Oracle previewed a new electronic health record flush with artificial intelligence tools Tuesday as it tries to win back market share lost to its largest competitor, Epic Systems.
The company said the EHR will be built around conversational AI and can summarize a patient’s medical history to provide tailored recommendations for clinicians. The preview came on the first day of a two-day event for Oracle customers and others.
Related: Oracle Health’s Seema Verma on Epic and interoperability
Oracle has struggled to achieve its healthcare ambitions since acquiring EHR company Cerner for $28.4 billion in June 2022. There have been problems with a massive EHR project for the Veterans Affairs Department and the company laid off employees in June 2023.
The company lost customers that accounted for almost 15,400 beds in acute care, multi-specialty hospitals last year, while Epic gained almost 28,800 beds, according to a May report from market research firm KLAS.
In addition to touting its products and capabilities, the event in Nashville, Tennessee, which was streamed for virtual attendees, included multiple thinly veiled swipes at Epic during a keynote address by Seema Verma, Oracle Health's executive vice president and general manager.
“This isn't a refurbished Cerner EHR, because in this day and age, you can't leverage modern technology by bolting new innovation to something built in the 1990s,” Verma said.
She later added, “It won't require hours of training or years of implementation.”
Oracle plans to make the new EHR available to early adopter customers by the middle of next year.
In an interview, Suhas Uliyar, senior vice president, said Oracle has identified five health systems that could act as early adopters and help with the design of the product, called Oracle Health EHR. No contracts have been signed, he said.
The new EHR will automatically leverage data contained in its existing Millennium EHRs and should make the transition for customers easier, he said.
It will also incorporate a pair of previously announced AI tools. Oracle’s Clinical AI Agent, formerly called Oracle Health’s Clinical Digital Assistant, is meant to help clinicians search for patient information and transcribe patient-doctor conversations. Around 70 customers use the feature, which launched in May.
The company said its tools that take information from payer claims and pharmacies would be integrated into the product at launch.