Oracle announced  its new Clinical Digital Assistant technology, designed to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into its Cerner electronic health record (EHR) system. This technology aims to reduce manual work and documentation burdens for healthcare providers by enabling them to use generative AI and voice commands.

Why it's Notable:

• The new technology assistant will leverage generative AI and voice commands to enable doctors to automate note taking, order medications and view lab results while also more easily viewing a patient’s medical record. Doctors will be able to request to view specific parts of a medical record through voice commands, rather than manual searches, in an effort to save time. The digital assistant will be able to run during patient-doctor appointments ,and will propose context-aware next actions for clinicians based on the conversations detected during the consultation, such as ordering medication or labs. This reduction in manual workload will free up clinician time to focus on patient care.

• The new EHR assistant will also support patient-facing functions such as scheduling their appointments, paying their medical bills, checking their personal health information, as well as providing generative AI-generated answers to questions about their treatment and procedures. The platform also provides a web chat function where clinicians can communicate directly with patients via the patient portal, for example to remind them to bring lab results to their next check up.

Industry Implications:

• Oracle plans for its AI-driven EHR assistant to be available on the market in the next 12 months. There is a clear trend emerging towards the implementation of AI into EHRs, as this follows several other vendors announcing activity with generative AI. Back inApril 2023, EPIC announced its partnership with Microsoft aimed at integrating large language model tools and AI into its EHR software. The partners have since launched ‘copilot’ solutions to help providers with medical notes summarisation. Google and Meditech are also pivoting their partnership to focus on integrating generative AI, including Google’s Med-PaLM 2 healthcare AI chatbot, into Meditech’s EHR system.

• Oracle has been actively engaged in various endeavors to evolve the EHR space since its $28 billion acquisition of Cerner in June of 2022. This includes plans to build a nationwide unified EHR database in the U.S., to address fragmentation in the healthcare system. It plans to build a database from which providers in any hospital regardless of their EHR system will be able to access patients records when they are admitted to that hospital, while maintaining robust privacy protections. It also hopes the anonymised database will serve public health officials by providing nationwide health data. It was recently reported that this database will be ready for deployment as early as next month, and that the company is prepared to build new data centers to help national governments pursue this vision.

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