Oracle, Amazon Add New Virtual Care, Communications Capabilities

Oracle and Amazon announced new virtual care and communications offerings at the HIMSS 2023 conference.

Oracle has expanded its partnership with Zoom to add telehealth capabilities within Oracle Cerner Millennium. Through this addition, providers will be able to join virtual patient visits with the relevant EHR information at their disposal.

Further, providers will be able to input information from the visits into the patient's EHR directly.

"Integrating Zoom with Oracle Cerner Millennium is an important step in advancing telehealth options and giving patients increased options for care," said Stephanie Trunzo, senior vice president and general manager at Oracle Health, in the press release. "This unified system enables caregivers to better engage and serve patients even when they are remote, helping reduce practitioner's administrative burden and increasing access to care."

The expanded collaboration may also enable providers to offer telehealth in other settings, including decentralized clinical trials where telehealth can help boost participation.

This is not the first time Oracle Cerner has integrated its EHR solution with a video conferencing platform. Microsoft launched a Teams EHR connector for Cerner in 2021, which enables clinicians to launch virtual visits with patients or consult with other providers in Teams directly from their Cerner EHR.

Amazon's announcement focuses on in-hospital communications. The company announced a new suite of healthcare capabilities for its Alexa device. Alexa Smart Properties for Healthcare, the Amazon arm that helps health systems deploy and manage Alexa-enabled devices at scale, will now include WebRTC support, Private Branch Exchange (PBX) support, and the ability to onboard devices to WPA2 Enterprise Wi-Fi.

WebRTC support will enable audio and video calls between Alexa Echo and non-Echo devices, such as tablets and laptops. This will allow patients and medical staff to connect for virtual check-ins and other needs.

The PBX support feature will allow providers to link Alexa Smart Properties-supported devices with their facilities' phone systems to route Alexa calls and support caller ID when patients and medical staff conduct incoming and outgoing calls, according to the Amazon blog post.

Further, providers will now be able to onboard Alexa Smart Properties-supported devices to WPA2 Enterprise Wi-Fi networks to securely connect the devices to Wi-Fi without creating a new public network.

The news comes just a few days after Amazon filed a shareholder report with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In the report, Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, detailed Amazon's healthcare moves, ranging from pharmacy to telehealth to primary care, noting the tech giant's recent acquisition of One Medical.

Jassy struck an optimistic note, comparing Amazon's healthcare division to Amazon Web Services, which significantly advanced the use of cloud capabilities across businesses.

"There are also a few investments we're making that are further from our core businesses, but where we see unique opportunity," Jassy wrote. "In 2003, AWS would have been a classic example. In 2023, Amazon Healthcare and Kuiper are potential analogues."

Editor's note: A previous version of this article referred to Jeff Bezos as Amazon's current CEO and author of the report. We regret this error.