Evolving Patient Experience with SAP on Google Cloud  

“With the commitment of Managecore – a Protera Company and the advanced Google Cloud solutions, we are prepared to continue optimizing our internal processes and further improve patient experiences.” 

 - Karen Bollinger, VP of Business Applications 

Challenge 

Technology breakthroughs continue to revolutionize healthcare for everyone, from care providers and administrators to patients. With a focus on further improving the quality of care while keeping costs in check, hospitals, clinics, and other organizations always look to adopt the latest technologies. At the same time, healthcare providers must align processes to adhere to strict regulations that govern how patient data is managed. 

NextGen Healthcare has been helping medical doctors and dentists unlock the power of modern technologies for more than 20 years. The company gives providers tools that allow them to focus on patient care rather than administrative tasks such as billing and IT management. 

“Delivering solutions to healthcare providers was one of the last frontiers of technology,” says Karen Bollinger, VP of Business Applications at NextGen Healthcare. “Everything from lab results to clipboard notes during patient checkups is quickly going digital as providers strive to improve their practices and patient services. We offer a suite of solutions to simplify digital transformation for healthcare providers.” 

As a publicly traded company, NextGen Healthcare also faces its own set of stringent requirements especially when it comes to finance and accounting, essentially all of these processes run through SAP. NextGen Healthcare had long hosted its SAP applications on-prem, but wanted a more seamless, managed experience to keep its team, budget, and systems dedicated to building the best tools for healthcare providers. 

The company chose to run SAP on Google Cloud with the help of partner Managecore - a Protera company, a Google Cloud certified Premier Partner.

Enhancing the SAP Experience 

NextGen Healthcare recognized the importance of moving its SAP applications to a public cloud to achieve more intuitive, efficient experiences while reducing management workloads. It knew that it would need a best-in-breed cloud infrastructure provider along with the right partner to ensure high availability, accessibility, and security for its SAP apps. 

“You could think of SAP as my high-performing, luxury car – one that provides stellar driving experiences and comfort when given the right care,” says Karen. “Given the importance of SAP to our business, we needed the best gas and mechanic around. Google Cloud infrastructure provides us with that best-in-breed gas, and Managecore – a Protera company continues to prove itself as the best mechanic around.”  

NextGen Healthcare first engaged Managecore – a Protera company to support some of its security needs and instantly saw the benefits of working with a boutique partner that can provide more personalized service. 

For example, NextGen Healthcare rapidly gained new visibility into its IT environment, eliminating the complicated and hidden internal mechanism that stood in front of security. The increased transparency made experiences with SAP apps more predictable. 

“The level of service from Managecore – a Protera company is exceptional. They have a seasoned team of professionals who can answer all our questions,” says Karen. “They also constantly give us suggestions to improve how we run our enterprise apps, along with strong economic and risk evaluations to proactively guide us.” 

Managecore – a Protera company put in the time to understand NextGen Healthcare as deeply as possible so that they could speed responsiveness to requests. As a result, NextGen Healthcare is able to request tasks such as spinning up a sandbox, which can be completed in a day, as compared to three weeks in the company’s previous environment. 

“We are looking to sunset our SAP BusinessObjects instances. Instead of taking up my team’s time or having to reach out to another third party, we just asked Managecore – a Protera company to turn down Dev and QA. The whole thing was done in less than a day,” says Karen. “This is just one example of how Managecore – a Protera company and Google Cloud enable us to become far more agile and responsive.” 

Upgrading an Entire SAP Landscape 

NextGen Healthcare looked at several cloud infrastructure providers and decided on Google Cloud given its strong reputation for enabling exceptional availability of SAP apps. 

“Learning that Google Cloud also supports Google’s own IT environment was a big selling point for us,” says Karen. “It gives us a lot of confidence knowing that Google Cloud trusts its own infrastructure enough to stake its business on it. We knew we were choosing the best provider.” 

In addition, Google Cloud offered incentives to accelerate NextGen Healthcare’s SAP migration, with NextGen Healthcare tapping into the Google Cloud Acceleration Program (CAP) to support its move to SAP HANA. This enabled NextGen Healthcare to not only shift more of its workloads into SAP HANA but also economically upgrade service. 

Today, NextGen Healthcare’s SAP apps and modules, including:SAP HANA and ERP Central Component (ECC), Project System (PS), Materials Management (MM), and Finance and Controlling (FICO) run on Google Cloud, enabling efficient management of financials, payables, general ledger, AP/AR, and other vital processes.  

In all, NextGen Healthcare has slightly more than a 1 TB footprint in SAP enterprise apps, and that is growing at a rate of about 5 percent annually.  

By migrating its SAP workloads onto Google Cloud and putting more data into SAP HANA, NextGen Healthcare is seeing jobs complete 70 percent faster. 

“We had to get all of this done very fast, and the Google Cloud incentives along with support from Managecore – a Protera Company gave us everything we needed to complete the project on time,” says Karen. 

At the same time, the migration was taking place during the COVID-19 pandemic. Completing it also enabled employees to continue to interact efficiently and securely with SAP apps from home, just as they had prior to the pandemic. 

“We were able to securely access our infrastructure even when our teams had to begin working remotely. This illustrates the flexibility and performance of our new environment. Together, Managecore – a Protera company and Google Cloud helped us make this possible,” says Karen. 

Driving Further Innovation in Healthcare 

The agility that NextGen Healthcare has achieved through its use of SAP on Google Cloud and expert support from Managecore – a Protera comapny enables the company to keep innovating in the healthcare space. 

“In every industry, the gap between where you are as a company and your end customers has narrowed,” says Karen. “In healthcare, patients increasingly expect efficient and tech-driven experiences when interacting with providers. Our job is to make that possible. The entire doctor’s office experience has transformed with innovation and enhanced services as the way forward.” 

NextGen Healthcare is focused on a range of additional projects to improve patient experiences through better, more advanced tools, while expanding the ability to securely analyze and understand data.  

Given the ways in which provider-generated data informs public health initiatives, NextGen Healthcare is looking to use technology to enhance collaboration between providers and governments. 

“The possibilities in healthcare are incredible. Technology is increasingly central to enabling quality patient care and population wellness. With the commitment of Managecore – a Protera Company and the advanced Google Cloud solutions, we are prepared to continue optimizing our internal processes and further improve patient experiences.”