Kansas City, MO-based electronic health record (EHR) company Cerner is now a business unit within Oracle, the Austin, TX-based software behemoth. Oracle, which already sells some software to insurers, hospitals, and public health departments, called Cerner the company’s “anchor asset”, and hopes to use it to expand its healthcare presence. Oracle co-founder and board chair Larry Ellison unveiled lofty plans to create a national health records database, but he didn’t detail how the company would get access to health records from non-Cerner systems, as interoperability standards haven’t been fully implemented.
The Gist: In addition to the challenge of entering the complex EHR and healthcare data market, Oracle now faces the challenge of rebuilding Cerner’s growth, and its clients’ confidence. Cerner lags Epic in terms of hospital market share: Epic holds about a third of the US hospital market, compared to Cerner’s 24 percent. Epic gained an additional 74 hospitals last year, compared to Cerner’s five.
Anecdotally, we know of several long-term Cerner health system clients who are either in the middle of, or planning for, a transition to Epic, which is seen by health system leaders as the superior EMR option. (In the words of one executive, “No CEO ever got fired for choosing Epic.”) If a stronger Cerner product emerges as a result of the acquisition, it could help to stem this tide.
Oracle’s chairman Larry Ellison outlined a bold vision Thursday for the database giant to use the combined tech power of Oracle and Cerner to make access to medical records more seamless.
Days after closing its $28.3 billion acquisition of electronic health record company Cerner, Ellison said Oracle plans to build a national health record database that would pull data from thousands of hospital-centric EHRs.
In a virtual briefing Thursday, Ellison highlighted many long-standing problems with interoperability in healthcare. “Your electronic health data is scattered across a dozen or separate databases. One for every provider you’ve ever visited. This patient data fragmentation and EHR fragmentation causes tremendous problems,” he said.
“We’re going to solve this problem by putting a unified national health records database on top of all of these thousands of separate hospital databases. So we’re building a system where the health records all American citizens’ health records not only exist at the hospital level but also are in a unified national health records database.”
The concept of the national health records database, which would hold anonymized data, Ellison said, is to help doctors and clinicians have faster access to patient records when providing care. Anonymized health data in that national database could also be used to build artificial intelligence models to help diagnose diseases such as cancer.
“Better information is the key to transforming healthcare,” he said. “Better information will allow doctors to deliver better patient outcomes. Better information will allow public health officials to develop much better public health policy and it will fundamentally lower healthcare costs overall.”
Oracle also plans to modernize Cerner’s Millennium EHR platform with updated features such as voice interface, more telehealth capabilities and disease-specific AI models, Ellison said.
He highlighted a partnership between health tech company Ronin, a clinical decision support solution, and MD Anderson to create a disease-specific AI model that monitors cancer patients as they work through their treatments.
“The people at Oracle are not going to be developing these AI models. But our platform, Cerner Millennium, is an open system and allows medical professionals at MD Anderson, who are experts in treating cancer, to add these AI modules to help other doctors treat cancer patients,” Ellison said.
The purchase of Cerner, which marks Oracle’s biggest acquisition, gives the database giant a stronger foothold in healthcare. Ellison said the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) and HR software already is widely used in healthcare.
But the company will face the same long-standing barriers to sharing health data that have stymied other interoperability efforts. There also could be pushback from the industry to any effort by a tech giant to build a nationalized health database.
In March 2020, the federal government released rules laying the groundwork to give patients easier access to their digital health records through their smartphones. The regulation, which went into effect in April 2021, requires health IT vendors, providers and health information exchanges to enable patients to access and download their health records with third-party apps. Under the rule, providers can’t inhibit the access, exchange or use of health information unless the data fall within eight exceptions.
Interoperability experts point out there are already efforts underway to create a more unified database of health records, such Cerner competitor Epic’s Cosmos, which is a de-identified patient database combining the company’s EHR data of over 122 million patients.
Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair is backing Ellison’s vision for building a unified health database. Blair, who leads the nonprofit Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, partners with Oracle to use its cloud technology to tackle health issues.
Speaking at the virtual event, Blair said a unified health records system will “empower citizens and provide clinicians and other care providers with immediate access to their health history and treatment without chasing it down from disparate sources.”
David Feinberg, M.D., who took the reins as Cerner CEO just four months before the acquisition was announced in December, said he was excited about the potential for Oracle and Cerner to advance data sharing.
“We’re bringing world-class technology coupled with a deep and long history of understanding how healthcare works. I don’t think anyone’s ever done that,” said Feinberg, now president and CEO of Oracle Cerner.
Prioritizing outcomes in healthcare is long overdue and now within reach following Oracle’s acquisition of Cerner. To achieve more seamless, coordinated care, technology must play a greater role in reframing solutions for health and well-being around the world.
Combining Cerner’s clinical capabilities with Oracle’s enterprise platform, analytics, and automation expertise will change health and wellness in a way that simply hasn’t been possible before. We’ll provide secure and reliable solutions that deliver health insights and experiences to dramatically change how health is managed by patients, providers, and payors. The industry has never been riper for change.
Designing for people
Healthcare is innately personal; however, the industry often loses sight of the human side of health as delivering and understanding care has become increasingly disconnected and complex. Research reveals that doctors spend nearly twice as much time on administrative work as they do engaging with patients. If we replaced clinicians’ time spent performing administrative tasks with patient interactions, imagine how dramatically we could improve quality of care. Technology-induced administrative burden contributes to burnout, which has, in part, resulted in a workforce shortage and overshadowed the true benefits of healthcare technology. Clinicians didn’t enter medicine to spend half of their time conducting routine tasks and completing required documentation; they chose their profession to practice at the top of their license. We’re working to make this a reality, providing a toolset that supports clinical decision making and prioritizes the user experience.
For care delivery organizations, we’ll develop new cloud-enabled capabilities allowing providers to access the information they need, where and when they need it, on an interface that is easy to use. This will significantly reduce the time and effort required to find a patient’s information, even if the information is scattered across different providers or care settings. We’ll help people access and manage their own health information from wherever they are, so that they have a stronger voice in their care and can conduct more meaningful conversations with their providers. When successful, these improvements ultimately increase the value of healthcare and have the additional benefit of contributing data to population health insights.
Collaborative, interoperable care
In a complex and inefficient healthcare industry, interoperability is critical; but, it hasn’t been widely adopted between organizations. From the patient perspective, data silos limit patients’ empowerment and involvement in their health and well-being. It is vitally important that medical records are portable. Regardless of where someone receives care, their records should be accessible and unified. From a clinical perspective, interoperability ensures clinicians can properly review a patient’s entire medical history within their workflow and provide appropriate, contextual treatment.
A recent survey shows a staggering 97% of healthcare executives have called for increased healthcare data interoperability, the lack of which inhibits digital transformation and innovation within organizations and throughout the broader industry. Oracle is committed to open APIs to ensure any authorized user can consume health data and insights. We know a closed system will not create connectivity and unification across the many existing players and systems. Creating more solutions without an open ecosystem commitment would only contribute to the problems we see today with fractured and siloed systems.
Oracle will harness the power of data to create a collaborative ecosystem where people, patients, providers, and payors can securely access clinical, operational, and financial data on the cloud. These efforts will break down data silos and provide open systems that talk to—and connect with—one another to generate actionable, scalable, and global insights previously unavailable. Industry fragmentation impacts both patients and providers, but Oracle has the power to aggregate data into a single source of truth to achieve better outcomes.
Improved efficiency across the system
While enhanced clinical systems will improve experiences bedside and lead to better public health outcomes, back-office operations must also be improved to drive true efficiency, reduce costs, and make the business of healthcare more predictable. Oracle’s Fusion application suite can create this bridge between the bedside and the back-office, enhancing employee experience (better retention, less administration), streamlining the supply chain (reduced shrinkage, better inventory management), and giving the executive a better understanding of the issues impacting their business (greater predictability and cost control).
