In recent years, there’s been a significant rise of AI technology and hyper-scalers entering the healthcare market. Listen in as two experts from Oracle Health discuss improving healthcare delivery through the integration of these technologies, particularly focusing on the role of AI and comprehensive data platforms on value-based care. Learn about improving care coordination and delivery, the shift to scalable platforms, and incorporating AI and cloud technology to continuously evolve with the needs of healthcare systems.

Featuring:

Bharat Sutariya, MD, Senior Vice President and Chief Health Officer, Oracle Health

Scott Wiesner, Go-to-Market Strategy and Operations, Oracle Health

Listen as they discuss:

– Dr. Sutariya’s perspective on the current healthcare landscape (2:50)

– AI in service of improving value-based care (4:15)

o Growth of hyper-scalers in the healthcare industry and what is lacking with this technology specific to healthcare

• • The need for a comprehensive data platform that aggregates across multiple sources with terminology mapped to data and ontology applied for meaningful data

– Going forward with industry-based data platforms (7:25)

o Applying AI and genAI

o Applications with pre-formatted workflows running on a comprehensive platform

– Facing challenges in value-based care and technology choices (14:16)

o The option of platform as a service (PaaS) helping to meet the needs for value-based care contracts

– The Oracle strategy with cloud and genAI-based advancements (15:54)

o EHR agnostic capabilities

Notable quotes:

“We now have a unique opportunity, particularly leveraging the might of Oracle, to layer advanced AI, including generative AI, on top of our existing healthcare technology – taking us far beyond where we were before.” – Bharat Sutariya, MD, Senior Vice President and Chief Health Officer, Oracle Health

“At the end of the day, with value-based care, it’s really about the insights you get from the data – how do we make better use of that data in service of improving healthcare outcomes?” – Scott Wiesner, Go-to-Market Strategy and Operations, Oracle Health

CTA:

Want to enhance a connected healthcare ecosystem and accelerate value-based care efforts while improving clinician decision-making and the patient experience? See how Oracle Health can help with our suite of population health management solutions here: https://www.oracle.com/health/population-health/ 

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Episode Transcript:

Introduction  0:00 

Music.

Introduction 0:13 – 0:28

Welcome to perspectives on health and tech podcast brought to you by Oracle Health. In this series, we have conversations on creating a seamless and connected healthcare world where everyone thrives. Let’s get started.

Scott 0:29 – 0:58

You’re listening to perspectives on health and tech. I’m Scott Wiesner, Senior Director go to market strategy in Oracle Health. With me today is Doctor Bharat Sutariya, Senior Vice President and Chief Health Officer in Oracle Health. Dr. Sutariya has over 20 years-experience in care delivery transformation, value-based care, and healthcare technology. He’s also board certified in emergency medicine and has practiced medicine for over 25 years. Welcome Bharat.

Bharat 0:59 – 1:00

Scott, it’s great to be with you.

Scott 1:00 – 1:08

Great to have you. Very fortunate to have you here at Oracle as well. Let’s get into it. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what’s driving you these days?

Bharat 1:08 – 2:30

Scott, in many ways, it’s the same thing that has driven me for the last 25 years, and that is to significantly improving the healthcare ecosystem of providers, payers, and the life sciences, and to achieve the best outcome and experience for the patient. I’ve spent the last couple of decades developing and deploying healthcare technology products and solution and I’ve been fortunate to partner with leading health systems that think forward and solve complex problems that others mimic in healthcare then. I’m excited that I have this potential to make a significant progress, because I believe that the technology is more aligned to the problem now, and our ability to solve the problem now is better than ever before. So that’s what excites me. Last thing I would say is it’s great to be back now at Oracle Health, because Oracle is a full stack company having the most modern and efficient database, cloud infrastructure application development and proven, you know, technology over decades, and it’s really taking that advantage of that capability and applying to health care, it likely excites me the most.

Scott 2:31 – 2:52

Well, it’s great when passion and experience come together. Let’s sort of take the next step here. This This podcast is about perspectives, and particularly your perspective, and you’ve got a very extensive and a lot of experience as a practitioner, educator, implementer, and, of course, executive leader quite some time. Let’s talk a little bit about, you know, what you’re seeing in healthcare at this moment.

