Merchants in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia can check in seconds if American customers are creditworthy, but overseas hospitals can’t readily see injured travelers’ medicines, blood type, and allergies, presenting a ripe technology market opportunity, Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison said.
“You can look at my credit card and determine that I can afford care,” Ellison said at the Oracle Health Summit customer conference in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 30. “But there’s no system that keeps track of our medical records that anyone can immediately find in an emergency. We have to unify all of that healthcare data.”
“We will have a much healthier population that has longer lifespans, a much better quality of life, better outcomes, and lower costs.”
During the conference, company executives demonstrated the next version of Oracle’s electronic health record system, showing how a doctor could click on a visiting patient’s profile to see her chart—with a generative AI summary at the top listing conditions and medications—then query an AI model about dosages, side effects, and notes from previous visits. The revamped EHR is due in 2025 for outpatient medical care.
Oracle also demonstrated how it’s applying AI and data analysis techniques to help doctors quickly glean information from the EHR software, as well as let government and pharmaceutical researchers mine genetic information alongside data about patients stored in the EHR to better target treatments.
Medical groups including New Jersey’s AtlantiCare, Montana’s Billings Clinic, and St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center in Idaho are using a generative AI–powered phone app called Oracle Health Clinical AI Agent to automate often time-consuming EHR note-taking and let doctors pull up patient information via spoken commands.
The company also introduced Oracle Health Patient Portal, a cloud service that lets patients exchange emails with their clinicians, search for new ones, schedule appointments, view their test results and prescriptions, pay their bills, and more. Another new product, Oracle Health Patient Administration, helps medical practices with patient intake and scheduling.
Hospital groups that paid millions of dollars for EHRs are tailoring them to do more than log procedures and examinations for scheduling and billing. They’re incorporating information about patients’ living situations and ability to care for themselves. They’re flagging in the EHR pertinent new medical research, and they’re providing the ability to share information with other hospitals, medical practices, and pharmacies as US insurers shift from reimbursing for itemized procedures to paying doctors for complete courses of treatment and follow-up care.
During an onstage discussion with Sir John Bell, president of the Ellison Institute of Technology’s Oxford facility and a former professor of medicine at Oxford University, Ellison said EHR software should go beyond recordkeeping and work in unison with other key medical data. For example, it should be able to help doctors find patients with similar genetically predisposed responses to certain drugs and search medical journal libraries for potential treatments suited to their profiles.
“All of that’s going to be immediately available to the doctor,” Ellison said, so that a clinic in a remote US Western state can have the same information access as one at a major metropolitan cancer treatment center.
Oracle, which acquired EHR developer Cerner for $28 billion in 2022, is combining a technical overhaul of that software with tools to help clinical researchers glean insights from data sets about diseases and help pharmaceutical companies better assemble study panels.
The upcoming Oracle Health EHR, rearchitected to take advantage of the high performance and advanced security of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), is being designed to let doctors use natural language typed queries to quickly navigate to different points in patients’ charts to see active problems and their histories. It is planned to also summarize relevant information for a case along a timeline, filtering out data that’s not germane. An early adopter program is slated to start next year.
Customers that run Oracle’s existing EHR will have an upgrade path to comparable functions in the coming version at no additional cost. They will receive tools to assist with migrating to the next version, and they will be able to personalize AI-driven processes in the EHR so broad customizations may not be necessary.
Oracle also released software called Analytics Intelligence for Life Sciences, which offers researchers tools for measuring the efficacy of treatments and drug safety by tapping into disease, treatment, and genetic databases.
The combination of genetically targeted therapies, machines capable of reading longer DNA sequences and accessing new parts of the genome, and AI techniques to match patients to effective treatments can lead to better compliance with doctors' orders and better results, Ellison said at the conference.
“We will have a much healthier population that has longer lifespans, a much better quality of life, better outcomes, and lower costs,” Ellison said. “The patient’s much happier, and so are the taxpayers.”
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