Oracle Health plans to release a next-gen electronic health record platform in 2025 featuring the company's latest cloud and AI capabilities, executives announced Tuesday.
The new EHR platform will incorporate Oracle's clinical AI agent, voice-activated navigation and search capabilities as well as Oracle Health Data Intelligence. That AI and analytics solution integrates patient data from thousands of sources, including clinical, claims, social determinants and pharmacy.
The EHR platform is built from the ground up on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the company said, is designed to embed AI across the entire clinical workflow. The use of AI will automate processes, put information at providers' fingertips at the point of care and simplify appointment prep, documentation, and follow up for physicians and staff, according to the company.
Speaking at the Oracle Health Summit in Nashville, where the company plans to move its headquarters, Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager at Oracle Health and Life Sciences, said the EHR platform will "no longer be a record-keeping system but instead of dynamic, evolving system of intelligence that spurs action to ensure better patient outcomes."
"The speed that we have built this new EHR is an engineering triumphant," Verma told the audience at the event.
"For providers, it's not a scribe or an assistant, it's the doctor's best resident, the administrator's most productive analyst, the researcher's best trial recruiter and the payer's most efficient partner in reviewing and authorizing treatment and payment," she said.
Oracle acquired health IT company Cerner in a $28 billion deal in June 2022 to push deeper into the healthcare market and help boost its cloud business. The company rebranded the Cerner business Oracle Health.
During earnings calls, Larry Ellison, Oracle chairman and chief technology officer, told investors the company is in the process of transitioning Cerner to the cloud and is upgrading and modernizing Millennium "a piece at a time" to go after a bigger piece of the healthcare ecosystem.
The software giant has been building out generative AI tools in its healthcare solutions, including a gen AI-based clinical assistant. Oracle also has been leveraging its cloud capabilities to build out the Health Data Intelligence platform, formerly called HealtheIntent, as a suite of cloud applications, services and analytics.
Verma noted that most EHRs were built in the 90s and are "ill-equipped to meet the complex security requirements and clinical needs of today’s healthcare networks, practitioners and patients."
She said the new Oracle Health EHR will use AI to "seamlessly permeate the clinical workflow from beginning to end" to bring "powerful insights and automation to every process."
"Today's EHRs dictate workflows that force providers to deliver care in a one-size-fits-all approach. The new EHR will empower providers to create personalized workflows that adapt to change," Verma said.
As Oracle Health Data Intelligence will be embedded in to the EHR, this technology can suggest personalized care plans that match the genetic makeup and lifestyle choices of each patient to help reduce trial-and-error treatments, increase patient engagement, and support healthier outcomes, executives said.
Verma stressed that the platform is not a "refurbished Cerner EHR," but a reinvention of a digital medical record system.
"You can’t bolt new innovation onto something built in the 1990s," she said.
The new EHR platform will incorporate Oracle's clinical AI agent, voice-activated navigation and search capabilities as well as Health Data Intelligence (HDI), providing access to a longitudinal patient record that bring in data from 300 data sources. "This enables users to conduct sophisticated analytics and benchmarking," Verma noted.
The platform also will incorporate capabilities for value-based care operations and integrate with Oracle Health Command Center to give healthcare organizations insight into patient throughput, staffing, and resource allocation. The EHR is also designed to help streamline information exchange between payers and providers, support patient recruitment for clinical trials, simplify regulatory compliance, optimize financial performance, and help accelerate the adoption of value-based care, company executives said.
The software giant also made several other announcements Tuesday.
Oracle unveiled two new cloud applications designed to make it easier for consumers to manage their healthcare and for front desk staff to support them. A new patient portal enables patients to securely review and share their health information to manage their own care, executives said. A new patient administration tool is a modern front-office solution that simplifies patient intake, registration, scheduling, and appointment confirmation.
On the interoperability front, the company announced that it intends to begin the process to become a Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN) as a part of the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA). Becoming a QHIN will allow Oracle Health to directly enable its healthcare customers to participate in the U.S. government’s nationwide approach to enable standardized sharing of health information between providers and payers, pharmaceutical companies, and government agencies.
The network is being designed to support data types that are not typically available in other exchanges, such as X-rays and MRIs.
“As a longtime champion of giving patients control over their data, Oracle Health continues to demonstrate its commitment to making data more available, useful, and secure,” Verma said Tuesday. “As we progress through the TEFCA QHIN application process, Oracle will continue to lead the industry in providing solutions that help reduce costs and complexity and improve the utility of information for patients and providers.”
While on stage Tuesday, Verma also took the opportunity to throw some shade at a competitor regarding efforts to advance data sharing in the healthcare industry.
During her time as administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) from 2017 to 2021, Verma said Cerner and other vendors consistently showed a commitment to comply with interoperability regulations.
"Other EHR companies pushed back viciously to protect profits. I think that is a shameful, epic failure in judgment," she said Tuesday.
In May, an Oracle executive, Ken Glueck, executive vice president, wrote in a blog post that "Epic’s CEO Judy Faulkner is the single biggest obstacle to EHR interoperability." The blog post was in response to a news report about Oracle's $28 billion acquisition of Cerner.