Oracle’s CEO Talks About the Company's Evolution into Healthcare

On Tuesday, October 29, Seema Verma, EVP & GM of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, who was CMS Administrator under the Trump administration from 2017 to 2020, spoke with Oracle's CEO, Safra Catz, at the Oracle Health Summit in Nashville, Tennessee. About the transformation she led within Oracle, Catz said, "To bring healthcare and all this technology to help our medical professionals save lives, that's really what the journey has always been about."

COVID brought to light, Catz pointed out, how much was unknown. "Coming from the data world, we found it so profoundly disturbing that no one knew anything." "We were all desperate for different things, but doctors couldn't even share information amongst themselves." Catz continued, "We thought to ourselves, you know what? We already have a cloud." "We built systems that kept track of the different medications that doctors were trying…we did things to help with the supply chain, to be able to find all the different parts." "Had we not had a cloud, we probably wouldn't have had vaccines so fast," Catz added. 

Oracle Life Sciences announced the 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 data project of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which is why the company is so security-conscious. With the merger with Cerner and Oracle Health, she said, "We are finally bringing it to the single most important thing we can do….save lives."

"When we built our cloud, we built it in a way so that when our customers' workload is running, our network is running on a completely separate set of processors," Catz responded to Verma's question about cybersecurity. To avoid human error, Catz added, we've implemented deep artificial intelligence (AI). The database is autonomous, she noted, because it is constantly under attack by robots. "Humans cannot fight robots."

Oracle unveiled its 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 to learn from our customers, is, we realized that so much of what EHR had turned into was basically a giant documenting system," Catz mentioned. Healthcare workers spend a lot of time typing and entering data. Oracle wanted to change this. We wanted a system, Catz said, that knows a situation and gives recommendations.

With all the advances, Catz said, "We're doing things in security which will enhance privacy." "Your health should be at least as important as your shopping journey, 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).