Oracle intends to affix TEFCA, company says

Oracle on Monday announced it intends to affix a recent federally-backed medical network that can make it easier for clinics, hospitals and insurance firms to share patients’ data.

The network, called the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, or TEFCA, launched in December. Oracle, which acquired the medical records giant Cerner for $28 billion in 2022, is the most recent major vendor to support TEFCA, joining its chief rival Epic Systems.

Oracle must be approved to affix TEFCA, but its interest in doing so helps to bolster the nascent network’s credibility. It also suggests that TEFCA may achieve ushering in a recent standard for data-sharing practices across the health-care industry.

Sharing medical records between different hospitals, clinics and health-care organizations is a notoriously complex process. Health-care data is stored in a wide range of formats across dozens of various vendors, making it difficult for doctors and other providers to simply access all of the relevant data about their patients.

“That is only a natural next step,” Seema Verma, executive vp and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, told CNBC in an interview. “We are usually not into information blocking. We do not have that status.”

Oracle’s competitor, Epic, has long been accused of dragging its feet around interoperability efforts, and Oracle has not been afraid to call the corporate out. In a May blog post, Ken Glueck, executive vp at Oracle, wrote, “Everyone within the industry understands that Epic’s CEO Judy Faulkner is the only biggest obstacle to EHR [electronic health record] interoperability.”

“Epic hopes that today’s Oracle Health announcement indicates that they’re finally able to take interoperability seriously—and to deliver the technology that patients and providers deserve as a substitute of creating distracting, unfaithful statements,” Epic said in a release Monday.

Several corporations and organizations have previously tried to streamline health-care information exchange, but TEFCA was designed to assist bring all of those players together on a national scale. The network’s ultimate goal is to finally standardize the legal and technical requirements for sharing patients’ data.

The predominant groups that take part in health-data exchanges through TEFCA are called qualified health information networks, or QHINs. These networks volunteer to participate – they are usually not paid – they usually should undergo a two-step approval process to be sure that they’re eligible and have the mandatory technical infrastructure. 

Oracle said Monday that it’ll begin the method to grow to be a QHIN. Seven QHINs, including Epic, are live inside TEFCA now.