The health of any organization depends on the health of its people. That is why SAP takes a holistic approach to wellness, both for our employees and our customers. We were a forerunner in understanding the links among well-being, motivation and employees’ ability to innovate. By understanding these links, we not only create healthy work environments, but we also foster innovative thinking that ultimately serves the health care industry. SAP’s solutions enable providers to deliver data-driven, value-based personalized care.

As the working world becomes more fast paced, complex and global, we believe that an effectivework-life balance must be a component of preventative care. In our experience, well-balanced people perform at peak effectiveness. In support of this, we offer our employees nontraditional options like flexible working conditions, sabbaticals and virtual training on stress resilience and work-life balance. SAP also offers employees a full complement of more traditional, competitive health care benefits and programs to manage individual health and wellness, including access to employee assistance programs and sponsored medical checkups as well as onsite gym facilities, sports courses and medical offices.

The relationship between stress management and peak performance is so critical to driving innovation that it is one of the key social indicators covered in our Annual Integrated Report. Every year, we use an index of questions to measure the cultural conditions that support employees’ health and work-life balance. In 2013, we surpassed our goal on this index.

Our employees’ ability to innovate has resulted in software solutions for the health care industry — solutions that help the world run better and patients live healthier lives. SAP’s solutions allow providers to zero in on individual patient needs, collaborate and achieve better outcomes. They can achieve this all while optimizing their operations in real time. In recognition of these accomplishments, last year, the White House honored SAP, alongside Stanford Medical School and the German National Center for Tumor Diseases, for genomics advances enabled by SAP HANA — the fastest data analytics platform in the world.

SAP also is helping the health care industry reduce costs, increase efficiency and provide better patient outcomes with a completely integrated health care platform — from embedded analytics, to smart mobile apps, to availability in the cloud — all powered by SAP HANA.

Innovations like SAP HANA are only possible when our people are able to perform at their best. By starting with the philosophy that work-life balance drives innovation, SAP enables employees to create solutions that help the health care industry run better. When we provide employees with the means to create better workplace outcomes, they provide better outcomes to our health care customers.