Oracle has added healthcare-specific functionality to its Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, including supply chain, planning, and HR, helping hospitals with tasks, such as scheduling surgeries, ordering supplies, and hiring and scheduling employees.
For most hospitals, these tasks are “a very manual, laborious process,” said Steve Miranda, Oracle executive vice president of applications development, during his recent keynote at Oracle CloudWorld. “Unfortunately, you pay for this through inefficiencies, or pay for it because you had to reschedule your surgery, or skip an appointment because goods or services aren’t there.”
The incentive to update and integrate back-office systems is a critical one in the healthcare industry, where the absence of a certain type of equipment, medication, or medical specialist can put a person’s life in jeopardy. Drugs and supplies are often stored in different locations throughout a facility, making it hard for clinicians to find what they need at critical moments. Ensuring that you have the right clinical skillset in the right place at the right time is vital to maintaining optimal patient care. But scheduling a highly trained workforce involves multiple variables, including managing complex union agreements that enforce specific staffing requirements.
Healthcare-specific functionality in Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications can automate such critical processes end to end, helping doctors, nurses, and other care providers shift their focus to where it’s needed—on their patients, Miranda said.
A patient-centric supply chain
New capabilities in Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain Management (SCM) & Manufacturing will help hospital staffers with demand and replenishment planning, so that they don’t overstock and allow items to expire before they’re used. Staff will be able to connect historical information with case scheduling data in electronic health records. “We’ve simplified the process so that people who don’t have a degree in demand planning can use the system and more proactively manage their supplies,” says Kristen Miles, Oracle vice president of healthcare product strategy.
The new Oracle Cloud SCM functionality will also support what Miles says will be the next major advance for healthcare—remote hospital care, whereby hospitals can discharge patients and send them home with everything they need to recover, while still being monitored remotely by clinicians who can tell, for example, whether pain medication is working, or a piece of equipment has stopped working.
New features built into Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) enable healthcare providers to anticipate patient demand for specific products and services, predict hospital staff and physician needs, and improve patient care and outcomes.
“We’re bringing together a lot of information from operational systems, including clinical, administrative, and financial data,” says Hari Sankar, group vice president of product management for Oracle Cloud EPM. Such information gives hospital leaders a complete, detailed view of their entire operation so they can better manage costs and eliminate inefficiencies. “We’ve tailored this for healthcare providers with specific KPIs, dashboards, and planning models that are based on years of working with healthcare customers and partners,” says Jennifer Toomey Oracle vice president of product marketing..
Staff shortages are the number one challenge cited by healthcare organizations, a years-old problem only exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent professional burnout. “The better we can support these workers and enable them to succeed, the better care and service they can provide to people all over the world,” says Chris Leone, executive vice president of applications development for Oracle Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM).
New healthcare features built into Oracle Cloud HCM help hospitals and other providers attract doctors, nurses, physician assistants, therapists, technicians, and other frontline specialists and give them the tools they need to retain their accreditation and grow their expertise. “We’ve got healthcare-specific recruiting features to attract the best talent and get them on board as quickly as possible,” says Lewis Thompson, group vice president of development for Oracle Cloud HCM.
Hospitals can use Oracle Cloud HCM to manage complex schedules so that the right number of people, with the right licensure, are scheduled to work at the right time. “Providing the right level of training and resources for your talent and increasing skillsets along a development path—that’s continuously upskilling your workforce,” says Justin Knoerzer, senior director for cloud product strategy at Oracle.
Tackling healthcare’s challenges
With decades of experience developing applications and infrastructure to advance medical research, power clinical trials, and manage key healthcare processes, Oracle is well positioned to help the industry take on a wide range of challenges—especially with its recent acquisition of electronic health records company Cerner.
“You can’t just tackle a piece of the problem,” says Mike Sicilia, executive vice president of Oracle Global Industries. “Whether it’s the back office, whether it’s how we think about patients, whether it’s the changes that need to be made around processes, we need to look at the problem holistically to be able to foster better outcomes.”
But it’s too big a challenge for just one company to solve alone, Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison emphasized during his Oracle CloudWorld keynote.
“We have to build a platform, not just a healthcare application or series of healthcare applications,” Ellison said. “We can build some of those. But we have to build an open platform where others can innovate and plug in their technology. We’re absolutely committed to the mission, and we have a lot of help from a lot of partners who are just as committed as we are.”