(Bloomberg) — Oracle Corp. is looking to develop a national system of digital health care records after completing its acquisition of electronic medical records provider Cerner Corp.
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“Data today is fragmented in thousands of databases across the United States,” Larry Ellison, Oracle board chairman and chief technology officer, said Thursday at a press briefing. “We’re going to solve this problem by putting a unified national health records database on top of all of these of thousands of separate hospital databases.” Ellison said this new system will only have anonymous information until individual patients give consent.
Oracle, the second-biggest software maker by revenue, is best known for legacy database products. The company has struggled in recent years to gain ground in cloud computing, in which companies rent data storage and analytic power from large server centers, trailing far behind market leaders Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. The $28.3 billion purchase of Cerner, which closed earlier this week, gives Oracle a huge foothold in technology for the health care industry.
Cerner’s central service, Millennium, will be updated with features such as voice interface, more tele-health capacity and disease-specific AI models, Ellison said. In addition, the system will be able to facilitate research studies across different geographies, ensuring a diverse sample size. Cerner, which competes with Epic Systems Corp. and Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, among others, has many large US hospital systems among its customers.
The acquisition will be “substantially accretive” to Oracle’s earnings in fiscal year 2023, and a “growth engine for years to come,” said Oracle Chief Executive Officer Safra Catz in a statement last week.
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