Bharat 2:53 – 3:36

Interesting question. You know, I feel like we are at a unique juncture in healthcare where multiple forces are coming together. The cost of healthcare is rising. The outcomes are not necessarily keeping up. All of us are paying more out of our pocket, and overall, you know, that’s not a sustainable system. But what’s exciting is that we now that technology, you know, particularly with novel technology coming that has such an amazing promise to solve complex healthcare that it, you know, it, it gives me so much passion to look forward at solving these problems that we haven’t been able to solve in the last 27 years.

Scott 3:37 – 4:17

So, you know, technology is both a promise and a solution. And what we’re hearing from customers today really true of any industry. How do I reduce that cost? But then take those cost savings and power innovation. That’s kind of the two levers there that you that you want to pull to drive efficiency and better outcomes. And one of these things we can’t talk about in this day and age, whether, you know, without spelling it out, of course, is artificial intelligence. And really, how do we look at artificial intelligence and generative AI in service of, you know, improving value-based care? Can you elaborate a little bit on those two areas?

Bharat 4:18 – 6:50

As you know, my healthcare is very broad, and the movement toward value-based care, of course, many models, ranging from shared savings to full risk arrangement, both in commercial and government space, continues to grow, so I think it’s an important topic. Now. I’ve spent a decade on value-based care strategy, technology development and partnering with health systems to really enable success in value-based care model. And there, you know, I’ve learned quite a bit, right? You know, I see going forward, the hyper-scalers have already made a significant progress with the penetration into healthcare, but I’m not sure that that hyper-scaler presence in healthcare has particularly been uplifting for value-based care, because in order to achieve value-based care in a programmatically and sustainable way, you have to solve some core challenges. And in the hyper-scalers, they’ll provide robust technology platform, they’ve not necessarily solved these challenges. And the challenges that I’m talking about is, first and foremost, you have to have a very comprehensive data platform that aggregates data across multiple data sources, and that data sources need to have a high degree of terminology mapped to it, and then ontology needs to be applied to make meaning out of it, because what happens in healthcare, in particularly value-based care, is that an average value based care provider is likely providing 50 to 60% of care in their own network, meaning they have the data, but the rest of it is provided outside of their network, into the community for which they don’t have clinical data, and they can only get the insight by using the claims data. So, what’s happening is that the forward looking, advanced value-based care organizations have a desire to aggregate this data from multiple EHRs, where patients get their care, multiple payers, where they have taken payer contracts. They want to get data across VBM, social determinants of health, and basically anywhere patient is touching healthcare institution. They want to understand that data, because it is that aggregated data that can give them the full insight so that they can then provide a comprehensive care.

Scott 6:51 – 7:27

Yeah, it’s a great point. You know, whether you’re a hyper-scaler or otherwise, you know, everybody can provide a data platform where you’re aggregating data. You know, some version of that. What we’re describing here actually is, how do we make that better use of that data in service of value-based care, and all the contracts and regulations and things that you pointed out once before is, you know, always changing. And you can’t just solve that like, you know, everybody can do that, but it’s really the next thing. So maybe you can elaborate on that a little bit more, and where we’re going with industry-based data platforms.

Bharat 7:28 – 9:27

I see many in the industry are starting such a platform today. While we’ve had a decade head start, we’ve had Healthe Intent for more than a decade now that has been recognized as a highly scalable world class data aggregation platform that reconciles large swath of data, you know, maps it and creates a medical grade longitudinal record. And we’ve been able to use this platform to help our customers achieve initial success in value-based care model. On top of that platform, you apply intelligence, you create gaps in care insight, you also empower the risk adjustment capability as well as care coordination capability and all of that together then operate, you know, provides operational capability for the value-based care organizations. So that’s kind of the current state of where we are, right. And while we have a highly organized platform and software approach, you know, I feel like many in the industry are still catching up, you know, to where we are. We now have a unique opportunity, particularly leveraging the mind of Oracle to layer, you know, advanced AI, including genAI, on top of it. So, imagine, you know where we were, which was already fairly advanced, and now we have the ability to layer more advanced capability on top of it, and that is the go forward future. And at least you know that Healthe Intent that people know today is now the Health Data Intelligence that has all this capability that I just talked about.

