Oracle announces new AI-powered electronic health record

Oracle unveiled a brand-new electronic health record on Tuesday, its most significant health-care product update since acquiring the medical records giant Cerner for $28 billion in 2022. 

An electronic health record, or an EHR, is a digital version of a patient's medical history that's updated by doctors and nurses over time. EHR software can be complex and cumbersome for clinicians to use, but it's become an integral component of the modern U.S. health-care system.   

Oracle's latest EHR is equipped with cloud and artificial intelligence capabilities that will make it easier to navigate and set up, the company said. There are no menus or drop-down screens, and doctors can pull up the information they need by asking questions with their voices. Ideally, this will allow doctors to spend less time searching through records and more time caring for patients, Oracle said. 

"It's not just a scribe. It's not an assistant. It's almost like having your own resident," Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, told CNBC in an interview. 

Oracle's new offering could help boost its position within the fiercely competitive EHR market, where it has struggled to maintain its footing in recent years. In 2023, Oracle saw its largest net hospital loss on record while market leader Epic Systems, Oracle's top rival, was the only company that saw a net increase in acute care market share, according to a report from KLAS Research.

Cerner contributed $5.9 billion to Oracle's total revenue in fiscal 2023. Epic generated $4.9 billion in revenue last year. 

The new EHR has been in the works since Oracle acquired Cerner, but it was not built on top of Cerner's existing infrastructure, Verma said. That means current Cerner customers will have to decide whether to migrate to the separate system.

"Just think about crumbling infrastructure in a house, you're not going to put new things on top of it," she said. "That was the conclusion that we came to when we looked at the Cerner technology, so what we're introducing to the market is something that's brand new."

Suhas Uliyar, Oracle's senior vice president for product management in clinical and health-care AI, walked CNBC through a virtual demo of the new EHR. He showcased what it might look like for a doctor to get up to speed, respond to messages and fill prescriptions ahead of a day packed full of patient visits.  

The EHR is browser based, and physicians will see a search bar and a chronological list of their appointments when they open it. The interface is very simple. A doctor can click on the microphone in the search bar and ask questions like, "How many openings do I have for today?" or "How many new patients do I have on schedule for today?" The doctor will then get an AI-generated answer within seconds. 

If a doctor clicks on a patient, they'll open their chart, where they can find AI summaries as well as more detailed explanations of their medical history. The physician can see what's changed since the patient's last visit, whether they're taking any new medication and other details like lab results, clinical documentation, past treatments, risk factors, messages, allergies and vitals. 

Additionally, the doctor can click the microphone and ask patient-specific questions like "Has she ever complained about panic attacks or shortness of breath?," "Has he had a CT screening for lung cancer, and are his vaccinations up to date?" or "Which antibiotics have you treated her urinary tract infection with?"

"It's going through the entire history, all the records, and it gives me a very specific answer," Uliyar said. "I didn't have to go scroll through 15 different documents and find that." 

The voice-activated questions can build on one another, and the EHR's AI will start to learn the doctor's habits, like the types of medications they prescribe and refill often. Even when Uliyar stumbled over his words or didn't phrase a question exactly right, the system still pulled up the information he was looking for.   

If a doctor wants to go into more detail or double-check an AI-generated answer within the new EHR, they can always click on the citation and look through the original record that's referenced, Uliyar said. And answers that include content like medication dosage information or other evidence-based recommendations will link to validated databases, he added.  

While Oracle has been developing its new EHR, the company has also been rolling out features to existing Cerner customers to try and improve their experience with the product. Uliyar said many of these features, including Oracle Health Clinical AI Agent (formerly called Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant), are already embedded within the new EHR. 

Oracle announced the general availability of Clinical AI Agent in June, and it aims to automate much of the documentation that doctors are responsible for. 

Physicians can access the Clinical AI Agent through an app on their phone, and they hit a button to record their visits with patients. Once they stop recording, Oracle's AI automatically generates a clinical note based on the appointment, so the doctors no longer need to write it themselves. 

Around 70 customers are already using the Clinical AI Agent, Uliyar said. The company is currently building a similar tool for nurses. 

Since the Clinical AI Agent is already embedded within the new EHR, customers will not have to worry about integrating it. The tool will also remain available as a stand-alone product that's EHR agnostic, Uliyar said. 

The early adopter program for Oracle's new EHR begins next year, and Oracle said it will work with customers to determine the customizations they need. The company has been moving its health-care customers to the cloud, so that should make the EHR implementation process much easier, Verma said.

"We see it as very disruptive to the market," she said. "Our EHR is going to solve a lot of long-standing problems that we've had in health care."