Secure healthcare data
Unfortunately, we know that retail, finance, and health data are the most targeted in security breaches. Patient privacy and the security of health data, when left unaddressed, threaten what the information of health exchange is solely meant to protect: patient safety. It’s time to raise health data security to an unprecedented level of investment and focus.
Oracle is an industry leader in securely storing, processing, and analyzing large volumes of cloud-based data. We’ll continue to apply the same security-obsessed focus to healthcare as we do to all industries, allowing people, patients, providers, and payors to safely access insights that improve care and advance decision-making. Oracle has been trusted with some of the world’s most sensitive and regulated data for more than 44 years. For the financial services industry specifically, Oracle already serves customers in more than 140 countries and manages risk for 24 of the world’s 28 systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs).
Meeting the moment
While we already knew this industry was ready for change, the pandemic amplified and accelerated the world’s readiness to see that change. We aim to meet this moment leveraging the technology and expertise that have revolutionized other industries, as well as applying new innovations to transform these systems of record into systems of intelligence.
Combining our existing healthcare industry solutions—from clinical trials to health insurance payor solutions to public health analysis systems—with our acquisition of Cerner, we believe Oracle has a uniquely positioned opportunity to offer new solutions to a broken healthcare system. We plan to support the entire lifecycle of healthcare, going beyond traditional health IT to integrate our infrastructure, platform, and applications capabilities for a more fully connected operational, administrative, and clinical system.
We are fully committed to the partnerships that will be instrumental to this journey. The technology and the world are ready for transformation. This is just the beginning.
In a “small but compelling” study published Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine, 18 patients with rectal cancer achieved complete remission, marking “the first time this has happened in the history of cancer,” Gina Kolata reports for the New York Times.
For the trial, which was sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline, 18 patients with rectal cancer took a checkpoint inhibitor called dostarlimab. During the six-month study period, the medication was administered every three weeks. Dostarlimab works by exposing cancer cells, allowing the immune system to detect and destroy them.
Before the trial, “[t]hese rectal cancer patients had faced grueling treatments — chemotherapy, radiation and, most likely, life-altering surgery that could result in bowel, urinary and sexual dysfunction,” Kolata writes. “Some would need colostomy bags.”
When the trial began, many of the patients still believed they would have to undergo these procedures when it was over. Ultimately, no one really believed their tumors would disappear.
However, they were met with “astonishing” results, Kolata writes. “The cancer vanished in every single patient, undetectable by physical exam, endoscopy, PET scans or M.R.I. scans.”
“There were a lot of happy tears,” said Andrea Cercek, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and a co-author of the paper, which was presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
On average, one in five patients have some type of adverse reaction to checkpoint inhibitors like dostarlimab. But, notably, none of the patients in the trial experienced clinically significant complications.
Commentary
According to Alan Venook, a colorectal cancer specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved with the study, the absence of significant side effects means “either they did not treat enough patients or, somehow, these cancers are just plain different.”
In an editorial accompanying the paper, Hanna Sanoff of the University of North Carolina‘s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, who was not involved in the study, said the study was “small but compelling.” However, she noted that it is still unclear whether the patients are cured.
“Very little is known about the duration of time needed to find out whether a clinical complete response to dostarlimab equates to cure,” Sanoff said.
And while the results were “remarkable” and “unprecedented,” Kimmie Ng, a colorectal cancer expert at Harvard Medical School, said they would need to be replicated.
Still, Luis Diaz Jr., an author of the paper from MSKCC, said he did not know of any other study in which a treatment completely eradicated a cancer in every patient.
“I believe this is the first time this has happened in the history of cancer,” Diaz said.
Separately, Venook agreed, noting that a complete remission in every single patient in a trial is “unheard-of.” (Kolata, New York Times, 6/5)
HENRY KOTULA 