Dive Brief:
- On top of the thousands of different hospital databases that exist in the U.S. today, Oracle founder and Chairman Larry Ellison announced on Thursday that Oracle is building a “unified national health records database.” However, the interoperability effort faces significant future obstacles and industry scepticism.
- The database aims to provide emergency access to patient records to doctors in various jurisdictions and systems and to give academics real-time data about metrics like disease incidence to assist influence policy responses.
- A spokeswoman for Oracle would to comment further on the new database’s release date, cost, or public access, but assured Healthcare Dive that it will be a “standards-based system open to all.”
Dive Insight:
Medical data in the United States is incredibly compartmentalised, despite government legislation designed to encourage unfettered electronic sharing of health data between entities. The lack of aggregated data was one of many flaws in the American medical system that the COVID-19 pandemic uncovered. This hindered public health responses and prompted some academics to redouble their efforts to develop frameworks that combine patient data.
Prior to the coronavirus epidemic, proposals to centralise medical records existed, but no concrete steps had been taken in that direction.
Although economies of scale will benefit Oracle and Cerner, two industry heavyweights, it’s not fully apparent what the two will contribute to the realisation of this ambition, according to Patrick Murta, chief platform architect at BehaVR. Murta previously led the interoperability platform for Humana.
Nothing in the union, according to Murta, “makes that more realistic. There is a healthy doubt that they will have the solution to remove any of the current interoperability hurdles.”
The new project’s specifics are hazy, but it has the potential to change the interoperability landscape of healthcare in the country. However, it is likely to encounter issues like data fragmentation and standardisation, security and privacy, divergent state laws and regulations, and buy-in from other EHR vendors.
It’s unclear if Oracle has contacted other providers to inquire about the possibility of include their records.
The EHR vendor Meditech has had “no formal communication” from Oracle regarding the initiative, according to a Meditech spokesman. Allscripts and Epic have not yet responded to requests for information as of the time of publication.
Regarding whether it intends to exchange records with the database, Athenahealth declined to comment.
According to Murta, the announcement “may even provide additional caution for others.” “I don’t naturally understand how it creates a nice feeling to join this national database if you’re a competitor of Cerner and they’ve now partnered with an even larger business,” the author said.
Oracle may find gold by centralising a sizable EHR dataset and using the database for product development and life sciences research. Only two use cases for the new system have so far been disclosed by Oracle. One benefit, according to Ellison, is that it would give academics and public health professionals anonymised data to find new viruses, create AI models, or let local governments know how many hospital beds are available in their area.
Additionally, clinicians at a brand-new hospital who lack access to a patient’s medical file may use Oracle’s database to store their patient information.
At an Oracle announcement on the Cerner purchase on Thursday, CEO Larry Ellison stated, “They get all of that information instantly. What your blood type is, what your allergies are, what drugs you’re now taking, do you have a stent in your heart”. The government is likewise working toward achieving that future, and early this year it established its own framework for cross-border data interchange. The voluntary framework would enable clinicians to request patient data from member networks.
