Epic left Mumps 2 or 3 decades ago, they are primarily on Intersystems Cache and SQL. Cache has proven to…
News 10/30/24
Top News
Oracle Health will release a voice-powered, AI-enabled EHR in 2025.
The new system will be developed from scratch rather than being built on Cerner Millennium architecture, which will then require existing customers to migrate to the new one.
The company says that it discovered that Millennium has a “crumbling infrastructure” that was not suitable for enhancement.
Reader Comments
From TooCuteByHalf: “Re: Oracle Health’s application to become a QHIN. This is great news for interoperability … eventually. The application process takes months at the earliest, and even at that, it won’t be till at least mid 2025 before the first Oracle Health hospital goes live. TEFCA is nearly a year old, with millions of documents being shared, and the founding QHIN’s have been in the game for literally years. What took Oracle so long, and why take a victory lap in a race you’re not winning?” I’m even more interested in how Oracle Health plans to release a from-scratch EHR in the next few months that does not use Millennium’s underpinnings. It seems challenging to develop, test, document, and install a brand new EHR that will require existing customers to migrate, which is probably why no company has succeeded in rolling out a competitive inpatient EHR in decades. It’s a high-wire act to put out a huge software platform that directly affects patient care, especially given significant loss of former Cerner subject matter experts, and it wouldn’t take many clinically unfortunate missteps to send Oracle Health’s remaining customers fleeing to Epic. Meanwhile, having thrown the only available product under the bus after what seems to have been poorly executed due diligence, Oracle won’t likely make many new sales until the replacement system goes GA, not that it is selling much anyway.
From Big Dog: “Re: Epic. Is the shared version (where multiple clients are on the same instance) of Epic a reduced functional version of Epic when it’s a standalone version? Was talking to a nurse at a local hospital the other day and they recently converted from Cerner Community Works and the nurse was stating they must have purchased the cheap version as it was no better than what they had been using.“
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
This week is a first, in that both Jenn and I are away on vacation at the same time. I’ll put in enough hours to not miss anything important, but will keep it simple otherwise.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
London-based events operator Hyve acquires HLTH, whose HLTH USA conference will become its largest event by revenue. Hyve will take over HLTH USA (Las Vegas), ViVE (Nashville), and HLTH Europe (Amsterdam). Hyve says it has targeted HLTH for years as the top conference in healthcare, noting a post-pandemic trend in which the largest conferences are growing at the expense of smaller ones. Hyve will bring over 80 HLTH employees and founder Jon Weiner. Hyve was taken private by two private equity firms in June 2023.
Alpha II, which acquired RCxRules in October 2023, changes its name to Aptarro.
A study by Peterson Health Technology Institute finds that digital hypertension management tools – which include blood pressure monitoring, medication management, and behavior change – don’t provide overall health spending value even though they can be effective. It concludes that solutions that send data to care teams for medication management are most effective, while those that focus on patient behavior change deliver substandard results compared to traditional care.
Sales
- Northeast Georgia Health System chooses Optimum Healthcare IT to support execution of its cloud strategy with Amazon Web Services.
People
Lissy Hu, MD, MBA (WellSky) joins healthcare learning solutions vendor Ascend Learning as CEO.
Announcements and Implementations
Oracle Health will apply to become a Qualified Health Information Network. The company says that it will continue to support CommonWell Health Alliance as a founding member. Epic welcomed Oracle Health to TEFCA, noting that Epic already has 700 hospitals live on TEFCA as a founding member and adding, “Epic hopes that today’s Oracle Health announcement indicates that they are finally ready to take interoperability seriously—and to deliver the technology that patients and providers deserve instead of making distracting, untrue statements.”
Altera Digital Health announces GA of Paragon Denali, a cloud-native EHR that runs on Microsoft Azure and is targeted to rural, critical access, and community hospitals.
Medscape announces a free, AI-powered scribe solution that transcribes and summarizes encounters.
Emory University and Emory Healthcare will consolidate their IT operations into a single organization under Alistair Erskine, MD, MBA, who has been named to the newly created position of enterprise chief information and digital officer. He joined Emory Healthcare as chief information and digital officer in March 2023.
Inovalon announces new products for eligibility verification, network provider utilization, AI-powered record review, FHIR API connectivity for health plans, a research network, and expanded pharmacy functionality.
A new KLAS report on ambient speech solutions finds that Nuance is most often considered while Abridge is strong in affordability and physician acceptance,with both companies benefiting from their relationship and integration with Epic. Suki and Augmedix are often considered by Meditech users.
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“There are no menus or drop-down screens, and doctors can pull up the information they need by asking questions with their voices”
I know I am neither a visionary nor a doctor, but personally – ew, as well as yikes. What could possibly go wrong?
So, will the DoD and VA be the guinea pigs for the new Virtual Resident EHR written by bots? Or do they get to build their future on the “crumbling infrastructure”?
When you say your current product is bad and the new product will fix it, your sales team has a problem. Clients don’t want to commit to the new product until it’s feature ready, but they don’t want to buy the “crumbling” old product either.
Current hospital systems won’t buy Cerner because of RevCycle concerns. Oracle isn’t investing in fixing that. They are investing in this ambulatory EHR. What’s the target market? It’s the same market targeted by athenahealth, ECW, and various specialty EHRs. Those vendors are already miles ahead of Cerner on this.
Has Oracle completely given up on new sales?
Oracle hasn’t completed its move to Nashville yet, so they still have access to lots of cannabis, facilitating delusions that they can build a fully featured EHR in a year.
This is the beginning of the end of Cerner/Oracle in the EMR market. They will literally fall by the wayside faster than you can say Sunrise Clinical Manager. Physician adoption of AI will continue to wane as the challenges continue to pop up with patient safety issues, let alone moving to a full EMR completely dependent on AI.
It is instructive to see how Oracle moved Peoplesoft and JD Edwards users onto its e-business suite platform in the 2010s. There will be bold pronouncements, with tenuous relationship to reality in the early years. But what will emerge at the end (in ~5 years) will be a full-featured platform with a modern user experience and industry-standard backend.
I worry about the “Epic can do no wrong” mindset of the majority of users on this website. It is a terrible piece of software – awful user experience, a backend that no one understands (still on a technology called MUMPS), and its monopoly position either eliminating or heavily reducing innovation activity around EHR, information management and sharing.
The healthcare community, while being justifiably cautious of Oracle’s aggressive plans, should be cheering on the move to modern systems. Epic has missed two platform refresh cycles. When the community complains about the slow rate of change and innovation in healthcare, not enough attention is paid to how much that drag is due to Epic.
Epic left Mumps 2 or 3 decades ago, they are primarily on Intersystems Cache and SQL. Cache has proven to be a bullet proof data base, yet does have some shortcomings, hence the SQL component.
If there is anything I learned in 40 years in the HIS/EMR world is that hospitals may jump at new medical technologies but they are extremely cautious in installing new IT technologies.
Oracle has one overwhelming challenge in front of it and I am sure they are grossly under estimating the time and investment required The real question is do they have the patience and money that it will need. Not likely for a public company..