New Oracle Health Cloud-Based EHR Features Focus on Patient Experience

Oracle Health has announced new cloud-based EHR capabilities that aim to improve the patient experience and reduce provider burden.

A secure portal with document recognition and voice services will allow patients to provide their health data with minimal manual data entry. For example, patients will be able to upload a picture of their driver’s license and have that information automatically populate in the EHR.  

Within the same portal, patients will be able to schedule appointments or check their lab results by using simple voice commands. Providers will have access to similar features to save time and increase efficiency.

“Our goal is to deliver one of the industry’s best, most functionally rich EHR systems to reduce wasted time, eliminate redundant processes, and add value every step of the way for practitioners and the patients they serve,” Travis Dalton, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health, said in a press release.

“These enhancements are another step forward in our mission to improve the patient experience by connecting the healthcare ecosystem in a way that enables providers to deliver more efficient and effective care,” Dalton added.

Oracle Health clients will be able to adopt these new capabilities, without reimplementation, in a modular fashion. Select capabilities will be available in the next year.

Oracle Health will also be making its clinical and financial resources, such as vitals, appointments, and orders, available via public application programming interfaces (APIs). These new APIs are set to support deeper integration with Oracle’s clinical tools and allow stakeholders to create more advanced customizations.

For example, an existing standards-based API allows organizations to review a list of medications a patient is using within Oracle Health clinical systems. The public API aims to allow developers to optimize workflows to not only review current medications but also create medication orders directly within the system.

Developers will be able to access the public APIs and documentation within their existing Oracle Health console. The first set of APIs will be available for developers to test in a public sandbox later this year.

Oracle Health also introduced new generative AI capabilities for clinical documentation this week. The Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant aims to help providers use voice commands to reduce manual work and spend more time paying attention to patients.

The multimodal voice and screen-based assistant uses generative AI to automate notetaking and suggest context-aware next steps, such as ordering medications or scheduling labs and follow-up appointments. According to officials, the tool will be available for use in the next 12 months.