Larry Ellison, co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corporation, delivered a speech at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on October 22, 2018.
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Oracle A new electronic health record was launched on Tuesday, the most significant healthcare product update since its $28 billion acquisition of medical records giant Cerner in 2022.
An electronic health record (EHR) is a digital version of a patient’s medical history that is updated over time by doctors and nurses. EHR software can be complex and cumbersome for clinicians to use, but it has become an integral part of the modern U.S. health care system.
Oracle’s latest electronic medical record is equipped with cloud and artificial intelligence capabilities that will make navigation and setup easier, the company said. There are no menus or pull-down screens, and doctors can get the information they need by asking questions via voice. Ideally, this would allow doctors to spend less time searching for records and more time caring for patients, Oracle said.
“It’s not just a scribe. It’s not an assistant. It’s almost like having your own residency,” Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, told CNBC.
Oracle’s new products could help bolster its position in the competitive electronic medical records market, which Oracle has struggled to maintain in recent years. Oracle posted its largest ever hospital net loss in 2023, while Oracle’s biggest competitor and market leader Epic Systems was the only company to see a net gain in acute care market share, according to a report. Klass Research.
Serna’s contribution $5.9 billion Proportion of Oracle’s total revenue in fiscal 2023.
Oracle co-founder and chairman Larry Ellison delivered a keynote speech at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, California on October 22, 2018.
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Verma said the new EHR has been in development since Oracle acquired Cerner, but it was not built on Cerner’s existing infrastructure. This means that current Cerner customers will have to decide whether to migrate to a separate system.
“If you think about the crumbling infrastructure in the house, you wouldn’t put new stuff on it,” she said. “That’s what we came to when we were working on Cerner’s technology, so what we’re bringing to the market is something completely new.”
Suhas Uliyar, Oracle’s senior vice president of clinical and healthcare artificial intelligence product management, showed CNBC a virtual demonstration of the new EHR. He shows doctors speeding up, answering messages and filling prescriptions before a day filled with patient visits.
The EHR is browser-based, and when doctors open it they see a search bar and a chronological list of appointments. The interface is very simple. Doctors can click on the microphone in the search bar and ask questions like “How many open positions are there today?” or “How many new patients do I plan to see today?” The doctor will then get an AI-generated answer within seconds.
If a doctor clicks on a patient, they’ll open their chart, where they can find an AI summary and a more detailed explanation of their medical history. Doctors can see what has changed since the patient’s last visit, whether they are taking any new medications and other details such as lab results, clinical documentation, past treatments, risk factors, information, allergies and vital signs.
In addition, doctors can click on the microphone to ask the patient specific questions, such as “Has she ever complained of panic attacks or shortness of breath?”, “Has he had a CT scan for lung cancer, and are his vaccinations up to date?” or “Which antibiotic did you use to treat her UTI?”
“It looked at the entire history, all the records, and it gave me a very specific answer,” Ullial said. “I don’t have to scroll through 15 different documents and find it.”
Voice-activated questions can be correlated, and the electronic medical record’s artificial intelligence will begin to learn doctors’ habits, such as the types of medications they prescribe and the types of medications they frequently refill. Even if Uriel stutters or doesn’t phrase his question quite correctly, the system still pulls up the information he’s looking for.
If doctors want more details or double-check AI-generated answers in the new EHR, they can always click on a citation and view the original record of the citation, Uliyar said. Answers that include things like drug dosing information or other evidence-based recommendations will be linked to a validated database, he added.
Traders work on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on July 12, 2023.
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While Oracle has been developing the new EHR, the company has also been rolling out new features to existing Cerner customers in an attempt to improve their experience with the product. Uliyar said many of these features, including clinical digital assistants, are already embedded in the new EHR.
Oracle announced the general rollout of Clinical Digital Assistant in June, with the goal of automating much of the documentation that physicians are responsible for.
Doctors can access the clinical digital assistant through an app on their phone and record patient visits with the push of a button. Once recording is stopped, Oracle’s artificial intelligence will automatically generate clinical records based on the appointment so that doctors can No more writing it yourself.
Uliyar said about 70 customers are already using Clinical Digital Assistant. The company is currently developing similar tools for nurse practitioners.
Because the clinical digital assistant is embedded in the new EHR, customers don’t need to worry about integration issues. Uliyar said the tool will also continue to be available as a standalone product unrelated to EHRs.
An early adopter program for Oracle’s new EHR will begin next year, and Oracle said it will work with customers to determine the customizations they need. Verma said the company has been moving its healthcare clients to the cloud, which will make the EHR implementation process easier.
“We think this is very disruptive to the market,” she said. “Our electronic medical records will solve many of the long-standing problems we have in health care.”
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