Oracle Acquires Cerner to Form Oracle Health: The Future of Healthcare

Prioritizing outcomes in healthcare is long overdue. To achieve more seamless, coordinated care, technology must play a greater role in reframing solutions for health and well-being around the world.

In 2022, Oracle acquired Cerner to form Oracle Health, combining Cerner’s clinical capabilities with Oracle’s enterprise platform, analytics, and automation expertise. This partnership continues to change health and wellness in a way that simply has not been possible before. We can provide secure and reliable solutions that deliver health insights and experiences to dramatically change how health is managed by patients, providers, and payers. But there is still more to be done.

Designing for people

Healthcare is innately personal; however, the industry often loses sight of the human side of health. Delivering and understanding care has become increasingly disconnected and complex. Research reveals that many doctors spend nearly twice as much time on administrative work as they do engaging with patients. If we replaced clinicians’ time spent performing administrative tasks with patient interactions, imagine how dramatically we could improve the quality of care. Technology-induced administrative burden contributes to burnout, which has, in part, resulted in a workforce shortage and overshadowed the true benefits of healthcare technology. Clinicians did not enter medicine to spend half their time conducting routine tasks and completing required documentation; they chose their profession to practice at the top of their license.

Oracle’s healthcare division, Oracle Health, offers an open healthcare platform with resources and tools that support clinical decision-making while prioritizing the user experience. By connecting payers, providers, consumers, public health, and life sciences organizations, Oracle Health’s platform promotes a better care experience and improves health outcomes.

For care delivery organizations, we develop new cloud-enabled capabilities allowing providers to access the information they need, where and when they need it, on an interface that is easy to use. This significantly reduces the time and effort required to find patient information, even if the information is scattered across different providers or care settings. We help people access and manage their own health information from wherever they are, so that they have a stronger voice in their care and can conduct more meaningful conversations with their providers. When successful, these improvements can, ultimately, increase the value of healthcare and have the additional benefit of contributing data to population health insights.

Collaborative, interoperable care

In a complex and inefficient healthcare industry, interoperability is critical, but it has not been widely adopted between organizations. From the patient perspective, data silos limit patients’ empowerment and involvement in their health and well-being. It is vitally important that medical records are portable. Regardless of where someone receives care, their records should be accessible and unified. From a clinical perspective, interoperability ensures clinicians can properly review a patient’s entire medical history within their workflow and provide appropriate, contextual treatment.

According to a 2022 survey, 97% of healthcare executives have called for increased healthcare data interoperability, the lack of which inhibits digital transformation and innovation within organizations and throughout the broader industry. Oracle is committed to open APIs to ensure any authorized user can consume health data and insights. We know a closed system will not create connectivity and unification across the many existing players and systems. Creating more solutions without an open ecosystem commitment would only contribute to the problems we see today with fractured and siloed systems.

Oracle is harnessing the power of data to redefine healthcare delivery through Oracle Health. This collaborative and connected ecosystem combines data, AI, and cloud capabilities where people across the healthcare industry can securely access clinical, operational, and financial information. These efforts will break down data silos and enable open, interoperable systems.

In addition, Oracle Health's next-generation electronic health record (EHR) is designed with the care experience in mind. By embedding AI (Oracle Health Clinical AI Agent) across workflows, clinicians can automate processes, streamline appointment preparation, deliver informed health insights, and, ultimately, reduce clinician burnout while enhancing patient care. Industry fragmentation impacts both patients and providers, but Oracle Health has the power to aggregate data through Oracle Health Data Intelligence into a single source of truth to achieve better outcomes.

Improved efficiency across the system

While enhanced clinical systems improve experiences at the bedside and lead to better public health outcomes, back-office operations must also be improved to drive true efficiency, reduce costs, and make the business of healthcare more predictable. Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications can create this bridge between the bedside and the back office, enhancing employee experience (better retention and less administration), streamlining the supply chain (reduced shrinkage and better inventory management), and giving executives a better understanding of the issues impacting their businesses (greater predictability and cost control).

Secure healthcare data

Unfortunately, we know that retail, finance, and health data are the most targeted in security breaches. Patient privacy and the security of health data, when left unaddressed, threaten what the exchange of health information is solely meant to protect: patient safety. It is time to raise health data security to an unprecedented level of investment and focus.

Oracle is an industry leader in securely storing, processing, and analyzing large volumes of cloud-based data. Oracle has been trusted with some of the world’s most sensitive and regulated data for approximately five decades. We continue to apply the same security-obsessed focus to healthcare as we do to all industries—allowing people, patients, providers, and payers to safely access insights that improve care and advance decision-making.

Meeting the moment

While we already knew this industry was ready for change, the pandemic amplified and accelerated the world’s readiness to see that change. We were committed to meeting this moment, and we leveraged the technology and expertise that have revolutionized other industries and applied new innovations to transform these systems of record into systems of intelligence.

By combining our existing healthcare industry solutions—such as clinical trial management systems, health insurance payer solutions, and public health analysis systems—with our acquisition of Cerner, Oracle Health is uniquely positioned to offer new solutions to a broken healthcare system. We plan to continue to support the entire lifecycle of healthcare, going beyond traditional health IT to integrate our infrastructure, platform, and applications capabilities for a more fully connected operational, administrative, and clinical system.

Everyone here at Oracle and Oracle Health is fully committed to the partnerships that will be instrumental to this journey. The technology and the world are ready for transformation. This is just the beginning.