Travis Dalton, executive vice president of Oracle and director of Oracle Health, inaugurated a few days ago the new European hub that the group has opened in Barcelona. Dalton explains that Oracle technology, focused on improving healthcare management and clinical care, has taken a step forward with the incorporation of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which can become a doctor’s assistant and free him from tasks. non-care. In his opinion, “technology will be key to retaining doctors.”
You ran Cerner, a technology company specializing in health that Oracle bought for 26.5 billion euros. What has this purchase brought to Oracle?
Cerner had 40 years of healthcare experience and we had 20,000 customers in 32 countries. Oracle had global scale, global cloud and technology capabilities, and products and engineering that allowed it to grow quickly. The real advantage has been that we now have access to talent. We have the ability to invest in places like Barcelona. We have cloud infrastructure and better cybersecurity capabilities. And Oracle has gained a base of healthcare customers to whom it can sell other value-adding products and services.
Oracle is a specialist in business management tools that operate from the cloud, and with the integration of Cerner they wanted to implement them in healthcare environments. But is this going to improve healthcare?
In the last six months I have seen, I would say between 150 and 200 clients in 15 countries and they are all basically looking for the same thing: better health outcomes; better experience for those who use the computer system (doctors, nurses or laboratory technicians) and lower cost. At Cerner we could have done the first two, but not the third. As Oracle, we can do all three. Go beyond clinical care and improve the entire healthcare ecosystem, with its clinical systems, its integrated financial and billing systems, its cloud region, integrated AI, prediction and other analytics. And also reduce costs. No one else in the world can provide all that.
They have presented here an application that uses AI and voice recognition so that the doctor speaks with the nurse and the system records his instructions without having to type the report himself, just reviewing it. Have you quantified how this can improve the time doctors spend caring for patients?
In my opinion, bureaucracy and administrative burden is precisely the reason why doctors are leaving the profession. Most IT systems in healthcare have been built more as billing systems than as a clinical system for the end user. We want to change it. We now offer artificial intelligence capabilities – or applied intelligence as I like to call it – the ability to analyze data and predict outcomes before they happen. But the user experience has to be better, and probably the number one investment we are making at Oracle is in improving that experience. That the doctor’s instructions are captured by voice and only signed, and the system automatically generates discharge instructions for the patient so that they can take them with them when they walk out the door.
You said that the pandemic has led to a leap in the incorporation of new technologies into healthcare.
Yes. I think Covid was a big wake-up call for the global health community. We realized that we were not connected, that we had no data interconnectivity. And it also changed the patients, their expectations changed. Now they want to have their data on their phone, when they need it, in real time, and they want to be able to use it. They don’t want to have to go to the emergency room or outpatient clinic. It took us out of the status quo.
The technology, however, is expensive, and governments are already making a great effort to incorporate innovative treatments, and due to the aging of the population. How much would it cost to implement it?
Our model is very much software as a service: we try to make sure that customers don’t pay for things they don’t use or aren’t useful to them. And you have to consider scale as an advantage, which can reduce the costs of our platform for large health systems.
Our system combines the clinical system and data platform that Cerner had and Oracle’s business management systems: supply chain management, workforce management, enterprise resource planning, payment processing… integrate all that and connect it with clinical management can reduce many inefficiencies and generate a lot of value. Furthermore, by analyzing the data we can make predictions. For example, we have clients who predict what the demand for medical care will be in 30 or 90 days. This way they can adapt their staff to demand. We have 12 use cases for that.
The Spanish Government has launched a project to create a single medical record for patients, which would improve the care they receive when they move within Spain and at the same time save money for the system, by avoiding unnecessary tests. You are leaders in that.
At Oracle we have developed a public health data platform that actually sits on top of vendor-neutral systems (hospital, primary care, etc.). These centers do not have to use our system, which can take data from other systems or platforms, or from portable devices and normalize it.
I’ll give you an example. The two largest healthcare entities in the US are the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Both use our system and that health data platform: 20 million beneficiaries in seven countries, with 2,000 care locations. From the moment someone enlists, anywhere they go around the world, to when they become a veteran and to the grave they have a unique medical history.
The doctor who treats you always has all the information and the medications you take. And our system can predict, for example, your potential propensity for opioid abuse or even suicide, so that the health professional takes action to prevent it. Or also, based on data, detect if there is a pathology with a high incidence in a group of people with common circumstances, such as people who lived in a place with contaminated water 30 years ago and today develop cancer. This allows the doctor to be proactive.
In Catalonia we have seen, in a recent incident at the Hospital Clínic, the importance of the security of hospital computer systems. Oracle had the CIA as its first client. They surely have experience with cybersecurity problems.
I’ll just say that we protect some of the world’s most sensitive data in other industries. Oracle is part of what is called the Defense Industrial Base and we have top secret clearance. And we use similar secure processes in other industries and in the health area at Oracle. We don’t like to say that we are the best in the world in cybersecurity, because hackers simply come to test us. They take it as a challenge. But we are very, very confident in our cyber capabilities.
