Oracle, Cerner plan to build national medical records database

By Heather Landi, June 10, 2022

Oracle's chairman Larry Ellison outlined a bold vision Thursday for the database giant to use the combined tech power of Oracle and Cerner to make access to medical records more seamless.

Days after closing its $28.3 billion acquisition of electronic health record company Cerner, Ellison said Oracle plans to build a national health record database that would pull data from thousands of hospital-centric EHRs.

In a virtual briefing Thursday, Ellison highlighted many long-standing problems with interoperability in healthcare. "Your electronic health data is scattered across a dozen or separate databases. One for every provider you've ever visited. This patient data fragmentation and EHR fragmentation causes tremendous problems," he said.

"We're going to solve this problem by putting a unified national health records database on top of all of these thousands of separate hospital databases. So we're building a system where the health records all American citizens' health records not only exist at the hospital level but also are in a unified national health records database."

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