Oracle moving quickly to change Cerner’s outside vendors to Oracle products and move their EHRs to Oracle cloud services. Will this fly with health systems and providers? An immediate change that will resonate with current Cerner EHR users is Oracle’s immediate moves to replace Cerner’s current third-party vendors with Oracle services and technology. So if your Cerner EHR has something you like but it comes from a third-party vendor, enjoy it while you can. Do expect that Oracle will be selling other products like Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud, administrative systems, and supply chain into providers and health systems–hard. From the earnings call, CEO Safra Katz: “We remain confident in our ability to grow Cerner’s top line and bottom line faster than they were able to do so on their own as these changes are implemented.”

The major and quickest move specified in yesterday’s Oracle earnings call (transcript) will be to move Cerner to OCI–Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Further down into Mr. Katz’s remarks, Cerner is expected to account for 20 points of their cloud growth in Q1 2023 (starting 1 June 2022). When Cerner has added $15.8 billion of debt to the balance sheets, it’s to be expected.  HISTalk, Becker’s

What happens to audio-only telehealth at the end of the pandemic Public Health Emergency (PHE)? HHS has just issued guidance that will permit telehealth, including audio-only, services to continue. According to the HHS release, “HIPAA covered entities can use remote communication technologies to provide telehealth services, including audio-only services, in compliance with the HIPAA Privacy Rule. ” There are specific requirements such as how the HIPAA Security Rule applies to electronic media and electronic protected health information (ePHI). The full guidance is here.

UK surgical connectivity platform Proximie raises $80 million. London-based Proximie, a system that connects surgeries with pre-operative patient information, collaborative tools, and post-operative content distribution, completed a Series C with participation from Emerson Collective – the impact investor founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, British Patient Capital, Mubadala Investment Company, and the Minderoo Foundation, plus previous investors. The raise is unusually large (in this Editor’s opinion) for the UK, particularly at this uncertain time. Proximie has supported over 13,000 surgeries in 100 countries, contracts with over 35 major medical device companies such as Stryker and Abbott, and has been used in 500 hospitals across 50 countries. The company is a partner with Teladoc and Vodafone Business.  Release.