Redwood Shores, California-based Oracle offers a comprehensive and fully integrated stack of cloud applications and platform services, including Oracle Health and its acquired electronic health record giant Cerner.

Going into next week's 2023 HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition, the most important healthcare trend for the Big Tech company is the human element. The company knows physicians and staff are burned out. This was a problem before the pandemic, and that crisis put a fine point on it.

When they’re burned out, quality of care suffers, and good people leave the field altogether, the company cautions.

"We can’t solve the whole problem, but we can and should work on ways to address one of the key drivers of physician and staff burnout – the administrative burden that is a constant source of complaints," said Mike Sicilia, executive vice president of Oracle Global Industries. "By alleviating that burden, we can reduce attrition and increase the amount of time physicians and staff are free to do what they’re best at, which is taking care of people."

Healthcare IT News sat down with Sicilia to get a sneak preview of what Oracle will be up to at HIMSS23.

Q. What are the most crucial healthcare technology trends going into HIMSS23?

A. We need to finish the job. Step one was the digitization of patient records, but now we need to complete the process of developing an open, intuitive and completely connected ecosystem.

At Oracle, we’re doing that through a cloud-based platform that ties everything together in a highly safe and secure environment.

In addition to patient data, we bring in data from human capital management, enterprise resource planning, supply chain, clinical trials and research, and more to paint a more complete picture of what is needed to treat individual patients, but also to do a better job running healthcare organizations.

This is where healthcare technology is headed – it’s where it must be headed.

Q. I'm sure you'll be introducing a variety of things at HIMSS23. Please offer a sneak peek at one of those new things.

A. Our three primary goals are to improve health globally, accelerate innovation and reduce healthcare costs. These things are tightly intertwined because each contributes to the other, so it’s about developing the products that enable all three.

Take Seamless Exchange, for example, which is an advanced interoperability tool that enables a patient who may have first been treated in a clinic in, say, New York, to walk into a hospital in Los Angeles a few days, or a few months, or even a few years later, and it’s like they’ve just walked down the hall.

The information follows the patient, and the venue is immaterial. Everybody wins because the data is cumulative, and it only has to be gathered once.

Similarly, we’re bringing connectivity to clinical research. By sharing more than 100 million de-identified patient records from 100 healthcare organizations through the Oracle Cerner Learning Health Network, we’re advancing that research.

Clinicians and communities that have never had the chance to be part of clinical discovery can now do so – which enables them to gain access to new therapeutics, diagnostics and medications more quickly.

All of this makes the system more efficient, but we can still do more. Right now, in far too many places, financial management is woefully inefficient, with providers, payers and hospital groups all running disconnected systems. That’s no longer necessary.

Through Cerner RevElate, we’re helping organizations harmonize those systems. For example, at one large health system, RevElate is helping reduce repetitive and time-consuming processes through automation of their billing cycle – which saves time and money.

Q. What is the primary message Oracle will be trying to get out to HIMSS23 attendees?

A. While other technology companies have dipped their toe into healthcare, Oracle is going all in.

Imagine an open, intelligent cloud-based platform that securely connects payers, providers and patients to increase efficiency, reduce costs and improve health. And what if it was so intuitive that clinicians could spend less time on administrative tasks and more on patient care.

Then imagine it could address complicated staffing requirements to reduce workforce turnover while helping ensure lifesaving supplies are never out of stock. That is where we are headed at Oracle for our customers and their patients.

Q. What do you think healthcare provider organization CIOs and similar health IT leaders should be focused on most now that the pandemic public health emergency is coming to an end?

A. Like the physicians and staff they support, healthcare CIOs and IT leaders need to be focused on the patient. Historically, healthcare IT has been built around the hospital, the health system and the clinician, and the patient has been an afterthought.

What we’re doing is putting the patient first by building an open, intelligent, cloud-based platform that connects it all – patients, communities, everything – so the individual gets the best care possible, and the institution is always on the cutting edge, because it benefits from modern technology and the collective wisdom of peers and partners around the world.

Too often when we use the word “efficiency” in healthcare it is a euphemism for cutting costs by cutting corners. In a patient-centered system, there are no corners to cut.

Everything seamlessly interacts and the efficiency is delivered through better outcomes, lower administrative costs, and happier, more engaged physicians and staff.

Oracle Health will be exhibiting in Booth 921 at HIMSS23.
 

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Email the writer: bsiwicki@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.