It’s no secret: healthcare systems are overburdened—could cloud capabilities really provide some of the needed reprieve? Could the right data presented at the right time reduce costs and improve operations, ease the administrative burden on clinicians and payers, and help improve the patient experience? Two experts discuss use cases on cloud-enabled intuitive assistance, streamlining and vetting data, how cloud-enabled technologies are benefiting the whole patient experience, and more.

Featuring:  
Michelle Flemmings, M.D., industry executive director, Healthcare North America Cloud Infrastructure 

Sarah Matt, M.D., vice president of Oracle Health product strategy

Hear them talk about:  
•    What’s going on in the healthcare industry right now (0:24 )

•    Using cloud and other technologies to improve workplace experience and retain healthcare workers (1:15 )

•    Challenges and concerns when moving from rules-based applications and tools to more predictive forecasting and AI (2:54 )

•    Working with clients going through the transition of bringing together disparate data sources separated by geography, organization, privacy, and security (4:27 )

•    Harnessing cloud capabilities for clinical trials (7:24 )

•    How to build trust around privacy and security for cloud and AI—and how cloud can be a secure mechanism to bring forth that trust (10:05 )

•    Opportunities in leveraging the cloud for healthcare (14:24 )

Notable quotes:  

“I think that cloud has a great availability of information, but it also has the functionality whereby it can hopefully look at the system overall, if it's dialed in right, and then predict what's necessary and then take out the rest of the chaos. You know, taking in the signal and taking out the noise.” – Michelle Flemmings

“Now with the potential of AI using thoughtful implementation to support our providers from burnout, empower our patients to lead their healthcare teams, make those right decisions using trusted information that's fit for purpose, it changes the entire landscape.” – Michelle Flemmings

“We need to make certain that we're not replacing that trust that has been in the provider relationships so long and then got compromised when we did start going digital. There's an opportunity here to rebuild that, and magnify that, and still broaden our ability to care for more patients.” – Michelle Flemmings

Learn more about how Oracle is connecting healthcare with cloud capabilities through products and solutions.

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Episode Transcript:

00:00:00 Dr. Sarah Matt
You're listening to Perspectives on Health and Tech, a podcast by Oracle where we have conversations on creating a connected healthcare world where everyone thrives. I'm Dr. Sarah Matt. I'm the VP of Oracle Health product strategy. And with me today, I have Dr. Michelle Flemmings from our OCI team. So, Michelle, I know we've been hearing a lot about cloud capabilities for healthcare. Can you get us a bit of an overview of what's really going on in the industry right now?

00:00:24 Dr. Michelle Flemmings
Well, Sarah, thank you for that question. I have had the pleasure of meeting with a lot of our clients and being at several events recently and top of mind is cost containment especially with the economy as it is, and the cost continuing to rise. Second, a very close second, is achieving and maintaining operational efficiency that will help support that cost containment.

00:00:44
Things around process improvement, throughput, driving patient outcomes, improving quality performance as well. And then I think, honestly, the one that really surprised me the most is road mapping around the implementation of AI and wanting to establish the right partnerships in order to know that they're doing it in the right way.

00:01:03  
You know, in a race not to be last, they got to be they're busy road mapping but they also have to assess the readiness for change. And I think that's where I'm having the best conversations.

00:01:15 Sarah Matt
Interesting. So we talk about cost containment as a start. I know that over the last couple of years, especially when COVID hit, we had huge issues with not just supply chain but the supply of our workers.
So we think about utilizing cloud and some of our technologies to improve not only the experience of our workers, but how do you keep and retain them? What have you seen as really effective mechanisms, especially in healthcare?

00:01:37 Michelle Flemmings
Oh goodness, that is a double-edged sword. Having worked with a lot of systems and in a lot of digital tools that support our care of patients, you have to be careful in the balance. You don't want to be very disruptive in the way of inset and alerts, but you also don't want to overload with minutia and tab hopping and logins and so forth.

00:02:01  
Where the sweet spot is is intuitive assistance and uplift for productivity as well as insight speaking specifically around things such as items that occur in the background. So I'm seeing a patient, they know that this patient has a hip fracture and automatically, based on the fact that the patient weighed 125 pounds and is, you know, five-feet-three, this patient will need this size of prosthesis and it automatically taps out two supply chain to identify the location and availability. Those sorts of items that are intuitive and in the background and I don't have to touch another tab are important.

00:02:38  
Additionally, clinical decision support—the right information at the right time that doesn't disrupt my brain processes and my thoughts, because anytime a provider is interrupted, an opportunity for omission and errors.

00:02:54 Sarah Matt
So I know when I see patients—I still do charity care on the side—it is a very difficult job for all providers to keep up with the latest and the greatest when it comes to new literature, new guidelines, and that most hospital systems are doing whatever they can within the application space, whether it's their electronic medical record or otherwise, to assist with some of those areas.

00:03:15  
When we think about moving from rules-based applications and tools to more predictive forecasting and AI, what do you think are some of the challenges and concerns that health organizations really need to think about?

00:03:31 Michelle Flemmings
Wow. Overload of information we have that now we need to prevent it. Especially when you start doing predictive. If we're going to do that, we need to be very dialed in on our resources, our sources of information and eliminate duplication. As well, make certain that it's not just raw data that you're bringing in, and then you leave it to be sorted by the individual.

00:03:54  
So any ability to bring in items that are useful that are already vetted somewhere in the system and provide the right-size solution is going to be key. It can't just be everything that you bring in. I think that cloud has a great availability of information, but it also has the functionality whereby it can hopefully look at the system overall, if it's dialed in right, and then predict what's necessary and then take out the rest of the chaos. You know, taking in the signal and taking out the noise.

00:04:27 Sarah Matt
When we think about large healthcare organizations or even small healthcare organizations, especially United States, cloud is becoming a lot more necessary, if you will, because we're moving from a lot of extremely siloed on-prem installations of whatever it might be into an extremely connected environment and the HIEs of the past and the present may not give you enough of what you're looking for from a connectivity perspective. What I'm seeing a lot, and I'm wondering what your thought process is, is that payers, providers, even pharma, are all moving to systems where they're actually utilizing PaaS (Platform as a Service) to bring together some of those disparate pieces, whether it's in a data lake, a data lake house, whatever you want to call it. But they have so many different systems that are either separated by geography, separated by organization and separated by privacy and security, and they're trying to figure out the best ways to bring that disparate data together. How are you assisting some of those clients that you've been seeing in moving through that transition?

00:05:27 Michelle Flemmings
Absolutely. We start with, for lack of a better word, an audit of their inventory. What do they have? What do they utilize and where does it sit? How is it connected? Is it connected in a manner that works for you now? If so, great, we won't mess with that. But if it's not connected and you need to go ahead and log into something else or open up another platform, that doesn't work.

00:04:49  
What we then go to is examine and evaluate in partnership with our clients. What else are you trying to achieve? What are the near misses that you have now that you're experiencing and are frustrated or struggling to capture? And what is your Nirvana?

00:06:06  
And then we make a path with them from those starting from that basis. It needs to be end-to-end, is honestly where I think that we need to take our clients and go with them for success. It needs t