Oracle's Larry Ellison is not what one might call humble. The founder of the software company and owner of a Hawaiian island, among other things, he usually takes to the stage at his company’s events to tell the world how much better Oracle products are than those of rivals.
At this week’s Oracle OpenWorld conference in Las Vegas, it was as if a different person had stepped on stage for the keynote address. While he slipped in references to Oracle’s “self-repairing” autonomous database, he had something else on his mind: transforming the world’s healthcare systems.
The need, he said, was urgent. And Oracle could not do it alone.
“The big healthcare technology providers have focused on selling systems to one segment of the healthcare ecosystem, big hospitals. So the hospital buys the system, operates the system, and ... each hospital has its own database of electronic health records. Sharing those records is very difficult and your health records are scattered in dozens of databases owned by every provider you've ever visited in your entire life. It’s terribly fragmented.”
The current generation of healthcare systems, he said, puts health providers at the centre of the system, not patients.
“That’s a fundamental problem. We’re going to keep providing hospitals with clinical systems, and we’re going to greatly enhance both systems, but we’re also going to layer on top of that a national public health electronic record database. Some of that data will want to be shared among nations to provide a worldwide global public health system.”
In short, he said, Oracle planned to build two new public health systems, one national and one global.
We’re going to keep providing hospitals with clinical systems, and we’re going to greatly enhance both systems, but we’re also going to layer on top of that a national public health electronic record database
“It was made very clear during the Covid-19 pandemic that we are in desperate need of both of those systems if we’re going to do a better job of managing healthcare, especially during a crisis.”
It is an ambitious goal, and not one that lends itself to humility. But this was not the 2019 version of Larry Ellison.
“We discovered during the pandemic there’s no way we can do this ourselves. We don’t have the domain expertise to do this by ourselves. We have to have partners as we automate the ecosystem.
“During the pandemic, we worked with the University of Oxford; we worked with the Centers for Disease Control. We found a number of independent software companies. We had to make our development environment an open platform where they could innovate, they could develop technology that would run on our healthcare platform.”
The key that unlocked the door of possibilities, he said, was health IT company Cerner, which Oracle acquired for $28.3bn (R436bn) this year.
“With Cerner’s knowledge of healthcare and our knowledge of technology, [we can] merge those together and tackle the next generation of healthcare systems.”
The clue that the goal is not too ambitious lies in the global credit and financial system.
“They know how much you earn. They know where your kids went to school. They know all of that because there is a global financial base that keeps track of every creditworthy person on the face of the Earth.
“Obviously we prioritise shopping way above healthcare. We have no similar healthcare systems, but we know how to build them. We built them for financial records. Why can’t we build them for our health records? It’s a little more complex, but the answer is obviously yes, we should.
“A complete financial accounting budgeting system is part of it and we’re constantly enhancing our ERP [enterprise resource planning] system for healthcare. We enhance our HCM [human capital management] system for healthcare. We enhance our supply chain system for healthcare. We’re committed to this mission and we have a lot of help from a lot of partners.”
• Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za
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