A sneak peek at Oracle’s plans for healthcare prior to 9 June’s ‘The Future of Healthcare’ live

June 9, 2022 | by

Gimlet EyeOracle is all set to heal the healthcare system, now that Cerner’s in the fold. Unlike other companies that have promised (ZocDoc and Change Healthcare come to mind), Oracle may actually have the capabilities to do so in many areas. Oracle has the enterprise infrastructure, the analytics, and IT automation; Cerner brings the entreé into patient records, automation, and clinical expertise that Oracle on its own didn’t have.

For those Readers not able to join the Oracle Live presentation at 3pm Central Time, 4pm Eastern, and 9pm BST (and miss Tony Blair! s/o), some of the highlights of the preview posted by Oracle’s EVP Mike Sicilia, on the Oracle Health blog:

  • The objective is to deliver “secure and reliable solutions that deliver health insights and experiences to dramatically change how health is managed by patients, providers, and payors”
  • Reduce technology-induced administrative burden that’s burned out clinicians through “a toolset that supports clinical decision making and prioritizes the user experience” via an interface that’s easy to use for care delivery organizations to find patient information
  • Make systems interoperable between organizations so that clinicians can access complete medical histories and records are portable by the patient by creating a collaborative ecosystem that breaks down information silos
  • Using their Fusion application to streamline and integrate back-office systems to drive efficiency and reduce costs, as well as reducing administrative costs, the supply chain, and retaining employees
  • Oracle’s 40+ years in securing vulnerable healthcare data to the standards they have in handling large volumes of cloud-based data for financial institutions
  • Combining existing expertise in areas such as clinical trials, health insurance, and public health analysis with Cerner, they will “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”

Those cynics among us with Gimlet Eyes have heard each and every one of these points before. Panaceas where everything is there for everybody, all wrapped up with a blue bow, if you buy it all at the usual stunning price, have been tried before in healthcare. Another question is the mesh of Middle America Cerner and Silicon Valley Oracle. Nonetheless, the combo should give the industry a little hope. They’ll be feeling their way through as Cerner is an organization used to doing things their way. If Oracle can straighten out the MHS Cerner Genesis and Cerner Millenium rollout in DOD and the VA, it’ll be worthy of applause.

One step further towards smartphone-based health apps becoming autonomous

August 5, 2013 | by

It’s my contention that telehealth, or whatever it is called then, will only start to have a really significant impact on reducing the burden on caregivers when the technology begins to move from decision support to decision taking; only then will clinicians be able to disengage from needing to be involved in every decision regarding a patient’s treatment and focus on those decisions requiring significant skill and judgement. Sure there are all sorts of genuine hurdles in the way like ensuring that the decision-making process is not compromised by other genuine – or rogue – processes taking place on whatever the smartphones is called in the future that is processing and transmitting information, and there have been several recent warnings on malicious hacking of medical devices, so it won’t be happening any time soon. However, given the way so many medical processes that began with manual involvement have moved steadily towards automation, from ECG to Point-Of-Care-Testing, hopefully one day these problems will be solved.

One pointer, reported in iMedicalApps, is three trials currently underway using smartphones to control artificial pancreases to manage diabetes. The smartphones in this case are completely locked down and are only used for the decision-taking process around closed-loop insulin delivery. Nevertheless it’s a step.

When mHealth and telehealth become ‘just healthcare’ (US)

July 25, 2013 | by

GovernmentHealthIT reports that, speaking yesterday during the first day of the World Congress on mHealth and Telehealth in Boston, US, Jonah J. Czerwinski said Veterans Affairs (VA) had managed the health of some 500,000 people using telehealth in 2012.  He expects this to rise to over 600,000 this year.  He is senior advisor to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, where he leads the VA Center for Innovation.  That’s some endorsement for telehealth!

“It’s connected healthcare – no ‘tele-,’ no ‘m-,'” he is reported to have told the audience: “This is just healthcare.”

Picking up on the topic of automating telehealth monitoring, he also described how the VitaLink home monitoring system, one of the VA’s more promising telehealth projects, has been developed by the VA from algorithms used in the mining industry to detect when drill bits embedded deep in the earth were stressed out and ready to fail.