- Hello everyone.
This is Jacob Emerson with Becker's Healthcare.
Thanks so much for tuning into our podcast today.
We're thrilled to be joined by Amy Anderson,
who is the Vice President of Market Development Enterprise
and Cloud Venture at Oracle.
Today, we're going to be discussing driving transformation
with cloud infrastructure.
So Amy, thank you for taking the time
to sit down with us today.
- Thank you. It's my pleasure.
- And before we dive in here, Amy, I'd love
to have you share a little bit more about yourself,
your background in healthcare,
and what it is that you do today at Oracle.
- Sure. Thank you so much.
Uh, I've been in healthcare my entire
career, um, many decades.
Um, currently I lead market development
for Oracle Cloud infrastructure,
and what that means is I'm really driving the strategy
and implementation of our vertical, vertical
industry specific solutions and value.
Um, in my past, I have been a lobbyist.
I've led strategy, I've worked in
transformational consulting.
Um, and for our, our purposes today, I think it's important
to note that, um, I also led regulatory compliance
and strategy for Kaiser Permanente in California.
Um, and back in my early days, um, I helped
craft the legislative language that became the HIPAA law.
So that's something that's very important to me as we look
to, uh, develop, you know, high value cloud solutions
for a highly regulated industry like healthcare.
And I'm thrilled to be here today.
- Wonderful. Well, like I said, we're glad to have you
with us, and thanks for taking us
through a little bit more about your background.
Excited to dive right in.
So, Amy, there's been a lot
of interest in Oracle's acquisition of Cerner last year.
What exactly is Oracle's vision for healthcare overall
and how do you view the Cerner acquisition
fitting in with that?
- Yeah. Well, let me tell you, there were a lot of, um,
raised eyebrows and questions about,
about Oracle buying Cerner
because many, you know, the market really sees us
as either a database company, a SaaS company,
and now with the Cerner acquisition,
they're also looking at us
as an EHR company, but that's not correct.
Fundamentally, our vision
for healthcare is really about data, right?
Harnessing data and insights to drive clinical
and operational excellence,
and frankly, to reduce the total cost of care.
There's so much inefficiency in the healthcare market,
and healthcare data and operations are notoriously siloed,
and frankly, EHRs were built
as electronic filing systems for
that siloed environment, right?
What I like to say is our acquisition of, of Cerner,
you know, it is not about scaling an EHR, it's really about
creating a, an open data platform that provides access to
the myriad types of data, structured unstructured
data from, you know, streaming devices, imaging,
and really taking that data and making it accessible
and deriving, you know, insights from the data to really
transform and innovate around clinical, operational
and financial operations.
And I need to say this very clearly, our open data platform
and ecosystem will be EHR agnostic.
It can bring their data and,
and apply, you know, solutions, AI solutions,
natural language processing, what have you,
and have that data integrated into
whatever EHR they have in their system.
- So ultimately, Oracle's vision for healthcare is,
is centered on data and,
and using that data to reduce the cost of care
and reduce those silos that you mentioned.
Amy, in that vein,
can you tell us a little bit more about Oracle's modern data
platform and what that means exactly?
- Sure. Um, well, the modern data platform is,
I'll just walk through it.
So why is it modern?
Um, it's modern because we are investing in,
we have invested billions of dollars in r
and d so that our customers don't have to,
and this strategy is, is industry specific.
So we're building solutions
and services that are prebuilt for healthcare,
for life sciences, um, for other industries
that include a vision service, NLP
AI services, generative AI services.
So that is why it's modern.
So we have these solutions and services,
but the data is, is our customer's data.
Bring your own data. We will apply the services
and solutions against those.
We'll help you develop algorithms.
We have a host of incredible partners like NVIDIA
and Cohere, um, that we can leverage
and our customers can leverage to, you know,
get quicker results and, and, and, and impact.
And the platform, of course, this is the OCI platform.
It is, it is, um, envisioned
to be an innovation ecosystem of solutions
that run on OCI.
So that can include analytics and genomics.
Um, and, and so that
platform play is really exciting for us,
but it is also the environment in which we'll provide that,
that environment for innovation
so our customers can innovate within it.
But we also are working closely
with our customers on specific use cases.
Um, that can be, you know, I think add value
to the market more broadly,
and those, those solutions will be accessible to, to other
customers who bring their data that will be protected, um,
and sequestered for their own purposes.
And getting back to why this is important to me, I think
that, um, that security particularly in, in the healthcare
and life sciences field is so paramount so
that we have an innovation environment that
builds in the types of regulations
and policies, um, specifically around security.
- Yeah. So Amy mean, it sounds like then you,
you are making those research
and development investments so
that your customers do not have to, it's
so interesting to hear you talk about this.
You, you mentioned specific use cases for this technology,
and a top concern that we hear from payers often
is fraud detection.
So based off everything we've just talked about,
can you talk a little bit more about
how new technology can really help in this space?
- Yeah, absolutely. I'm
so glad you asked about fraud detection
because fraudulent claims against payers are estimated in
the billions of dollars annually.
And the work that we're doing with our customers
around fraud detection, you know, a, a percentage
or two in improvement could
save the entire healthcare system, billions of dollars.
