Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, is collaborating with Oracle on a new project to advance healthcare access, innovation and education in Middle Tennessee and beyond.
The news was announced at the Oracle Health Summit at the end of last month. The historically Black college and the software giant plan to establish a joint research collaborative focused on precision medicine and health informatics as well as a health innovation hub plus a community care and wellness center.
“The work that Oracle has done globally … focused on health and health outcomes made them a logical partner for Meharry,” Dexter Samuels, senior vice president for student affairs and executive director at Meharry’s Center for Health Policy, told Fierce Healthcare.
The innovation hub will leverage Oracle’s cloud, AI and clinical apps with the goal of helping practitioners better understand how to improve outcomes and how tech can help execute on this mission. “It’ll really be a deeper dive in terms of patient data, because we need the data to understand how to improve the lives in the communities that we serve,” Samuels said.
The wellness center will give patients access to vaccines and basic services like getting blood pressure checked. Exactly who will have access is still being determined, Samuels said.
Through the partnership, access to Oracle’s EHR will be monumental for Meharry, according to Samuels. What that access will entail is still being fleshed out for Meharry and other local healthcare institutions. “You really need the data to help drive process improvement,” Samuels said.
Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison surprised many during the Oracle Health Summit earlier this year by announcing the company would move its world headquarters to Nashville. At the time, Ellison said it would not look like a standard corporate campus but rather a park with office buildings and a community clinic. The new East Bank Oracle headquarters is reportedly less than three miles from Meharry Medical College.
Meharry is focused on improving health equity by helping diverse communities enhance their well-being through innovative education, quality healthcare and leadership in health policy, Samuels explained. Oracle plans to help enhance Meharry’s goals through technology designed to enable students and residents to spend more time with and better understand patients.
“Our collaboration with Meharry Medical College is helping further our mission to transform the entirety of the healthcare industry,” Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager at Oracle Health and Life Sciences, said in a press release. “The research, technology, and skills we are cultivating will not only benefit the Nashville community but will have broad reach as students enter the workforce, applying the insights and understanding they’ve gained to shape the future of healthcare around the world.”
As a next step, Oracle and Meharry plan to engage community stakeholders in the weeks to come to help ensure their work is informed by regional healthcare providers, public officials, health plans, patient advocacy organizations and members of the community. Meharry is also looking into establishing an accountable care organization to expand its reach, Samuels said—that is, to have more attributed lives as part of its portfolio and add more physicians to its staff.
Meharry sees these sorts of agreements as crucial to an improved and more efficient healthcare system. “Technology can help improve [inefficiency]. You need the data to improve health outcomes, so it’s not logical if we don’t involve technology and these tech giants,” Samuels said. “To improve on our health and service systems, we have to partner with entities such as Oracle.”