When Kern Medical put its EHR out to bid, the Bakersfield, Calif.-based safety-net health system was weighing the same move many Oracle Health customers have made in recent years: a switch to Epic.
Instead, Kern signed on with Oracle Health for another 8 1/2 years, in a contract that took effect Aug. 1.
“We went out to RFP to essentially change EHRs, but Oracle got their act together right in the middle of our evaluation period, and we decided to remain on Oracle Health,” Kern Medical co-CIO Sandra Bakich told Becker’s.
The decision cuts against the market. Oracle Health shed 56 hospitals in 2025, and its share of acute care hospitals fell to 21.9%, compared with Epic’s 43.7%, according to KLAS data compiled by Becker’s. Tampa, Fla.-based Moffitt Cancer Center and Valhalla, N.Y.-based Westchester Medical Center Health Network were named new Epic customers in August, both leaving Oracle Health.
But KLAS also found some Oracle Health customers holding off on EHR decisions while they waited to see where the vendor was headed, and called 2026 a pivotal year as Oracle rolls out a new AI-enabled EHR.
The clearest results so far come from Oracle’s Clinical AI Agent, an ambient documentation tool. Kern piloted it in its ambulatory clinics this summer and rolled it out to all ambulatory providers in October. The pilot included strong, middling and poor documenters, and the poor documenters improved the most, Ms. Bakich said.
“Before we couldn’t get them to sign a note. Now they complete notes for the whole day, and that same day, not weeks and months later,” she said.
Other Oracle customers report similar results. At Clearwater, Fla.-based BayCare Health System, physicians who were already efficient documenters saw little change, while less efficient ones caught up to their peers, according to CIO Lynnette Clinton. Atlantic City, N.J.-based AtlantiCare, which began using the agent in 2024, has produced more than 250,000 AI-assisted notes across 26 specialties, and providers who use it consistently have cut total EHR time by about 28% and documentation time by about 40%, said Chief Information and Digital Officer Jordan Ruch.
For Kern, the bigger draw was cost. Ms. Bakich said Oracle’s plan to move its software fully to the cloud, including the application layer, will save the hospital “a ton of money” on maintenance and support. Epic requires a large support staff, she said, and that staff is hard to find in Bakersfield.
“You can’t find anybody to come here, right? So you either have to grow your own, or you have to pay really expensive people a lot of money to live here,” she said.
Ms. Bakich also said Oracle’s support has improved, calling Kern’s most recent upgrade the best she’s had in 20 years.
Ms. Clinton and Mr. Ruch both pointed to Oracle’s architecture. Ms. Clinton said owning the full stack — infrastructure, database, EHR and, at some organizations, the ERP — lets Oracle deliver new functionality quickly. Mr. Ruch told Becker’s the edge comes from AI built natively into a connected EHR and ERP platform rather than bolted on through third-party tools.
“The AI-native approach to the new EHR is extraordinary for the market. When it’s fully ready, it could be a real market disruptor, which this industry hasn’t had in a long time,” Ms. Clinton told Becker’s.
Springfield, Mass.-based Baystate Health, an Oracle customer for more than two decades, expanded its relationship with the vendor in June, including plans to adopt the Oracle Health EHR and Clinical AI Agent. President and CEO Peter Banko told Becker’s that AI could give Oracle an edge if it does something other vendors can’t or won’t. In his view, AI’s ultimate power lies in “making interoperability disappear.”
Customers also see gaps. Ms. Bakich wants Oracle to move faster on revenue cycle AI tools, several of which she expects in the first half of 2027. Mr. Ruch said Oracle’s AI needs to expand beyond documentation into chart search and summarization, medication reconciliation and discharge planning.
“Revenue cycle has always been the Achilles’ heel of Oracle Cerner. So they’re really improving it,” Ms. Bakich said.
Whether that’s enough to win health systems back from Epic is another question. Jim Whitfill, MD, chief transformation officer of Scottsdale, Ariz.-based HonorHealth, said Epic may be the only U.S. company with an EHR that can handle the complexity of U.S. healthcare at the scale of most medium and large health systems.
“To catch up with Epic, Oracle needs to be able to outperform Epic from a patient safety and end user experience perspective as well as in rev cycle performance with an implementation process that reliably works,” Dr. Whitfill said.
For now, Oracle’s AI gains are showing up among customers that decided not to leave. Ms. Bakich, who belongs to a KLAS group of Oracle Health clients, said more of her peers are staying put rather than moving to Epic, as Kern nearly did.
“I’m hopeful. So far so good, but it’s been early on,” she said.
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