Larry Ellison spent September laying out Oracle’s vision for the future of healthcare while fielding pressure over one of its most scrutinized contracts.
At the Oracle Health and Life Sciences Summit on Sept. 23 in Orlando, Fla., the Oracle co-founder, executive chair and chief technology officer argued that health records belong to patients rather than hospitals and that physicians should stop typing into the EHR. He has also made the case that higher-quality care is the most reliable route to lower costs.
The pitch came days after the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs served subpoenas compelling him to testify about Oracle’s $27 billion VA EHR contract, and a month after Time named him to its 2026 TIME100 AI list for the company’s all-in AI push, including its Oracle Health EHR business.
Here are six notes on Mr. Ellison’s healthcare strategy:
1. The record belongs to the patient, so the portal is multi-EHR. Oracle built its next-generation patient portal from the ground up rather than extending the legacy Cerner portal, which stored records hospital by hospital in whatever format each EHR produced. The new platform consolidates a patient’s history regardless of how many EHRs, hospitals or providers contributed to it.
“That record doesn’t belong to the hospital, that record belongs to the patient, and the patient needs a full longitudinal record, regardless of whether it’s in Epic format or in a Cerner format or an Allscripts format,” Mr. Ellison said at the summit.
He said the same multiprovider architecture could give public officials a statewide and national view of vaccinations, open beds and supply inventory — visibility he said was missing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
2. Physicians should edit, not type. Oracle is developing AI-driven documentation that listens during clinical consultations, drafts notes and orders automatically, and hands them to the physician for quick review rather than manual entry.
“We shouldn’t have doctors sitting behind keyboards typing in and updating their electronic health records,” Mr. Ellison said.
3. Better care is his affordability argument. As health systems absorb Medicaid cuts and margin compression, Mr. Ellison argues the cost and quality problems are linked. In his view, fewer complications, fewer readmissions and faster, more accurate diagnoses reduce the total volume of care a patient needs.
“The goal is to provide the highest quality of care, but at a price that doesn’t ruin Western civilization,” Mr. Ellison said. “The great thing about higher-quality care, it’s actually cheaper.”
Oracle’s platform connects wearables, smartwatches, blood pressure cuffs and prescription tracking to the health record so clinicians can catch problems in the weeks after discharge, before a patient deteriorates to the point of readmission.
“People usually recover better at home,” he said. “The problem is we don’t want to have to rush them back.”
4. AI would settle prior authorization before it starts. Mr. Ellison pitched AI that reads every applicable coverage rule and applies it to a patient’s clinical profile in real time, saying it would cut down on requests that were never going to be approved in the first place.
“You’re much less likely to ask for prior authorization if you know you’re not going to get it, because the AI will tell you, ‘Well, your body mass index is too low,'” he said. “It won’t be this back-and-forth, which is very frustrating and expensive for both the provider and the insurance company.”
5. The market hasn’t moved his way yet. Epic held 43.7% of the acute care hospital EHR market at the end of 2025, compared with 21.9% for Oracle Health, according to KLAS Research data reported by Becker’s. About 30% of sampled Oracle Health customers told KLAS the platform is not part of their long-term plans, and another 35% were considered vulnerable. KLAS described 2026 as a pivotal year for the vendor as it rolls out its new AI-enabled EHR.
Oracle, for its part, has said it expects Oracle Health to post double-digit revenue growth in fiscal 2027, fueled by an AI-driven modernization of the Cerner platform.
6. Congress wants him under oath. The House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs voted 19-0 Sept. 2 to subpoena Mr. Ellison and Oracle co-CEO Mike Sicilia after the company withdrew from an oversight hearing that day. Lawmakers want the executives to answer under oath for a no-bid contract modification that raised the contract’s ceiling from roughly $10 billion to $27 billion, despite years of delays, technical failures and patient safety concerns.
“Oracle agreed to testify, backed out, then tried to substitute private conversations for public accountability,” Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., the committee’s ranking member, said in a Sept. 14 press release.
In a statement to Becker’s, an Oracle spokesperson said the company supports congressional oversight, has testified 10 times on the VA project since acquiring Cerner in June 2022 and looks forward to providing testimony “when Congress returns after the election.”
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