Knowledge Guide” as a “Who Knows
What?”, employees can, as required and
within just a few seconds, draw on the
experience of a colleague for advice on a
disease, diagnosis, or therapy, even if they
were unaware at the time that the doctor in
question worked in another Asklepios clinic.
Once set up, these expert profiles are
automatically updated, so interviews and
time-consuming data-maintenance
procedures are no longer needed. At the
same time, with the “Knowledge Guide,”
doctors can also consult the skills profiles for
whole departments or particular individual
locations. In this way, the system supports
the top decision-makers at Asklepios in line
with their needs in relation to skills
management.
In the next stage, the clinic has opened an
online library that provides Asklepios
employees with access to external knowledge
resources without their having to initiate timeconsuming procedures to obtain them. The
online library is also being created digitally as
a SharePoint Portal Web Part, which offers
users strategically linked external and
internal knowledge.
Jörg Weidenhammer, Managing Director at
LBK Hamburg, says: “Our treatment results in
patient care depend directly on the
experience base of our doctors. Augmenting
and developing this wealth of knowledge is,
therefore, of central significance to
Asklepios.”
Through the online library, doctors receive
medical journals as required, as well as ebooks and news. An added advantage of the
SyynX intelligently incorporated Collexis
Fingerprint core engine is the linking of
internal skills with external knowledge
resources. If Asklepios employees call up an
article from a medical journal, for example,
they will automatically be shown details of
colleagues who have the appropriate skills
covered by the article. For direct contact with
the specialist, they need only dial the
corresponding telephone number or send an
e-mail message.
Finally, the SyynX Clinical Consult application
offers doctors the Information-Push Service,
which provides them with appropriate
professional articles and guidelines for the
patient currently receiving treatment. The
system simultaneously makes suggestions
for refined searches, which the doctor can
use to adapt to the results of that particular
patient’s condition. The medication
prescribed to the patient can be added by a
mouse click, and the system then delivers the
specific expert information for the product’s
composition.
External Partners Benefit from In-House
Experience
The knowledge and skills management
system also helps to strengthen cooperation
with GPs. The Asklepios clinics can make
areas of their applications available to
external partners through their doctors’
portal.
In addition to the infrastructure services for
the exchange of patient data, cross-sector
medical knowledge is also available in the
doctor portal to bring together experts in
outpatient and inpatient treatment at both
the professional and personal levels. Pöttgen
says: “Up to now, we weren’t even able to
exchange master data on patients with their
GPs on a compatible and seamless basis.”
By converting to the Health Interoperability
Platform GPs now use the Asklepios Group’s
central services through the doctors’ portal
and, following authentication, can access the
data produced inside the clinic. People able
to identify themselves with PIN and PKI
Smartcard codes will, for instance, receive
the examination results for their patients.
Doctors working alongside Asklepios can
enjoy virtual knowledge services in the form
of the Clinical-Consult Solution and the online
library.
The contributing doctors receive the relevant
guidelines and professional articles searched
for through SyynX Clinical Consult and
likewise for their own patients. At the same
time, partners can access parts of the
Asklepios online library and, for no charge,
use the professional publications available
worldwide in full text. “The system helps
doctors provide the requisite medical quality
and offers additional service, particularly to
GPs,” says Pöttgen.
Patients Gain Easier Access to Second
Opinions
In future, the group also wants to handle
hospitalisation procedures itself along with its
partners. There are plans for a second
opinion service to exchange data with the
doctor through SharePoint Portal Server to
learn what a colleague thinks of laboratory
diagnostic findings, ECG results, or
radiography results.
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For more information about SyynX
Solutions products and services, call + 49
(0) 221 162520-60 or visit the Web site at:
www.syynx.de/
For more information about Asklepios
Group products and services, call + 49 (0)
3303 522404 or visit the Web site at:
www.asklepios.com
Software and Services

© 2007 Microsoft Corporation. MICROSOFT MAKES NO
WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published January 2007
Products
− Microsoft Internet Security and
Acceleration Server 2005
− Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal
Server 2007
− Microsoft SQL Server 2005
− Windows Server 2003