Oracle broadcasts latest AI-powered electronic health record

Oracle unveiled a brand-new electronic health record on Tuesday, its most important health-care product update since acquiring the medical records giant Cerner for $28 billion in 2022. 

An electronic health record, or an EHR, is a digital version of a patient’s medical history that is updated by doctors and nurses over time. EHR software will be complex and cumbersome for clinicians to make use of, nevertheless it’s change into an integral component of the fashionable U.S. health-care system.   

Oracle’s latest EHR is supplied with cloud and artificial intelligence capabilities that may make it easier to navigate and arrange, the corporate said. There aren’t any menus or drop-down screens, and doctors can pull up the data they need by asking questions with their voices. Ideally, this may allow doctors to spend less time looking through records and more time caring for patients, Oracle said. 

“It is not only a scribe. It is not an assistant. It’s almost like having your personal resident,” Seema Verma, executive vp and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, told CNBC in an interview. 

Oracle’s latest offering could help boost its position inside the fiercely competitive EHR market, where it has struggled to keep up its footing lately. In 2023, Oracle saw its largest net hospital loss on record while market leader Epic Systems, Oracle’s top rival, was the one company that saw a net increase in acute care market share, in response to a report from KLAS Research.

Cerner contributed $5.9 billion to Oracle’s total revenue in fiscal 2023. Epic generated $4.9 billion in revenue last 12 months. 

The brand new EHR has been within the works since Oracle acquired Cerner, nevertheless it was not built on top of Cerner’s existing infrastructure, Verma said. Which means current Cerner customers could have to determine whether to migrate to the separate system.

“Just take into consideration crumbling infrastructure in a house, you are not going to place latest things on top of it,” she said. “That was the conclusion that we got here to once we checked out the Cerner technology, so what we’re introducing to the market is something that is brand latest.”

Suhas Uliyar, Oracle’s senior vp for product management in clinical and health-care AI, walked CNBC through a virtual demo of the brand new EHR. He showcased what it’d appear to be for a physician to get up to the mark, reply to messages and fill prescriptions ahead of a day packed stuffed with patient visits.  

The EHR is browser based, and physicians will see a search bar and a chronological list of their appointments after they open it. The interface may be very easy. A health care provider can click on the microphone within the search bar and ask questions like, “What number of openings do I actually have for today?” or “What number of latest patients do I actually have on schedule for today?” The doctor will then get an AI-generated answer inside seconds. 

If a physician clicks on a patient, they’ll open their chart, where they will find AI summaries in addition to more detailed explanations of their medical history. The physician can see what’s modified for the reason that patient’s last visit, whether or not they’re taking any latest medication and other details like lab results, clinical documentation, past treatments, risk aspects, messages, allergies and vitals. 

Moreover, the doctor can click the microphone and ask patient-specific questions like “Has she ever complained about panic attacks or shortness of breath?,” “Has he had a CT screening for lung cancer, and are his vaccinations up thus far?” or “Which antibiotics have you ever treated her urinary tract infection with?”

“It’s going through the whole history, all of the records, and it gives me a really specific answer,” Uliyar said. “I didn’t must go scroll through 15 different documents and find that.” 

The voice-activated questions can construct on each other, and the EHR’s AI will begin to learn the doctor’s habits, just like the sorts of medications they prescribe and refill often. Even when Uliyar stumbled over his words or didn’t phrase an issue exactly right, the system still pulled up the data he was searching for.   

If a physician desires to go into more detail or double-check an AI-generated answer inside the latest EHR, they will all the time click on the citation and glance through the unique record that is referenced, Uliyar said. And answers that include content like medication dosage information or other evidence-based recommendations will link to validated databases, he added.  

While Oracle has been developing its latest EHR, the corporate has also been rolling out features to existing Cerner customers to attempt to improve their experience with the product. Uliyar said lots of these features, including Oracle Health Clinical AI Agent (formerly called Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant), are already embedded inside the latest EHR. 

Oracle announced the overall availability of Clinical AI Agent in June, and it goals to automate much of the documentation that doctors are liable for. 

Physicians can access the Clinical AI Agent through an app on their phone, and so they hit a button to record their visits with patients. Once they stop recording, Oracle’s AI mechanically generates a clinical note based on the appointment, so the doctors not need to write down it themselves. 

Around 70 customers are already using the Clinical AI Agent, Uliyar said. The corporate is currently constructing an identical tool for nurses. 

Because the Clinical AI Agent is already embedded inside the latest EHR, customers won’t must worry about integrating it. The tool may even remain available as a stand-alone product that is EHR agnostic, Uliyar said. 

The early adopter program for Oracle’s latest EHR begins next 12 months, and Oracle said it should work with customers to find out the customizations they need. The corporate has been moving its health-care customers to the cloud, so that ought to make the EHR implementation process much easier, Verma said.

“We see it as very disruptive to the market,” she said. “Our EHR goes to resolve a variety of long-standing problems that we have had in health care.”