At the recent HIMSS24 global conference, Oracle showcased a range of new products and innovation initiatives designed to help health care providers and networks better understand population health trends, reduce clinician burden, reform health care costs, and improve patient care. Among the key highlights was the introduction of a generative artificial intelligence data assistant in Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant, which aims to automate various tasks during patient appointments in order to reduce clinician burnout, and retain the accessibility of health care amid a growing aging population.
Seema Verma, the former Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator who now serves as executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Oracle Life Sciences, shared insights into the company’s new AI, cloud, and interoperability technologies.
“Providers review the notes and action items and use their voice to sign off with few to no clicks,” Verma explained, noting that the feature has received “extremely good” feedback during its beta program and will soon be offered to more health care providers. In time, she added, “entire nations” can benefit from the health care AI.
Story Stages
Enhancing Oracle Health Data Intelligence
Oracle announced significant enhancements to its Oracle Health Data Intelligence platform, a suite of cloud applications, services, and analytics that enables health care and government stakeholders to leverage data from across the health care ecosystem to advance patient health, improve care delivery, and drive operational efficiency. In creating this open ecosystem, operations will become intelligibly streamlined. The new capabilities include performance improvements, prebuilt clinical quality analytics, and automated alerts that can help increase reimbursements and enhance care. “Turning this data into action can help users dramatically simplify their efforts to innovate more quickly, engage more patients, close care gaps and lower the cost of care delivery,” Verma said.
“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,” Verma explained. “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.” In turn, this helps customers reduce the cost and complexity of trying to integrate disparate data into multiple interface systems. This can close the gap present within clinical research and actual clinical care, determining effectiveness of treatments through newly accessible masses of clinical evidence shared by willing patients.
Interoperability and TEFCA
Oracle Health, through its work with the CommonWell Health Alliance, is now part of an onboarded Qualified Health Information Network under the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement. This development is expected to bring more participants into the health information exchange ecosystem, ultimately improving the experience for Oracle’s customers by providing a more complete representation of patient data. A larger base for representation voids the possibility of ineffective treatment and inadequate support of disease prevention. “We see a future where people will have complete access to all their personal health care data, from any provider, and can share it securely and easily with designated people,” Verma states.
Verma emphasized future visions of lessening instances of ineffective treatment within health care through interoperability. To be effective, treatment must not be anonymized or locked up into individual systems. “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.”
The Future of Generative AI in Health Care
Looking to the future, Oracle Health sees significant potential for generative AI in health care. Verma noted that AI and large language models have matured significantly in the past 18 months and will continue to have a dramatic impact on the industry by including interactions between doctors and patients. Preliminary tasks such as automating appointment notes, discharge summaries, and insurance authorization can have an incredibly strong impact on streamlining the health care sector. However, Verma stresses that for AI to reach its true potential, it 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,” Verma said. “Right now, practitioners are spending upwards of 20% to 35% of their time on administrative functions.”
Additionally, the installation of new generative AI services in company software for care management can summarize patient history for care managers, reducing manual chart review time and enabling them to reach more patients every day, closing care gaps and allowing the completion of HR functions to be more quickly and accurately finalized.
Verma concluded by emphasizing Oracle’s focus on delivering solutions that securely address health care’s most complex challenges, stating, “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.”
