Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison has laid out his grand vision of transforming the way people across the world access healthcare services, no matter where they are.
Speaking at Oracle Cloud World 2022 in Las Vegas, Ellison outlined a large number of thoughts and initiatives his company is kicking off in order to help people around the globe.
“We're going to bankrupt western civilization unless we can find a way to make healthcare cheaper,” Ellison said in his keynote speech at the event, “we've got to do a better job.”
Solving the big problems
Ellison says that the pandemic unsurprisingly made him and many others think differently about how healthcare provision works, particularly in the US, where it can be challenging for patients and providers alike to find the information they need.
“Your health records are scattered across different databases, everyone you've visited in your entire life,” he said, noting that providers, not patients, are being put at the center of the system - something he described as, “a fundamental problem.”
"Why is there a global financial database that knows your entire credit history but not a global healthcare one?” he noted. “If you have an accident, the hospital will know your financial records but not if you're allergic to penicillin.”
"We need to automate the entire global healthcare ecosystem,” he continued. “Some of these data can be shared among nations to create a worldwide global public health system.”
Ellison went on to outline his goal - nothing less than having Oracle build not just national health systems, but also a global platform.
He highlighted the work Oracle undertook with the University of Oxford on its Global Pathogen Analysis System, originally designed to track tuberculosis, but quickly redesigned to follow Covid-19.
He also celebrated his company work on the US Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) V-safe system, which offered a feedback portal for users to share how they felt after receiving their vaccines, which was built in just 10 weeks, and helped share breakthrough findings on the safety of vaccines for pregnant women and children.
Oracle’s purchase of healthcare technology giant Cerner for $28 billion in December 2021 may have raised eyebrows around the world, but Ellison says the deal has given the company everything it needs to move towards his lofty goals.
"This new generation of medical information systems promises to lower the administrative workload burdening our medical professionals, improve patient privacy and outcomes, and lower overall healthcare costs," said Ellison.
"We're going to automate the connection between patients and healthcare providers by building the next generation of healthcare applications,” he declared. “We have to catch the next pandemic earlier.”
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Source: TechRadar