This week Oracle has descended upon Las Vegas for the massive Oracle CloudWorld conference. This event brings together Oracle’s users and partners in once place and provides a venue for the company to make big announcements about what’s happening at Oracle. The event was being held at the Venetian conference center and Caesar’s Forum. As a Las Vegas local, I’ve been to probably 50-100 events at this venue, but I’ve never seen it more packed than it was for this year’s CloudWorld conference.
Much like the other cloud and AI vendors like Amazon AWS and Google Cloud events that I’ve attended, Oracle is working in probably the hottest technology space right now. They provide the servers, data centers, cloud infrastructure, and more that powers much of the AI boom we see happening in every industry, not just healthcare.
Of course, as someone who covers healthcare technology, I was particularly interested to see the event from a healthcare perspective. At least year’s conference they essentially co-located an Oracle Health conference (lots of Cerner users) amidst CloudWorld. However, this year they decided to merge all the healthcare stuff into the general CloudWorld. I was interested to see how this played out.
Needless to say, this was kind of disappointing to me since last year’s event was like a mini HIMSS conference with health IT vendors that integrate with Oracle Health and this year’s event I only found one health IT focused vendor on the show floor. What I did learn is that it seems Oracle Health is pushing their partners and users to instead attend the Oracle Health Summit happening October 29-30, 2024 in Nashville, TN. More on why that event is going to be big later and why I’m sad Colin will be there covering it for Healthcare IT Today instead of me.
Event logistics and focus aside, I was still excited to go to CloudWorld and get access to the Oracle Health leaders. Especially since it was a short 20 min drive to the event for me. Incredibly impressive to me was Larry Ellison’s keynote. It’s amazing to see someone at 80 years old bringing that much passion to the work that Oracle is doing. I won’t go into all the details of his keynote since you can easily watch it here. However, he did focus on two main points: new Open MultiCloud partnerships and Oracle’s approach to using AI for better cloud security.
I’ll admit that their approach to cloud security is pretty mind blowing. Check out the keynote for more details. The only thing it misses is that their security is so good that hackers aren’t going to really even attack it. Instead, they’re going to attack the humans who have legitimate access to the data through phishing and other ways to breach a system using someone’s legitimate credentials. Although, Ellison did talk about biometrics which addresses some of those issues. Plus, he said that this time next year Oracle’s employees will no longer use passwords to access their systems since passwords are inherently insecure. We’ll see if that’s the start of a trend.
What was most amazing about Ellison’s keynote was having him on stage with an executive from AWS. Ellison acknowledge that in the move to the cloud, something was lost. Oracle was used to running across a wide variety of devices, manufacturers, etc. This year’s CloudWorld will likely be remembered for Oracle partnering with Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and many more application providers that are often seen as competitors. Ellison even had them listed in alphabetical order to try and not show any favoritism.
He also pointed out how the conference used to be called Open World to illustrate that openness:
It was definitely fascinating to see Ellison talk about customers desire to be able to use multiple clouds and to seamlessly transition between clouds as desired. No doubt that will be of interest to many healthcare organizations. It turns out, this kind of “open” approach to partnering even with competitors (cooperatition as many call it) came up during the Oracle Health focused media events I attended as well. Check out what Seema Verma said about Oracle Health’s desire to have their AI assistant be EHR agnostic.
Obviously, the proof is in the pudding and it’s one thing to say we want to be EHR agnostic and another to make the experience great across EHR vendors. Especially if EHR vendors resist that approach. That said, I was surprised to see AWS on stage at CloudWorld, so maybe I’ll be just as surprised if Oracle Health can integrate their AI Assistant seamlessy with Epic, MEDITECH, NextGen, eCW, etc.
The other biggest insight I got in regards to Oracle Health (the product previously known as Cerner) was from Mike Sicilia, Executive Vice President, Oracle Global Industries, when he talked about their approach to rebuilding Cerner. He described the decision this way:
From an overall perspective, this was probably a smart move. With a few exceptions, much of the EHR technology is 30+ years old. In Cerner’s case, the technology was old and often kludged together through acquisitions. So, the desire to rewrite Cerner using modern coding techniques including the Oracle generative AI coding engine and on Oracle’s Cloud does make sense. Plus, if done right they can rethink how it works using AI rather than just replicating the EHR interface with new code. And I agree completely with Sicilia that the EHR will go into the background as AI Medical Scribe and ambient clinical voice technology becomes the interface.
Sicilia did highlight that Oracle has done this kind of software rewrite before with their property management solution which powers many of the hotels in Las Vegas. Here’s what he shared about the approach:
Quite the novel approach to keeping the data schema the same while creating a new interface on top of that data. This is bad news for all the EHR data conversion companies out there that make money converting data from one EHR software to the next, but it definitely makes for a better experience for the EHR users that transition to the new software.
As I mentioned, this is where the Oracle Health Summit happening in October comes in. It definitely felt like Seema Verma and Mike Sicilia were priming for the new Oracle Health EHR to be unveiled at that event with full release in early 2025. In the next few weeks, I’ll share my video interview with Seema Verma at CloudWorld where she talks more about this new release and Oracle Health’s vision to go beyond just the EHR. Seems like October is when the big healthcare announcements are going to happen.
It’s a really big investment for Oracle Health to be releasing a new EHR and I’m excited to see what they bring to the table. New gen AI coding tools that Oracle creates can accelerate this process. Also, Oracle is in a unique position to leverage their various ERP and supply chain products in ways that other EHR vendors can’t do. Verma also highlighted to me how Oracle’s life sciences relationships can be leveraged as well. There’s a lot of potential there, but a lot of questions as well.
The two biggest questions for me are how well Oracle Health will package these changes including integrations with ERP and Life Sciences in their new product and will they roll out the changes quick enough to satisfy their existing Oracle Health users. Looks like we’ll know more in October at the Oracle Health Summit.
P.S. I think I’m addicted to pinball. LiveNation had a setup in the CloudWorld exhibit area with some pinball machines that I couldn’t resist. Pinball with live music is a great combination for me. I hope other conferences learn from CloudWorld.
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