Scott 9:28 – 9:52

So let me just take a step back just for a minute. Here, seems we kind of talked about the table stakes of a data platform. And of course, in order to enable generative AI in particular, as you mentioned, seems to me you kind of got to get your house in order. And if I make a little bit of pun out of out of this, not your just your house, your data warehouse, in order, in order to enable artificial intelligence and generative AI, is that that’s sort of the trend that we’re seeing here.

Bharat 9:53 – 10:55

Yeah, we were able to get a head start into this generative AI and overall intelligence powering the value based-care platform, because we already have a strong foundation. If you don’t have the right data foundation, particularly across the broad network of aggregated data, then the models you deploy on top is not going to work. So that’s point number one. Two, you also need this platform that’s evolving with the continuous technology as well as continuous intelligence. And that’s, you know, where we’re going as well is to have an agile platform with the agile software capabilities on top of it, and continuous layering of AI, with the end result being able to power every component of value-based care management, from a clinical intelligence, from a care coordination, and from an analytic perspective.

Scott 10:56 – 11:36

So, on one hand, you talked about hyper-scalers, kind of on the one end, and marshaling the data for these insights. There’s also the other proposition, where, hey, look, you know, there’s, there’s vendors out there that provide these insights, sort of out of the box, but they’re not a they’re not a hyper-scaler, they’re not a data platform. So can you talk a little bit about that end, because at the end of the day, with value-based care for my what I’m gathering here is, it’s really about the insights that you get out of the data. So, we could talk about kind of the dashboard approach. You talked about the data platform. Talk a little bit about kind of the SaaS version of the software as a service, kind of dashboard, end of things.

Bharat 11:36 – 14:15

I think, you know, strong platform that aggregates data is obviously, you know, needed in a strong set of applications that run on top, that have pre-formatted workflow, is also needed. But as we go forward here, we have to advance more than that, and that’s where really the use of Gen AI capabilities come into place. That we no longer have to build an application or a analytic query or dashboard for every single things that we want to know from an insight to make a decision about value-based care. We’re now able to use modern technology, particularly the Oracle analytic cloud, infused with the artificial intelligence, so that we’re able to treat analytic almost like a conversational search. We’re able to ask the analytic engine, for example, show me all of the patients that have hemoglobin A1C greater than nine, that have not seen physician in the last six months, and that don’t have an appointment coming in the next six months, and the system is able to show you to list the patients with all the pertinent data so that a care coordinator or a physician’s office can act and get them on the schedule. In the past or even in current systems, some would say, you would have to build a specific dashboard workflow to achieve that insight. But going forward, we’re able to use the AI-driven analytics to achieve such insight. By the way, all of it needs to be based on world class security and data privacy. I don’t think we can say enough of that. That is such an important concept in this day and age that, we restore health data and deal with health data, the security needs to be a first-class priority. Now, the other interesting part Scott is the VBC contracts are continuously changing. The network continues to change, the regulatory environments continue to change, and you also need a platform that’s agile, that’s constantly evolving at the platform level, application level, and the AI that’s integrated into it needs to also be highly adaptive to serve the ever-changing business needs.

Scott 14:16 – 15:03

So of course, if you’re speaking to your friends who are heads of population health, chief medical information officers. Sounds like they’re kind of facing some of these challenges. Look, I’ve got some regulatory requirements, you know, I want to develop really precision of care for value-based care. Wanted to also take advantage of some of these new innovations in generative AI, all, it sounds great. What are these folks facing today? There’s, there’s a lot of choices in the industry as well. You know, as having been in the industry for over 25 years, lots of choices, so I’m kind of seeing this, as you said, the other side and made me think of, you know, the two sides of the same coin. Hey, look, we want to use our money wisely one side, and you’ve got to be able to have a fast, scalable, secure platform, and you also have the interface to be able to utilize that data most effectively. Describe a little bit of that for me.

