Larry Ellison wants Oracle to build the future of global healthcare
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Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison laid out his grand vision to change the way people around the world access healthcare services, wherever they are.
At Oracle Cloud World 2022 in Las Vegas, Ellison outlined a myriad of thoughts and initiatives his company is launching to help people around the world.
“We’re going to bankrupt Western civilization unless we can find a way to make healthcare cheaper,” Ellison said in his keynote speech at the event, “we need to do better.”
Solving the big problems
Ellison says the pandemic has unsurprisingly made him and many others rethink how healthcare works, especially in the US, where it can be challenging for both patients and healthcare providers to find the information they need.
“Your medical records are scattered across different databases, everyone you’ve visited in your entire life,” he said, noting that caregivers, not patients, are put at the center of the system — something he described as “a fundamental problem. ”
“Why is there a global financial database that knows your full credit history, but no global health care?” “If you have an accident, the hospital will know your financial details, but not if you are allergic to penicillin.”
“We need to automate the entire global healthcare ecosystem,” he continued. “Some of this data could be shared between countries to create a global global public health system.”
Ellison further outlined his goal – nothing less than to have Oracle build not just national health systems, but a global platform as well.
He highlighted the work Oracle has been doing with the University of Oxford on its Global Pathogen Analysis System, originally designed to detect tuberculosis but quickly redesigned to track Covid-19.
He also celebrated his corporate work on the US Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) V-safe system, which provided users with a feedback portal to share how they felt after receiving their vaccines, which was built in just 10 weeks, and helped share groundbreaking findings on vaccine safety for pregnant women and children.
Oracle’s $28 billion purchase of healthcare technology giant Cerner in December 2021 may have raised eyebrows around the world, but Ellison says the deal has given the company everything it needs to achieve its lofty goals.
“This new generation of medical information systems promises to reduce the administrative workload for our medical professionals, improve patient privacy and outcomes, and lower overall healthcare costs,” said Ellison.
“We will automate the connection between patients and caregivers by building the next generation of healthcare applications,” he said. “We need to catch the next pandemic sooner.”