It was only five months ago that a team of people from Berlin’s Charité hospital met with a development group from SAP but quickly Charité saw an opportunity to improve patient care through mobile technology. In short order, the hospital became a pilot customer for the SAP Electronic Medical Record mobile app. Speaking at a panel discussion on The Mobilized Enterprise at SAPPHIRE NOW from Madrid, Martin Peuker, Charité’s CIO talked about the hospital’s vision of “personalized medicine” – a vision of enhancing the quality of patient treatment while making the clinical process more efficient.

The developers from SAP joined the nurses and physicians of Charité on their grand rounds to see how they worked before they started to build the app. This insight gave the SAP developers the insight they needed to design a user-friendly app with the medical staff as users in mind. In three months Charité was productive in three departments at the hospital with over 200 iPads running SAP Electronic Medical Record. “We’ve never seen project lead times like this before” says Peuker. Now the medical staff has traded clipboards for iPads, giving them access to huge volumes of patient information, and enabling them to make faster diagnoses and to give the patients better beside care. (Watch the Charité customer testimonial.)

As host to Peuker at SAPPHIRE NOW , SAP Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe must have been proud to hear the Charité CIO say “the future of healthcare is mobile.” But then SAP itself is going mobile, thanks to the widespread deployment of thousands of mobile devices including iPads, iPhones, and RIM PlayBooks – an effort driven by CIO Oliver Bussmann. Today SAP has more than 11,500 iPads in use, making it the third largest enterprise deployment of iPads globally. Snabe described how the SAP Executive Board has replaced thick binders of printed material with mobile decision-making at their monthly meetings. He noted too that with the sales, consulting, and support staff equipped with mobile devices, SAP is changing its ability to deliver value at the customer site.

Attending the same panel discussion were David McCue, CIO, CSC Corporation, and Raj Nathan, head of Mobile Applications at SAP. McCue happily shared his security recommendations with other CIOs on BYOD – bring your own device – strategies. CSC was named by Fortune magazine as one of the world’s most admired companies for information technology services and recently went live on SAP CRM Sales for more than 500 global sales reps on iPhone and BlackBerry smartphones giving them access to information quickly and securely. McCue says that while the sales team had positive feedback to the rollout, they want even more access to more information, sliced and diced in different ways for different audiences. He reinforces the importance of a mobile strategy, saying, “People don’t bring laptops on two to three day business trips anymore. They can enter sales updates or reference materials on iPads, iPhones or Androids.” (Watch the CSC customer testimonial.)

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