On Tuesday, October 29, Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, who served as administrator of CMS under the Trump administration from 2017 to 2020, spoke with Oracle CEO Safra Catz at the Summit. Oracle Health in Nashville, Tennessee. Of the transformation he led within Oracle, Catz said, “Bringing healthcare and all this technology to help our medical professionals save lives, that’s really what the journey is always about.”
COVID brought to light, Catz noted, how much was unknown. “Coming from the data world, we found it so deeply disturbing that no one knew anything.” “We were all desperate for different things, but the doctors couldn’t even share information with each other.” Catz continued: “We thought, you know what? We already have a cloud.” “We built systems that kept track of the different drugs that doctors were trying… we did things to help with the supply chain, to be able to find the different parts.” “If we hadn’t had a cloud, we probably wouldn’t have had vaccines as quickly,” Catz added.
Oracle Life Sciences announced Oracle Site Feasibility and Oracle Patient Recruitment Cloud Services during the summit. The new cloud services, Oracle said in a press release, will help pharmaceutical companies accelerate clinical trial site feasibility assessment and patient recruitment.
Catz noted that Oracle was founded in 1977 as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) data project, which is why the company is so security conscious. With the merger with Cerner and Oracle Health, he said, “we are finally accomplishing the most important thing we can do…saving lives.”
“When we built our cloud, we built it so that when our customers’ workload was running, our network was running on a completely separate set of processors,” Catz responded to Verma’s question about cybersecurity. To avoid human errors, Catz added, we have implemented deep artificial intelligence (AI). The database is autonomous, he noted, because it is constantly under attack by robots. “Humans can’t fight robots.”
Oracle sleepless their next-generation electronic health record (EHR) to thousands of customers and partners attending the summit. “One of the things we learned during COVID, but even during this process, since we merged with Cerner and really started learning from our customers, is that we realized that a lot of what EHR had become was basically a giant documentation system.” Catz mentioned. Healthcare workers spend a lot of time writing and entering data. Oracle wanted to change this. We wanted a system, Catz said, that would know a situation and make recommendations.
With all the advances, Catz said, “we’re doing things in security that will improve privacy.” “Your health should be at least as important as your shopping trip, and that’s what we’re working on.”
Recently, Oracle Health announced its intention to apply to become a Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN) under the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA).
