Oracle, under the leadership of Larry Ellison, has announced its integration of an AI-powered Clinical Digital Assistant into its electronic health record (EHR) solutions during its annual health conference in Las Vegas. The move aims to help healthcare providers automate administrative tasks and focus more on patient care. This development comes as organizations from various sectors are racing to adopt generative AI, while the healthcare industry has been slower to embrace this technology due to concerns about trust and biases in AI outputs. Oracle’s proprietary AI assistant could help address these concerns and support healthcare teams facing staffing issues.
EHR solutions play a crucial role in improving the care delivery process by connecting data from different touchpoints. However, the current form of EHRs requires clinicians to interact with the system, which can be time-consuming and disrupt the patient care experience. Oracle’s new generative AI-powered Clinical Digital Assistant offers a multimodal helper that can work through text or voice commands. Clinicians no longer need to interact with a screen during appointments to find the necessary information. They can simply call out to the assistant to handle routine tasks such as retrieving MRI scans or prescriptions. The assistant retrieves the requested elements from the database, including images and documents, and presents them in a relevant order. This immediate access to information allows physicians to gain insights into the appropriate treatment path. Moreover, the assistant remains active throughout the appointment and can take notes of the conversation while suggesting context-aware next actions like medication orders or follow-up appointments.
The generative AI-powered Clinical Digital Assistant is built on top of Oracle’s broader Digital Assistant platform, which helps enterprises create chat and voice-based conversational experiences for their business applications. This platform has already been adopted by various organizations, including industry leaders like FedEx, Echo, Exelon, Equity Residential, and Razer. Oracle’s goal is to leverage comprehensive generative AI and voice-first capabilities to reduce mundane work for healthcare providers, prevent burnout, and create better interactions with patients. By empowering providers to establish trust, build loyalty, and deliver better outcomes, the Clinical Digital Assistant aims to enhance workflow efficiency and improve the overall patient experience.
Apart from benefiting clinicians, the Clinical Digital Assistant also improves the patient experience. Patients can leverage the assistant to schedule appointments, make payments, and access medical knowledge by asking questions in natural language. The interaction with the assistant resembles the way consumers engage with large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude 2. Moreover, healthcare providers can link the assistant with their secure portal to provide patients with valuable information, such as reminders to bring lab reports during upcoming appointments. While some of these capabilities are currently being rolled out, Oracle expects a full rollout over the next year.
The integration of the Clinical Digital Assistant into Oracle’s EHR solutions is part of the company’s larger effort to embrace generative AI. Prior to this, Oracle introduced generative AI features for its Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) offering. These features simplify HR tasks, such as writing job descriptions or drafting employee surveys, for enterprises. By expanding generative AI technology into healthcare, Oracle aims to transform the industry and improve workflows for clinicians and the overall patient journey.
Oracle’s embrace of generative AI for healthcare through its Clinical Digital Assistant presents an opportunity to revolutionize patient care and streamline administrative tasks. By integrating AI into EHR solutions, healthcare providers can automate certain workflows, enabling them to focus more on patient care. Oracle’s commitment to creating better interactions with patients and empowering clinicians highlights their dedication to building trust, improving outcomes, and addressing the staffing challenges faced by healthcare teams. As generative AI continues to advance, the potential for its application in healthcare expands, and Oracle is at the forefront of this transformative movement.
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