Oracle announced the release of its Clinical Digital Assistant at the company’s health conference in Las Vegas.
The new AI tool integrates with Oracle’s electronic health record (EHR) solutions. The EHR system is already a great help to caregivers. It makes it easier to access accurate patient records, but it’s not a perfect system.
The healthcare provider often needs to spend time staring at a screen, rather than engaging with the patient, to access the EHR systems. This leaves patients feeling disconnected, unheard, and unsatisfied.
The Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant is a generative AI that responds to voice commands to more efficiently use Oracle’s EHR tools.
Instead of typing requests, the caregiver can simply speak to the digital assistant to ask for records or other info. The example given in Oracle’s release was that a doctor could say ‘Show me the patient’s latest MRI results,’ during an appointment.
The AI assistant would then display the images in relevant order allowing the doctor to give attention to an appropriate treatment path without having to click through multiple menus.
Suhas Uliyar, Senior Vice President of product management at Oracle Health said “The EHR should be a provider’s best ally in delivering engaging, personalized care to the patients they serve.”
Besides allowing caregivers to be more engaged with their patients, the digital assistant will also help alleviate burnout of healthcare staff.
Uliyar said, “We are not only helping providers reduce mundane work that leads to burnout, but we are also empowering them to create better interactions with patients that establish trust, build loyalty, and deliver better outcomes.”
Integrating AI into healthcare services opens opportunities for more accurate self-service and even self-diagnosis by patients without having to initially engage an already overburdened healthcare system.
Oracle’s digital clinical assistant enables patients to use voice commands to schedule an appointment, pay a bill, or ask questions like ‘What happens during a colonoscopy?’
Oracle’s AI ambitions
Oracle isn’t one of the company names that normally come up in AI conversations but the company has been doing a lot of work in the background. Earlier this year Oracle said it would be working with AI startup Cohere to build a cloud service for training custom LLMs.
The company is known for handling large databases and wants to help companies leverage their private data with secure custom LLMs.
We expect to see a lot more niche enterprise-focused AI applications bearing the Oracle tag in the future.
