Oracle on HIMSS24: AI Deployment, Back-Office Merger, and Data Exchange Simplification
ORLANDO – Oracle presented several new products and innovation initiatives this past week at HIMSS24, its second global conference since acquiring health IT giant Cerner in 2022.
We spoke with Seema Verma, the former Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator who now serves as executive VP and general manager of Oracle Health and Oracle Life Sciences, to learn more about the new artificial intelligence, cloud and interoperability technologies of the company and where its other new products are heading.
Among the new tools and capabilities showcased at the HIMSS24 booth, Oracle showcased its generative artificial intelligence data assistant in Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant.
Verma explained that the multimodal voice and screen-based assistant can automate note-taking during an appointment, generate medication orders, schedule follow-up labs and appointments and more.
“Providers then review the notes and action items and use their voice to sign off with little to no clicks,” she said, noting that Oracle will roll out the feature to more healthcare providers with “extremely good” feedback on the beta program offering “soon.”
Oracle Health also demonstrated the breadth of its healthcare industry experience in cloud infrastructure, clinical and operational applications, data management and AI.
Verma said that by bringing electronic health records to the cloud, creating an open ecosystem and streamlining operations, the vendor is helping providers, networks “and entire countries” better understand public health trends, reducing the burden for physicians and improve patient care. with the aim of improving results.”
The following questions and answers provide a look at new data features rolled out at the HIMSS Global Health Conference and Exhibition, insights into Oracle’s role (via its participation in CommonWell) as a qualified health information network under TEFCA, the future of generative AI, and more.
Q. Describe some of the new products and capabilities added to the Oracle Health portfolio at HIMSS24.
A. This week we announced significant enhancements to Oracle Health Data Intelligence, including a new generative AI service to help increase healthcare management efficiency.
Oracle Health Data Intelligence is a suite of cloud applications, services, and analytics that enables a broad range of healthcare and government stakeholders to use data from the healthcare ecosystem to promote patient health, improve care delivery, and increase operational efficiency. stimulate.
Additional new capabilities in the platform – which Cerner customers knew as HealtheIntent – include performance improvements, pre-built clinical quality analytics and automated alerts that can help increase reimbursement and improve care.
The platform integrates, secures and analyzes data from a wide range of sources, including each vendor’s electronic health records, enterprise applications, insurance claims and demographic data, to provide a more comprehensive view of individual patients and the overall health status of the population. This helps our customers reduce the costs and complexity associated with independently integrating disparate data and systems, which can take years.
By turning this data into action, users can dramatically simplify their efforts to innovate faster, engage more patients, close gaps in care, and reduce the cost of healthcare delivery.
Q. Through its work with the CommonWell Health Alliance, Oracle Health is now part of one QHIN on board under TEFCA. What does that mean for your customers? What changes or challenges are you helping to address when it comes to interoperability?
A. Over the past decade, we’ve made significant progress in connecting larger healthcare organizations to national networks like CommonWell.
Unfortunately, many healthcare organizations still do not use health information exchange. TEFCA has created a common platform, backed by the Federal Government, for anyone in the industry who wants to connect. This should bring more and more participants, which in turn improves our customers’ experience by providing them with a more complete view of patient data.
Without integrated data that provides a complete picture of a patient or population, it is virtually impossible to treat people effectively, create personalized care approaches, support disease prevention and much more.
COVID-19 was a clear example of this in action. By the time we had a basic understanding of the spread in one community, it had spread to another. Anonymized, secure data should not be locked away in individual systems. It must be shared freely so that doctors and governments can make the best possible decisions for the care and protection of people.
One way we already simplify these connections is through Oracle Health Seamless Exchange, which provides physicians with a comprehensive patient record by merging data from multiple sources, both internal and external, reducing duplication of information and creating a clean, comprehensive workflow created.
We see a future where people will have full access to all their personal healthcare data, from any provider, and can share it securely and easily with designated people.
Q. You’ve already noticed generative AI in some of your solutions. What does Oracle Health see as it looks to the future? generative AI in health care?
A. AI and large language models have matured significantly over the past eighteen months and will continue to have a dramatic impact on every sector, including healthcare. But to reach its true potential, AI must be fully integrated into the software people use every day.
Oracle has long embedded AI capabilities into our cloud applications to help organizations reap immediate benefits. Practitioners currently spend more than 20-35% of their time on administrative tasks.
Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant can participate in interactions between physicians and patients and assist with tasks such as automatically creating appointment notes, a patient discharge summary, or a health insurance authorization letter that the appropriate person can then review and approve, with no clicks and no administration required after o’clock.
Our new generative AI care management service can summarize patient history so care managers can dramatically reduce the time spent manually reviewing charts. This allows them to reach more patients every day, closing gaps in care and improving care.
For industry professionals such as HR, Generative AI integrated into Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications can summarize, author, and recommend content to help employees complete important HR functions faster and more accurately, such as writing a review or posting nursing job openings on certain departments. The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Genative AI service also allows companies to integrate LLMs into their own applications.
The use cases for AI are virtually endless for healthcare, and we will undoubtedly see many exciting developments in the coming years.
Our focus will be on delivering the solutions our customers need to safely address some of their most complex challenges – better managing and using data to improve care, reduce clinical burnout and of costs through automation and efficiency.
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.