Bharat 15:03 – 15:53

Scott, I think it’s important the choice of technology to our value-based care needs to be highly strategic in nature. In the past, you know, there was difficulty in choosing big strategic platform. How long will it take for me to stand it up and mature it right? But now, with the platform as a service, the choices are a little bit easier, and how fast you can get value out of it is also easier. So, I think in today’s day and age, you can achieve both, and that is, how do I get technology that can help me meet my needs for this year’s contract, but more importantly, how does the investment evolve with my needs over many years, and that is the balanced choice that people can make today.

Scott 15:54 – 16:27

Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense, because, you know, people are moving careers and jobs, and we as a provider, a technology provider, need to show a value today and tomorrow and of course, beyond. Makes a lot of sense, and to be able to think strategically, obviously, also makes sense as well. Lot of technologies over the years to meet some of these requirements. And so look, we’re both Oracle folks here, and you know, we’d be remiss if we didn’t talk a little bit about to our listeners here about the Oracle strategy, covering both cloud and generative AI based advancements. Can we talk a little bit about that?

Bharat 16:27 – 18:43

Yes, Scott, let’s, let’s make sure we earn our pay. I’m super excited about the path that we’re on. And quite frankly, I don’t think that path was possible prior to acquisition of Cerner by Oracle. As I mentioned earlier, Cerner had previously developed Healthe Intent platform that’s been in place for more than a decade, and having personally been involved, we leveraged the best possible technology components that were available at the time several years ago, and there was even an attempt to make sure that we keep the platform updated, but we now have an amazing new opportunity, and that is to leverage the total might of Oracle. You know, Oracle being a full stack company, it has the most modern database. It has the modern cloud infrastructure. It has the modern cloud analytics capability. It has the generative AI capability. So when we put all that asset together in one full stack, we’re able to do things that we could not do in past. And that is what our teams have developed now into health data intelligence on top of this, health data intelligence as a platform, we layer a new set of application called Clinical intelligence, care coordination analytics, and then many purpose-specific assets such as HCC and many different risk models associated with it. We do all of this in a completely EHR agnostic manner, in fact, system agnostic manner, so not every customer has to have our own electronic health record to benefit from it. It doesn’t matter to us, which EHR brand you use, what hyper-scaler cloud you may already be aligned to, from a data storage and computing perspective, we’re able to coexist because this is a purpose-specific healthcare intelligence platform, and then when it’s used for value-based care, we actually have a purpose specific value-based care applications in workflows that go on top of it.

Scott 18:43 – 20:09

Yeah, that’s interesting. So, and I wanted to kind of go back something that was, was interesting. And I think our, our listeners, customers, can identify with your journey, you know, as a almost a developer as well, you’re saying, you know, filling the needs of the requirements of your customers where, you know, look, not all of our customers are, you know, some of the hyper-scalers out there, they’ve got, you know, they’re not IT companies, you know, they’re really interested in the outcomes, not developing and supporting a data platform, you know, a non-industry data platform. Even though, as you pointed out, the hyper-scalers have made some inroads into that. And t’s about, again, outcomes. How do I make value-based care more efficient? Allow for better insights, kind of time to value of data and that precision healthcare that we talked about, again, about the outcomes at the end of the day. So, if we as Oracle, can provide that platform, that we manage, that then drives and allows you, the customer, to take advantage of all those insights. Really want to be here for you for that so when you’re ready for that next step of generative AI, not having to manage the platform itself, but also getting the insights through the applications that you mentioned. It’s already there for you, and can basically start with that the very next day. Any final thoughts, Bharat?

Bharat 20:10 – 20:34

It’s my pleasure, and I’m actually quite excited to leverage all of the assets we now have from previous Cerner and now Oracle, and it’s exciting to be part of this journey, and looking forward to working with our customers to get it in their hands and help them achieve their value-based care outcomes.

Scott 20:35 – 20:45

Fantastic. Thank you very much, and thank you for listening. Be sure to subscribe to the perspectives on health and tech podcast. Thank you very much.

Outro 20:45 – 21:20

That’s all for this episode of Perspectives on Health and Tech podcast. Be sure to subscribe to catch all our future episodes. For more information from industry experts, visit oracle.com forward slash health and oracle.com forward slash life hyphen sciences, or follow Oracle Health and Oracle Life Sciences on social media, thank you for listening and join us again for the next insightful episode of Perspectives on Health and Tech.