Will Oracle + Cerner transform Healthcare?

This month Oracle completed its $28.4 billion acquisition of Cerner.

Oracle has a grand vision for the company to become more of a medical information company than a technology company.

One of the plans is to build an anonymised universal patient record for all Americans to revolutionise the way health data is stored and exchanged in the U.S.

Oracle plans to change the architecture for the entire healthcare records system. A vision to replace the thousands of different systems spread out between offices and hospitals with one system that tracks patients everywhere.

By centralizing all Americans’ health records in one place and advancing patients’ engagement in their health maintenance, the goal is to give healthcare professionals the tools needed to create better health outcomes.

Also, a centralised database will be a big help for researchers who want to track outcomes and plan clinical trials. Oracle wants its system to support research everywhere, something that it feels will add diversity to the patient data and lead to better treatments and drugs.

Oracle also wants to use its technology to expand and improve Cerner’s existing system. A big part of this plan includes integrating telecommunications with data storage to create a personalized portal that patients can use to track their health while working with doctors.

It will also integrate with users’ smartphones and wearable medical tracking devices to routinely upload current information to the Oracle Cloud.

Oracle wants to improve Cerner and apparently, the first thing Oracle will do is make it easier to use by adding a voice user interface that makes it easier for doctors to access data.

Oracle also plans to invite drug companies, hospitals and doctors to collaborate with them on the data, perhaps deploying some of Oracle’s expertise with artificial intelligence to analyse the data.

“The people at Oracle are not going to be developing those AI models,” said Ellison. “Our platform is an open system, and it allows medical professionals to go ahead and build in there.”

There is no doubt that enterprise healthcare IT is overdue for an overhaul. Platforms are moving to the cloud, reimbursement is shifting from transactions to quality of care and outcomes and we absolutely have to enable better care through smarter use of clinical data.

With Microsoft’s acquisition of Nuance last year for $19.7 billion and the recent announcement that Optum plans to acquire EMIS for £1.2 billion there are some big shakeups coming.

I agree that creating more effective, efficient, and secure healthcare to improve health outcomes globally is one of the world’s most important challenges today.

If the combined entity can deliver on this goal of better information, it would certainly be a welcome development and, even if it does not transform healthcare, it has the potential to disrupt the healthcare information technology market.

I think the are still a lot of unknowns about what the acquisition will mean for the industry, but in the meantime, I’m sure the other major tech players will be watching.