SAP on Tuesday unwrapped a pair of new products for precision medicine. 

The enterprise software vendor is not new to precision or personalized medicine and neither are rivals such as Oracle and to a certain extent Microsoft. 

SAP's new wares, Foundation for Health and Medical Research Insights, are built on top of its HANA in-memory computing platform.

"The primary focus is to improve research and clinical outcomes," said SAP vice president of personalized medicine Dinesh Vandayar.

To that end, Foundation for Health is a warehouse for clinical and genomics data, Vandayar added, that also brings models and ontologies specific to healthcare, as well as capabilities crucial to medicine, such as natural language processing. HANA stores the data and Foundation for Health processes and normalizes it for healthcare.

SAP Medical Insights, for its part, is an application that runs on Foundation for Health and enables users to analyze data for research, population health, clinical trials, drug development and the software can present results in a visual fashion to help identify trends or patterns.

Whereas SAP counts major health systems including Baylor, Johns Hopkins and Sutter among its HANA users, thus far organizations using early iterations of Foundation for Health and Medical Insights are consortium's including the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the National Center for Tumor Diseases. ASCO, for instance, worked with SAP to develop the CancerLinQ platform to help doctors tap into data sources to create personalized treatment regiments.

"Our vision is really to create a health network enabling personalized medicine," said David Delaney, MD, chief medical officer of SAP. "If you look at the current market and the entities supporting medicine in general, there's really no free exchange of information between these parties."

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