ORLANDO – Oracle showcased several new products and innovation initiatives at HIMSS24 this past week, its second global conference since acquiring health IT giant Cerner in 2022. 

We caught up 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 about the company's new artificial intelligence, cloud and interoperability technologies, and where its other new products are headed.

Among the new tools and capabilities showcased at its HIMSS24 booth, Oracle featured 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 few to no clicks," she said, noting that with "extremely good" beta program feedback, Oracle will be offering the feature to more healthcare providers "soon."

Oracle Health also showcased the breadth of its healthcare industry experience in cloud infrastructure, clinical and operational applications, data management, and AI.

Verma said that in taking electronic health records to the cloud, helping to create an open ecosystem and streamlining operations, the vendor is helping providers, networks "and entire nations" better understand population health trends, reduce clinician burden and improve patient care, "with the goal of improving outcomes."

The following Q&A offers a look into new data features rolled out at the HIMSS Global Health Conference and Exhibition, insights into Oracle's role (through its participation in CommonWell) as qualified health information network under TEFCA, the future of generative AI and more.

Q. Please 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 care 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 across the healthcare ecosystem to help advance patient health, improve care delivery and drive operational efficiency.

Additional new capabilities in the platform – that Cerner customers knew as HealtheIntent - include performance improvements, pre-built clinical quality analytics and automated alerts that can help increase reimbursements and enhance care.

The platform integrates, secures and analyzes data from a vast range of sources including electronic health records from any vendor, enterprise applications, insurance claims and demographic records, to provide a more comprehensive view of individual patients and overall population health. This helps our customers reduce the cost and complexity of trying to integrate disparate data and systems on their own, which can take years to accomplish. 

Turning this data into action can help users dramatically simplify their efforts to innovate more quickly, engage more patients, close care gaps and lower cost of care delivery.

Q. Through its work with the CommonWell Health Alliance, Oracle Health is now part of an onboarded QHIN under TEFCA. What does that mean for your customers? What changes or challenges are you helping with when it comes to interoperability?

A. In the past decade, we’ve made a lot of progress connecting the larger healthcare facilities to national networks like CommonWell. 

Unfortunately, however, many healthcare organizations are still not taking advantage of health information exchanges at all. 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 in, which in turn makes the experience of our customers better, because they’ll have a more complete representation of the patient’s data.

Without integrated data that gives a full picture of a patient or population, it is nearly impossible to effectively treat people, create personalized approaches to care, support disease prevention and so much more. 

COVID-19 was a stark example of this in action. By the time we had a basic understanding of spread in one community, it had spread to another. Anonymized, secure data should not be locked up in individual systems. It needs to be exchanged freely so that clinicians and governments can make the best decisions possible for the care and protection of people.

One way we are already simplifying those connections is through Oracle Health Seamless Exchange, which provides clinicians with a comprehensive patient record by aggregating data from multiple sources, internally and externally, reducing duplication of information and creating a clean, comprehensive workflow.

We see a future where people will have complete access to all their personal healthcare data, from any provider, and can share it securely and easily with designated people.

Q. You have noted generative AI in a few of your solutions already. What does Oracle Health see when it looks to the future of generative AI in healthcare?

A. AI and large language models have significantly matured in the past 18 months and will continue to have a dramatic impact on every industry, including healthcare. But to reach its true potential, AI needs to be fully integrated into the software people use every day. 

Oracle has long embedded AI capabilities into our cloud applications to help organizations reap the benefits immediately. Right now, practitioners are spending upwards of 20-35% of their time on administrative functions. 

Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant can participate in interactions between doctors and patients and help with tasks such as automatically creating appointment notes, a patient discharge summary, or a letter of authorization for medical insurance for the appropriate person to then review and approve with zero clicks and no after-hour administration.

Our new generative AI service for care management can summarize patient history for care managers to dramatically reduce their manual chart review time. This enables them to reach more patients every day – closing care gaps and helping to improve care.

For line of business professionals like human resources, generative AI integrated into Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications can summarize, author and recommend content to help employees complete important HR functions more quickly and accurately, such as authoring a review or job posting for nurses in select departments. With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Generative AI service, companies can also integrate LLMs into their own applications.

The use cases for AI are almost endless for healthcare, and we will no doubt see a lot of exciting developments over the next few years. 

Our focus will be grounded in delivering the solutions our customers need to securely address some of their most complex challenges – better managing and utilizing data to improve care, reducing clinical burnout and reducing costs through automation and efficiency.

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.