Dive Brief:
Oracle will launch a new artificial intelligence-backed electronic health record next year, the technology giant said Tuesday.
The EHR will allow clinicians to use voice for navigation and search. It will also integrate the company’s clinical AI agent and tools for data analysis and tracking patient flow through the hospital.
The new record marks a major health initiative for Oracle, which acquired EHR vendor Cerner for more than $28 billion in 2022. “This isn’t a refurbished Cerner EHR,” Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, said during the Oracle Health Summit on Tuesday. “Because in this day and age, you can’t leverage modern technology by bolting new innovation to something built in the 1990s.”
Dive Insight:
The new EHR is designed to embed AI across the clinical workflow, with features like voice search and navigation aimed at helping clinicians more easily find patient information like recent vitals or labs, the technology giant said in a press release.
The EHR would provide AI-backed summaries too, aiming to better organize patient information so clinicians spend less time digging through charts. Additionally, it will include Oracle’s AI agent, which can draft clinical documentation, propose next steps like lab tests and follow-up visits, and pull data from notes to automate coding.
The record will also integrate Oracle Health Data Intelligence — a data analytics product that aggregates patient information from thousands of sources — and the company’s command center, which helps health systems track patient status in the hospital and provider staffing, Oracle said.
“It’s a misnomer to even call it an EHR, because it’s no longer a record-keeping system, but instead it’s a dynamic, evolving system of intelligence that spurs action to ensure better patient outcomes,” Verma said during the summit.
The new EHR comes more than two years after Oracle dove deep into healthcare with its Cerner purchase.
In April, Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison said the company plans to move its headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee, to be close to other healthcare sector giants.
On Monday, Oracle Health said it would apply to become a Qualified Health Information Network under the federal government’s health data exchange framework, TEFCA.
However, the Cerner unit has faced financial challenges — executives have called the segment a headwind on recent earnings calls.
Oracle is also managing the beleaguered rollout of a new EHR at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Cerner received the contract to modernize the agency’s record in 2018, but the deployment has been beset by technical issues and patient safety concerns.
Meanwhile, Epic, the nation’s largest EHR vendor, grew market share in acute care in 2023, while Oracle saw its largest net hospital loss on record, according to a report published this spring by Klas Research.
