CAN ORACLE’S ACQUISITION OF CERNER RESET THE EMR INDUSTRY?

Our healthcare industry is complex, heavily regulated and until the pandemic, resistant to change. The U.S. government spent $30B to incentivize providers to deploy electronic medical records, putting the industry on the rails of transformation. Now close to 90% of providers have some version of EMR system. To us, this monumental achievement was well worth the money, sweat and tears.

Now it is time for the second act. We believe the acquisition of Cerner, which has a 23% market share, will give Oracle a chance to reimagine the role of EMRs. Here are a few places where their focus could pay off handsomely:

Achieving full data liquidity- With the greater utilization of virtual care and shifting of acute care to the home, EMR systems need to ingest and “translate” incoming data from sources other than providers’ sites. Increased consumerism means ingesting data from wearables and remote patient monitoring devices, and turning that data into actionable insights. This task will become increasingly complex as the “clinic on the wrist” technologies advance. If EMRs fail to achieve full data liquidity, they will not play a role in prevention and will eventually decouple from the rest of the industry and lose relevance.

Reducing waste and optimizing clinical workflows- With the support of AI and ML models, EMR systems should be able to provide insights for care optimization and play a role in provider/payer alignment by exposing relevant data to payers in near real time.

Providing ambient voice intelligence for automatically documenting care- Oracle claims that it will use its voice technology to reduce burden on physicians. Other companies have a much bigger head start in this area, but we should not discount Oracle’s ability to organically or inorganically catch up with its competitors.

Of course, none of these steps will be achievable without a cloud-first strategy. Prior to the acquisition, Cerner was in the process of migrating to AWS cloud. Now it is Oracle’s chance to make that migration happen faster on its own cloud and tightly integrate Cerner with its platform.

Even the best EMR systems today are viewed as transactional platforms, with very little downstream capabilities. Alphabet’s effort to marginalize EMRs to data warehouses, through its Care Studio, has fallen short of its promise. Here, Oracle has an opening to elevate EMR as a universal platform which can be used by providers, payors, and analytics companies to build products that can finally make patient-centered healthcare a reality!