Oracle co-founder, chair and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison has spent years arguing that his company can overtake Epic. In an Oct. 27 keynote at Oracle AI World in Las Vegas, he pitched Oracle Health’s AI-based software to the hospitals that already run Epic’s EHR.
Oracle bought Cerner in 2022, and Epic has kept pulling customers away from it since. Tampa, Fla.-based Moffitt Cancer Center and Valhalla, N.Y.-based Westchester Medical Center Health Network were named new Epic customers at the vendor’s Users Group Meeting in August, both switching from Oracle Health. KLAS has called 2026 a pivotal year for Oracle Health as it rolls out a new AI-enabled EHR.
At his keynote, Mr. Ellison used Palo Alto, Calif.-based Stanford Health Care, an Epic customer, as his example.
“For example, if you’re a Stanford hospital and you’re using the Epic electronic health record system, and you want to put in the Oracle oncology module, you just turn it on, and the Oracle oncology module knows all of your oncology staff,” Mr. Ellison said. “It knows all of you because you have it in your system. You use [SMART on FHIR]. There are interfaces for doing this. It goes out and discovers what you’re currently using, and adds to it. There’s no data migration. There’s no new training.”
“Stanford has a system. They have Epic, and Epic keeps track of their staff, so we know who the staff is,” he said. “All that data is in the existing system. If their oncology module can read it, so can ours. Now maybe ours is better. Maybe ours isn’t. That’s for you to decide. But there isn’t this multiyear implementation with this new system, Oracle Health.”
He contrasted that with the way enterprise software usually goes in.
“I’ve decided to buy this really great new application, and then I’ve hired somebody, and they tell me maybe in two years, if I give them a lot of money, I can start using that application,” Mr. Ellison said. “That’s different than me downloading my Mahjong game onto my iPad.”
Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, interviewed Mr. Ellison onstage after his remarks and pressed him on whether a health system could buy just one piece.
“Can I just take an oncology agent? Take one agent, or do I have to take your whole system? And if I wanted that, how long would it take?” Ms. Verma asked.
“Most of these systems, the Cerner systems were a lot of them were installed in computers at the hospital. The Epic systems, a lot of them are installed in computers at the hospital. Ours are entirely in the cloud,” Mr. Ellison said. “It’s on the internet. You connect to the oncology module, and it will discover the data it’s authorized to look at, the patients it’s authorized to look at, the staff it’s authorized to work with.”
“It’s like turning a switch. You turn on oncology. You turn on radiology. You turn on patient monitoring,” he said.
Mr. Ellison also described Oracle Health’s patient portal, drawing on his son’s care at Stanford.
“We have a patient portal. In fact, the first part of Oracle Health that came out is called the patient portal, and it’s very different than traditional patient portals,” Mr. Ellison said. “The patient portal for my son at Stanford … was Epic-only, and it was Stanford-only. Now you could get that thing shared, moved to another hospital.
“That’s, by the way, the way the Cerner patient portal has worked up until the era of AI,” he said. “In the era of AI, the patient portal is little different. It will give you all your health records, regardless of what hospital you went to. … regardless of whether it was Epic or Cerner or Allscripts, so it’s multihospital, multi-EHR, and it covers every citizen of the United States of America.”
He made a similar case for clinical trials, an area where Oracle has positioned its software as broader than Epic’s.
“So even if you’re not using Oracle Health, you can plug Oracle Health into any Epic hospital, any Cerner hospital, any Allscripts hospital, any NHS hospital,” Mr. Ellison said. “Plug that in, and then once the clinical trials module is there, that would enable you to join the clinical trial regardless of where you are in the world.”
“Right now, none of the current EHR systems, not Epic, not the current version of Cerner, have clinical trials built in,” he said.
Epic has pushed back on similar claims before. After Mr. Ellison’s remarks at the Oracle Health Summit in Nashville, Tenn., in April 2024, an Epic spokesperson responded to Becker’s.
“Organizations using Epic manage thousands of clinical trials for millions of patients each year, and our software is used to support these trials,” the spokesperson said.
Editor’s note: Becker’s has reached out to Epic and will update this story if more information becomes available.
Becker’s 3rd Annual Fall Chief Pharmacy Officer Summit is the top tier event that the people leading the future of pharmacy convene. This 3-day event is built specifically for Chief Pharmacy Officers and senior pharmacy leaders. The sessions examine the workforce, financial and clinical priorities shaping pharmacy today. Becker’s is where candid discussions flourish and new ideas thrive. Becker's 3rd Annual Fall Chief Pharmacy Officer Summit
