Becker's Hospital Review

27 CIO / HEALTH IT Florida health system to spend $65M on Cerner to Epic transition By Naomi Diaz N aples, Fla.-based NCH Healthcare System will spend $65 million to transition its Cerner EHR system to an Epic system, Naples Daily News reported May 26. The health system began transitioning more than 1 million patient records to Epic's EHR system in January 2021. The Epic system will go live at the health system on June 4 after months of testing. Patients who are treated at NCH hospitals and physician of- fices, diagnostic centers, and outpatient surgery centers will have their medical records transitioned to the new system. The health system said it initiated the move to network with other hospitals that use Epic and for patients who travel or spend part of the year in other parts of the country and need medical care. "Epic brings transformational change to our healthcare sys- tem," said Paul Hiltz, president and CEO NCH Healthcare System. "Our patients will now have access to their records from anywhere. It's the premier electronic health record sys- tem and will improve the patient experience and allow us to continue to provide the best quality care." n Oracle is planning a unified national healthcare database. Will it work? By Laura Dyrda Oracle's primary mission is improving the complex healthcare system with technology, according to Larry Ellison. e chair, co-founder and chief technology officer of Oracle said in a June 9 virtual pub- lic presentation the company plans to vastly improve care delivery, outcomes and public health policy while also lowering costs. Ora- cle acquired Cerner in a $28.4 billion trans- action June 8 and has plans to modernize the platform, taking it from a documentation and billing system to a complete source of information about an individual's healthcare. e EHR would also have virtual care capa- bilities, be interoperable and expand clinical trial accessibility. "Together, Cerner and Oracle have all the technology required to build a revolutionary new health management information system in the cloud," Mr. Ellison said. "at sys- tem will deliver much better information to healthcare professionals. Better information will fundamentally transform healthcare." Oracle aims to build a unified database for patient information, similar to the unified financial database with credit information, accessible to healthcare providers and pub- lic health officials. e database would have anonymized data from hospitals, clinics and providers across the U.S. and provide up-to- the-minute information about patients' per- sonal health as well as public health statistics, such as the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 or available hospital beds in a particular state. "We're building a system where the health re- cords, all American citizens' health records, not only exist at the hospital level, but they are all in a unified national healthcare data- base," Mr. Ellison said. "e national data- base solves the data electronic health record fragmentation problem." Mr. Ellison said the system will continuously upload records from hospital databases into a national database to arm physicians with the latest information for better care deci- sions. is idea, however, likely won't be easy to implement. He did not address how the system would gather information from hos- pitals that aren't on the Cerner system; Epic has nearly 33 percent of the hospital market, and interoperability isn't yet a reality. And as always, the data is only as good as the person entering it, leaving room for human error. e large database also raises security ques- tions. roughout the presentation, Mr. Ellison noted patients would still have the "key" to their health records, which are ano- nymized until patients give providers access. "We want to give doctors all the information they need about your health status so they can provide the best hospital care, but we don't want to compromise data security and data privacy," he said. "We've done that with this system." Mr. Ellison did touch on a few specifics about how Cerner's Millennium EHR will change. Oracle will add a voice user interface to make it easier to access data and orders; the EHR will also have an integrated telemedicine module and disease-specific artificial intelli- gence modules. Oracle also hopes to leverage its presence in the enterprise resource planning and human resources space within healthcare organiza- tions to further automate and improve HR functions. Managing the clinical workforce, including both contracted and employed cli- nicians, is complex and Oracle aims to make the process easier. "is new health management system will deliver much better information to health- care professionals," Mr. Ellison said. "It will help doctors deliver better patient outcomes, help public health officials improve public health policy and lower overall costs. at is now our primary mission here at Oracle." Oracle has made bold moves to realize the goal of a more efficient and cost-effective healthcare system that delivers better out- comes at a fraction of the cost of care today. But transforming the healthcare industry is easier said than done. n

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