A time of growth at Oracle Health

Late last year, a fun piece of news dropped into my inbox: the Bermuda Hospitals Board announced the birth of Frances Ivy Edwards, the first Bermudian who will never have a paper medical record. Her entire record will be digital—hosted on an Oracle Cerner EHR, no less.

Reflecting on this milestone, it struck me how stark the contrast is between many of the clients we support. On one hand, we’re helping to move Bermuda, an island whose population could fit inside a football stadium, from manila folders to electronic health records. At the same time, we’re supporting some of the largest, most complex healthcare systems in the world so they can reap the benefits of the next stage of tech modernization.

Last month, for instance, we completed a successful MHS GENESIS Go Live spanning 11 Military Treatment Facilities across the Northeast United States. The entire United States Department of Defense project is expected to be fully deployed this calendar year. Just north of there, we’re beginning our “One Person One Record” modernization to improve care for the more than one million Nova Scotians. In the Middle East, we are undertaking a strategic collaboration with King's College Hospital London – UAE to utilize Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to operate and manage an upgraded and enhanced electronic medical records system.

Since October, I have met with hundreds of clients, prospective customers as well as many industry partners. I was surprised by how many of these organizations already had Oracle solutions embedded in their hospitals and clinics, even before we joined forces. 

While we talked about the continuing challenges of high costs, workforce shortages, and caregiver burnout, our conversations were different from the past. The combined efforts of Oracle and Cerner have led to bigger, broader conversations about how healthcare ought to be, and what critical healthcare challenges we can address together.

Margins are still tight.

Staffing and workforce shortages have made it much more difficult to deliver affordable, high-quality care. We have tons of data at our fingertips. We need to start using this to improve clinical, operational, and financial efficiencies. 

Our clients shared their enthusiasm for our plan to bring together human capital management and supply chain systems with the EHR so that capabilities like just-in-time training are possible and scheduling can help drive inventory, saving time and maximizing resources.

Care team burnout continues to be a problem. 

We talk so much about the health of our patients, but the health of our caregivers needs to be part of this conversation. We need to give them the tools to do their jobs effectively. Storing patient data isn’t good enough: we need to use it to drive meaningful actions. Healthcare providers want a more connected healthcare ecosystem that prioritizes openness and interoperability and Oracle Health is in a unique position to make this happen. 

Consumerism in healthcare is coming—and it’s already here in some big ways.

It’s clear that healthcare was not built around the patient or family, and that needs to change. In some areas of care, we’re seeing a fundamental shift in how patient needs are addressed, and technology is enabling this change. A cloud-based health platform will allow for more advanced patient engagement tools that connect people to their caregivers and their health data.

Healthcare and technology need each other: emerging trends in cloud technologies, artificial intelligence, and machine learning can help caregivers take meaningful action.  We have the data, we have the tools, and now, we have the resources to make this a reality. We also know we cannot achieve our vision of healthcare being more open, connected and accessible without broad collaboration across the industry. I am grateful to our clients and our partners that are committed to our vision for healthcare’s future.

I’m especially grateful for the incredible Oracle Health leadership we currently have in place. Mike Sicilia’s guidance continues to have a profound impact on our business. Our General Manager Travis Dalton is fully committed to alleviating caregiver burden. Stephanie Trunzo has been invaluable as a leader for the entire Oracle Health team: her unique leadership is helping our teams navigate change. Nasim Afsar, MD and Sarah Matt MD continue to lend their clinical voice to remind our teams of the very human aspect of our work. The list goes on—I’m truly inspired by the team we have in place, and I thank the countless individuals who keep the entire Oracle Health team moving forward.

Healthcare is about people helping people. At Oracle Health, we have the opportunity and the obligation to use data to do just that in ways that might have seemed unfathomable even a decade ago. I often find myself thinking of Christy Dueck’s story from the OCHC stage this past October: Steve Downey, a member of the Oracle Health team in Malvern, Pennsylvania, reached out to her while at a chemotherapy appointment to thank her for the renewed hope he was provided through our Learning Health Network, which is helping research teams increase the speed and decrease the cost of clinical trials. Like Christy said then, we did that. Together.

Whether you’re a newborn in Bermuda or a chemo patient in Pennsylvania, we all deserve seamless access to proactive, accessible, and equitable care. And we all have reasons to be optimistic for the future of healthcare delivery.

I’m even more excited to be here than I was when I started last year. The more I learn about Oracle, the more optimistic I am about where we are. And the more time I spend with our remarkable teams, the more convinced I am that we’re headed in the right direction. 

I look forward to sharing more with you soon.