Some of the profound issues in American healthcare (and maybe globally) is the fragmented and siloed nature of healthcare knowledge. This narrative is essentially pushed by the huge variety of digital well being file (EHR) programs which are at present in use. These are the programs that comprise an individual’s medical knowledge, historical past, and previous therapy data. When a affected person has a healthcare encounter, their info is accessed via an EHR system, so physicians can present curated therapy per the affected person’s historical past and background.
The issue, nonetheless, arises from the truth that there are various totally different EHR and well being IT programs, that means {that a} affected person’s data might not be accessible throughout totally different organizations. This poses a large subject: if John Doe results in a hospital that’s totally different from his native establishment for any cause, until that hospital occurs to make use of the identical actual file and data system, it might be difficult for the treating physicians to entry any of John Doe’s earlier medical historical past. This creates a myriad of difficulties when making an attempt to find out how finest to deal with somebody, perceive somebody’s healthcare historical past, and get a holistic sense of the affected person.
For a few years, healthcare pundits have highlighted this as an enormous obstacle to attaining higher affected person outcomes. Accordingly, many individuals have additionally proposed an answer for this: why not simply create a common system that may be applied throughout all healthcare establishments?
That is the precise query that Larry Ellison, co-founder and chief of world-renowned know-how firm, Oracle, is making an attempt to unravel. The corporate has been a pioneer within the healthcare sector, with its cloud computing know-how and superior programs software program supporting among the world’s largest well being organizations and establishments.
Oracle co-founder and Chairman Larry Ellison delivers a keynote deal with.
Most just lately, Oracle furthered its imaginative and prescient of driving impression in healthcare by buying Cerner for practically $28 billion {dollars}. Cerner is likely one of the world’s largest EHR programs, utilized by establishments worldwide to arrange tens of millions of affected person data and encounters. Which means Oracle no longer solely has entry to this knowledge, but additionally has a singular alternative to scale this idea into one thing more practical for the trade.
Ellison shared his ideas concerning this throughout Oracle’s The Future of Healthcare convention earlier this month: “Collectively, Cerner and Oracle have all of the know-how required to construct a revolutionary new well being administration info system within the cloud […] That system will ship a lot better info to healthcare professionals. Higher info will essentially remodel healthcare […] We’re constructing a system the place the well being data, all Americans’ well being data, not solely exist on the hospital degree, however they’re all in a unified nationwide healthcare database […] The nationwide database solves the information digital well being file fragmentation drawback.”
After all, this journey will face vital hurdles. That is actually not the primary time a nationwide database has been proposed as an answer to well being data fragmentation. Nonetheless, well being data are notoriously difficult to navigate and manage, given how delicate this knowledge is to individuals’s lives and identities, and accordingly, the strict stipulations that the federal government locations on the information for affected person safety. A nationalized database will even assuredly be scrutinized for the quantity of vulnerability it opens up close to safety, particularly as healthcare cyber-attacks have significantly increased in the last decade. Certainly, there shall be many challenges in attaining this endeavor.
Indubitably, fragmentation of healthcare knowledge is detrimental to affected person security, care, and healthcare outcomes. Oracle actually has its work minimize out within the months forward because it tries to navigate this path. Nonetheless, the progressive imaginative and prescient that the corporate is making an attempt to propagate bodes effectively for the way forward for healthcare knowledge, as that is certainly an issue that can finally have to be resolved.
