Orlando, Fla. — Oracle plans to launch its generative artificial intelligence-backed clinical assistant in the next quarter, according to a top health executive.
The software company is entering a crowded market. Cutting back on documentation burden for providers has proved one of the earliest use cases for AI in healthcare, and one that tech giants and startups alike have pursued aggressively.
Oracle first teased the tool in September, capitalizing on the tsunami of hype around generative AI. However, the product will enter the market later than other documentation software, some of which have been available with generative AI since last year.
The cloud giant has been beta testing the clinical assistant with its provider partners for months, Nasim Afsar, Oracle’s chief health officer, told Healthcare Dive at the HIMSS conference in Orlando on Tuesday.
Oracle’s clinical digital assistant automatically transcribes patient visits and can suggest next steps for a provider to take, such as ordering medications or scheduling labs.
“So far the feedback has been really good. We’re continuing to improve the tool, but I’m really excited to have it be out in the market,” Afsar said.
Major cloud companies Google, Microsoft and Oracle have been racing to build AI tools to glean insights and create useful programs from providers’ massive troves of patient data. The Silicon Valley troop is joining electronic health records vendors like Epic and Meditech to weave the solutions into clinicians’ workflows.
Oracle is uniquely situated in the AI arms race because it owns Cerner, the second-largest EHR vendor for hospitals in the U.S. As such, it can build cloud services on top of Cerner for its clients, though Afsar noted the upcoming clinical assistant will be EHR-agnostic.
Executives have said that strategy should help boost revenue as Cerner continues to lose market share to Epic.
Skyrocketing desire for AI tools has bolstered cloud sales over the past year, including for Oracle. In a call with investors on Tuesday, Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said the healthcare industry is the best example of how Oracle is “re-engineering its industry-specific applications” to take advantage of AI.
Oracle faces some heavy competition in the industry, however, including around clinical documentation.
Microsoft acquired AI-based notetaking software company Nuance for almost $20 million in 2022, and has since hustled to upgrade its AI technology and integrate its products into widely-used EHRs. Last summer, Amazon also unveiled a clinical documentation service using generative AI for select specialties.
As such, provider clients have a plethora of options to automate clinical documentation (including from a mushrooming crop of startups like Nabla, Ambience, DeepScribe and Abridge).
But it’s worth waiting for Oracle’s tool, Afsar said, arguing the assistant isn’t a standalone ambient listening product.
“What we’re bringing forth is really robust, I would say far more robust than what’s got out to market really quickly,” Afsar said.
Google has similarly zeroed in on improving providers’ workflows. On Monday, the tech giant launched a generative AI-backed tool that can search disparate data siloes for information and pull answers to clinicians’ questions.
Also during HIMSS, Oracle announced updates to its portfolio of healthcare cloud services, called Health Data Intelligence, including a generative AI tool that summarizes patient history to cut back on manual chart reviews for care managers.