And, and that, and that translates into expanding access
to care, improving quality.
So all of the things that we all want to do, right?
And let me just be clear that we are, we are working
with our customers around these key business challenges,
and we're doing so with the modern data platform,
but foundationally, all
of this occurs within the Oracle Cloud infrastructure
that is our foundational ecosystem for innovation.
And let me just also say that our, our proposition
with the Oracle Cloud infrastructure
and the modern data platform is really to partner
with the customers around core use cases and,
and solutions, bring in other partners who can,
can provide those industry specific services like Nvidia,
like cohere in the, um, AI and generative AI space.
But also we are, we are stocking the shelves
with key solutions that are, uh,
and partners that are specific to those industries.
So I would ask, you know, just keep your,
keep your eye on the ball as we continue
to roll out additional partnerships, um,
that will make the Oracle cloud infrastructure
truly an innovation ecosystem as it relates to fraud,
uh, detection.
Um, our approach to the problem is,
is really bringing together all that data.
We then, you know, look at, um, you know,
really applying kind of data science
and AI services, um, to bring
insights into claims and risk stratification
where we can predict, um,
and recommend, um, optimized actions on, on case management.
And this is all being done again,
inside the Oracle cloud infrastructure, um, that is managed
by a, a specific policy and role-based access management.
So the data go governance is secure,
and we prebuilt all these functions
and services to ensure, you know, security
and in compliance with any new, uh, policies
or regulations that that roll out.
So we're very excited about what we can do.
We're not doing this alone.
It takes working with our customers
who bring their own data.
So we can do this in a, you know, with, with real world, um,
examples and partners.
- Yeah, absolutely. And it sounds like getting a, hold on,
on fraud detection really could save billions annually,
not just for payers, but for members as well.
Um, and, and we know,
we've heard payers consistently talk over the last few years
about using AI within their fraud detection spaces.
It, it's no surprise everyone's talking about ai,
- So it's really the same problem
across payers and providers.
So on the provider side, you know, there is a real desire
to improve, um, revenue cycle management
because of, as you mentioned, the implications
for clinicians, uh, improving quality of care,
easing the burden on patients and improving outcomes.
And one of those challenges is really in prior
authorization, right?
So prior authorization is a massive challenge on the
provider side, but we hear from our customers on the payer
side that they would like to have ways to improve
that process, that that is fraught
with manual processes faxing.
So we really envision, uh,
working within the OCI environment to bring together
the payer and the provider side to come up with, you know,
prior authorization, uh, solutions that, that,
that can really, um, transform
that whole continuum across payer provider.
- Yeah, absolutely.
And Amy, to your point, through our reporting,
we have seen large health systems
and payers begin to start these,
these AI powered partnerships
around prior authorization in different
parts of the country.
Um, but you, you brought up generative AI specifically, Amy,
so I have to ask, what is Oracle's
strategy in this growing field?
- Well, there's a I think there's a lot
of confusion about what generative AI is.
Um, uh,
but put simply, I think our sol our strategy related
to generative AI is pretty simple.
It's about using high powered computing
and the modern data platform together
with generative ai.
So if you think about chat GPT, right, very powerful.
But I will say that that approach is a generalized approach.
It's looking at the AI not specific
to a particular industry.
And that has challenges, I think, ethically with, you know,
how it's applied in a healthcare specific environment.
What differentiates Oracle, um,
and frankly our partnership with Cohere is
that we're bringing industry-based solutions
for generative ai.
This is part of what I mentioned earlier about pre-building
services and solutions,
but it's really important to know
that we are taking an industry specific approach towards
generative ai.
And that makes, I truly believe that that is
what is gonna be the most meaningful
and impactful, um, approach
for our customers in healthcare and life sciences.
And because we have this industry specific approach,
our customers, when they bring their sequestered data
to our platform, um, it is protected.
It is protected in the context of the particular use.
So if it's, if it's a clinical trial
or if it's in, in, um, sort of the claim space, um,
all of those, uh,
requirements are built into those industry
specific, uh, solutions.
And I can't emphasize this enough, it's,
it's incredibly important
because it, it means that we can work
with our customer's data and ensure that it's protected.
So the Oracle Cloud platform
and managed services are prebuilt functions
and services that are enshrined with the security
that is specific for the particular use case.
These will be pre-trained models.
And I know this sounds kind of simple,
but you bring your own data to use these pre-trained models.
And from, from the real data that our customers bring,
that's how we're going to drive, uh, innovation
and transformation, um, that can be replicable
and scalable, um, beyond the individual customer.
Uh, but our hope is within the OCI Oracle cloud
infrastructure environment, we will develop
meaningful solutions that can have a bigger impact
on the market beyond one customer here or there.
- Wonderful. Well, Amy, thank you so, so much
for taking the time to be with us on the podcast today.
It's been a pleasure speaking with you
and hearing a little bit more about Oracle's vision
for healthcare, for your customers and for AI technologies.
We really appreciate it.
- Thank you so much. - I'd also like
to thank our podcast sponsor Oracle.
You can tune into more podcast from Becker's Healthcare
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