Oracle fully On Tuesday, the company bought Cerner for $28.4 billion, prompting many to wonder what healthcare plans the tech giant might have in place after acquiring the No. 2 EHR provider.
Larry Ellison, chairman of the company’s board of directors and chief technology officer, shared the answer at the Oracle conference on Thursday. The future of healthcare broadcastingrevealed that the company was developing a nationwide database of anonymous health records.
The project aims to address a complaint health technologists have been expressing for a decade: how fragmentation of health data prevents caregivers from getting the information they need to provide effective treatment. Because hospitals and health systems must purchase and operate their own health data management systems, they cannot seamlessly exchange patient information with each other. Government efforts to regulate through interoperability are one way to address the problem.But the irony is that Oracle is The aim, Ellison said, is to overturn the hospital-centric approach of the EHR for a more patient-centric approach.
“We’re going to solve this problem by building a unified national health reference database on top of all these thousands of independent hospital databases,” he said. “We are building a system where the health records of all U.S. citizens exist not only at the hospital level, but also in a unified national health records database.”
Creating this anonymous universal patient record for all Americans could involve accessing patient information on Cerner’s competing EHR system, but Ellison didn’t address that. However, he noted that this is a lofty vision that may not be realized anytime soon.
The national database will be immediately updated with patient information to ensure clinicians have access to up-to-date patient information and public health officials can monitor trends in real time. However, Ellison assured that data privacy will be a priority. Oracle’s database will anonymize all patient data, and patients must agree to share their information so doctors and public health officials know who health records belong to.
Oracle’s new health records database will also touch upon the patient engagement system the company has been developing throughout the pandemic.The federal government was the first to use the system as it allowed some of the first Americans to get the Covid-19 vaccine share their experiences with national leaders.
Ellison said the “most interesting thing” about the pilot of Oracle’s patient engagement system is that it collected information proving that it is safe to vaccinate pregnant women against Covid-19.
Some people who shared their vaccination experience with the federal government became pregnant when they were vaccinated, even though they didn’t know it. The data they shared showed that pregnant women did not face more adverse effects than the general population.Based on these data, U.S. regulators are able to declare that it is safe to vaccinate pregnant women, even though they have no data on the vaccination of pregnant women Pfizer or Moderna were the first two companies to develop a Covid vaccine.
Oracle is now investigating the ability of patient engagement systems to gather information from wearables and home diagnostic devices. Once these capabilities are established, Ellison said, the system will create a two-way channel so that patients’ vital signs can be communicated immediately and their physicians can respond quickly to changes in medications or care plans.
Inspired by the insights patient engagement systems provide to governments, Ellison said the combination of wearables will allow more people to participate in trials, further advancing clinical research.
“You don’t have to be in Boston, New York or Los Angeles to participate in a clinical trial,” he said. “You can share this information in rural hospitals with your doctors and with people doing clinical trials. So it gives us a more diverse population in clinical trials.”
Ellison declared that Oracle and Cerner’s joint technology has the potential to revolutionize the way U.S. health data is stored and exchanged, by centralizing all Americans’ health records in one place and facilitating patient participation in their health maintenance, he said Oracle is helping Healthcare provides the tools professionals need to create better health outcomes.
Justin Sullivan, Getty Images
