Oracle Health spent September unveiling AI tools for cancer care, revenue cycle and nursing, even as Congress moved to force Oracle’s top executives to testify about the VA’s EHR contract and Oracle added $700 million to its restructuring plan.
Here are nine updates on the nation’s second-largest EHR vendor that Becker’s has reported in the past month:
1. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison argued that health records belong to patients rather than hospitals, the premise behind Oracle’s decision to rebuild its patient portal from the ground up instead of extending the legacy Cerner portal, Becker’s reported. Speaking Sept. 23 at the Oracle Health and Life Sciences Summit in Orlando, Fla., Mr. Ellison said the new portal consolidates a patient’s history regardless of how many EHRs or providers contributed to it, and that physicians should review AI-drafted notes and orders rather than type into the EHR. In a separate report, he made the case that higher-quality care is cheaper because it cuts complications and readmissions.
2. Oracle Health unveiled a cancer-specific EHR built on its AI-powered ambulatory EHR, Becker’s reported Sept. 23. An AI assistant for oncologists is expected to generate patient snapshots and previsit summaries, help with tumor board preparation and guideline-grounded treatment planning, and carry clinicians’ decisions into orders, referrals, documentation and coding. Planned capabilities include chemotherapy and immunotherapy regimen planning with lifetime cumulative-dose calculations.
3. Oracle Health unveiled five AI capabilities for its revenue cycle portfolio — covering prior authorization, clinical documentation integrity, charge capture, professional fee coding and appeal management — Becker’s reported Sept. 23. The tools are designed to flag denials, authorization problems and charge errors before they delay reimbursement, and Oracle Health plans to make them generally available to U.S. healthcare organizations in the coming months.
4. Oracle expanded Oracle Life Sciences Data Intelligence, a platform that lets pharmaceutical researchers use natural language to build patient cohorts and run outcome analyses, Becker’s reported Sept. 23. Its data foundation includes Oracle Health Real-World Data, which covers more than 122 million deidentified patient records.
5. The House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs signed and served subpoenas compelling Mr. Ellison and Oracle co-CEO Mike Sicilia to testify about the company’s $27 billion VA EHR contract, Becker’s reported Sept. 17. The committee voted 19-0 Sept. 2 to issue the subpoenas after Oracle pulled out of an oversight hearing, Becker’s reported. Lawmakers want the executives to answer under oath for a no-bid contract modification that raised the deal’s ceiling from roughly $10 billion to $27 billion. An Oracle spokesperson told Becker’s the company supports congressional oversight and looks forward to providing testimony “when Congress returns after the election,” after Oracle Health’s Seema Verma was unable to appear at the Sept. 2 hearing.
6. Oracle expanded its restructuring plan by about $700 million, bringing expected costs to roughly $2.8 billion, according to a Sept. 11 Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Becker’s reported Sept. 15. The filing did not say what the additional costs would cover or how many employees could be affected. It came as Oracle employees, including some at Oracle Health, reported a new round of layoffs on social media.
7. Brentwood, Tenn.-based Quorum Health selected Oracle to standardize its clinical, financial and operational technology across its 11 hospitals in nine states, Becker’s reported Sept. 15. Building on its existing use of Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, Quorum will adopt Oracle Health EHR, Oracle Health Clinical AI Agent, Oracle Health Patient Accounting, Oracle Health Patient Portal and Oracle Health Data Intelligence.
8. Oracle Health launched a clinical AI agent for nurses embedded in its EHR, with voice-enabled charting, patient information search and acute nursing summaries, Becker’s reported Sept. 14. Clearwater, Fla.-based BayCare Health System is an early adopter of the tool, which follows Oracle’s clinical AI agent for physicians.
9. The Government Accountability Office told Congress that the VA has not fully implemented 14 of 18 recommendations meant to fix its EHR modernization program, all 12 that GAO designated as priorities, Becker’s reported Sept. 2. A VA spokesperson told Becker’s the department has nearly tripled its federal EHR footprint since early April, from six to 17 medical centers.
