Sicilia, executive vice president of Oracle Industries, observed that the sector’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic proved that a concentrated focus on a seemingly impossible goal—in this case, the development of vaccines in months, rather than years—is possible. Oracle had a front row seat in this herculean effort. In 2021, 91% of all vaccine-adverse events were reported through Oracle’s drug-safety systems and more than 100 COVID-19 vaccine and therapeutic trials were managed using Oracle’s clinical trial systems.
“We understand the complexities of managing personal health data,” Sicilia noted. “We understand the security, the regulations, and all the things that come along with it.”
Sicilia identified five core components in trying to solve one of the world’s greatest problems: the need to automate healthcare processes and connect and extend health systems on a United States and global level. It’s a mission, he said, that will require a coalition of system vendors, healthcare providers, researchers, government agencies, and others.
- User-centric design. The systems of the future will be intuitive, easy to use, and require minimal training. Sicilia recently visited a large hospital on the US east coast and was stunned at the number of tablets and other mobile devices staffers were using to fill in functionality gaps left by the hospital’s primary system. “A few times people told me that they had a doctor who was also a computer science major who created this application for us,” Sicilia said. “We need to fix all of that, and we need to deliver responsive UIs, not custom UIs, not custom code, but responsive, metadata-driven systems.”
- Collaborative care. Health records must be unified and accessible regardless of where patients receive care or the system the provider uses. But this cannot be a single vendor solution, Sicilia emphasized. Multiple electronic health records systems, including Oracle Cerner’s Millennium as well as third-party applications that plug into those systems, must be interoperable and welcomed into the broad ecosystem. As Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison said during his Oracle CloudWorld keynote: “We have to work together to make all of this happen. No one can do this by themselves.”
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Improved efficiency. Healthcare providers can have the best systems in the world, but if those systems aren’t connected to their back-office finance, human resources, and supply chain management applications to improve efficiency, the providers’ notoriously slim profit margins will continue to narrow. “There’s a tremendous amount of money spent on very inefficient systems and very inefficient processes,” Sicilia said. “We are extending our back-office applications—HCM, supply chain management, and core ERP—with vertical-specific functions.” For example, new enhancements to the Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management, Supply Chain Management, and Enterprise Performance Management application suites are designed to make it easier for healthcare organizations to recruit, schedule, evaluate, pay, and forecast demand for workers.
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Insights from population data. There’s been huge resistance to sharing personal data in the healthcare industry but analyzing population data that’s been properly secured and “de-identified” can help policymakers and medical researchers identify health trends and develop new treatments. For example, Oracle is working with Oxford Nanopore Technologies to extend population-scale genetic sequencing worldwide to help speed medical breakthroughs and improve care. “We have the technology to completely de-identify data at the time of care, when it’s collected,” Sicilia said. “We make sure that personally identified information goes directly into an electronic health record. The rest of it, if the patient consents, can go into global databases for good.”
- Always-updated security. Fundamental to any discussion about automating healthcare processes and connecting and extending health systems is whether consumers trust that the data in those systems is secure. It’s one of the biggest arguments for moving healthcare systems to the cloud, as Oracle is doing with Cerner Millennium. Unfortunately, many on-premises IT systems used by healthcare organizations are out of date. “They aren’t upgraded, aren’t secured, and unfortunately are a huge target for cyber criminals and bad actors today,” Sicilia said.
The biggest bet in Oracle’s history
Working with the larger healthcare ecosystem, Oracle is tackling multiple parts of the automation and connectivity challenge, Sicilia noted, including managing clinical trials, identifying health trends, helping providers manage their back-end processes, and giving practitioners the data they need at the point of care.
“We’ve made a very large bet on healthcare, arguably the largest bet that we’ve ever made in the history of the company,” he said. “Some say it’s crazy, some say it’s ambitious. Nobody has said, ‘Well, that looks pretty easy.’”
Sicilia went on to emphasize: “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.”