For anyone who’s been to a doctor’s office, ER, or health clinic of late, it is no surprise that, despite major progress in healthcare technology, there is still far too much manual busy work for clinicians needing to access relevant data on the patient in their office. 

In this regard, St. Joseph’s Health, a major New Jersey healthcare provider, faced the same issues as its peers across the U.S. and adopted Oracle Health Data Intelligence to ease patient intake and improve care.

Because St. Joseph’s Health runs the nation’s fourth busiest ER, it is a great test ground to show how Oracle Health Data Intelligence can help busy clinicians maximize patient care, especially if those patients use several different healthcare providers—a scenario that tests even the most tech-forward practices.

“New Jersey is a very densely populated state, so our patients are not solely seeking care from St. Joseph’s,” explains Dr. Beth Kushner, emergency care physician and Chief Medical Information Officer at St. Joseph’s Health. “If you drive three miles in any direction, there’s a new hospital. So, the idea that people are only going to receive care from one health system isn’t a reality."

This often means that when a patient walks through the door, the hospital won’t have the full picture of their health history. “When you have patients seeking care at multiple hospitals and care facilities, you need to access all of this information at once and quickly,” said Dr. Kushner.

Oracle Health Data Intelligence is an EHR-agnostic cloud platform, tackles one of the most pressing issues in healthcare-- severely siloed data-- by integrating patient information from many sources, thus improving care delivery. With the solution, St. Joseph’s Health can create a complete, unified patient record that improves both the patient experience and clinical decisions.

Previously, the hospital system was only able to look at a patient from an EHR standpoint. But, Dr. Kushner explains, “With Oracle Health Data Intelligence, we can take data from other sources, digest it, normalize it, and make it accessible for our clinicians.”

This includes leveraging new AI-powered capabilities that intelligently map data from different systems, even when terminology varies, ensuring physicians have a unified view of the patient’s history, regardless of the source.

“Let’s say I have a patient coming in for a wellness visit, which is all about screenings and prevention. I need to know which tests my patient had done, and more importantly, what those results were,” said Dr. Kushner. “But not all labs are the same. In my system, I may call a breast cancer screening a ‘mammogram bilateral SPW’ but in another system, they call it ‘mammogram routine.’ That’s where Oracle Health Data Intelligence comes in; it has the intelligence built-in to recognize that both are the same, which is incredibly important for patient mapping and closing care gaps.”

In addition to providing a complete view of the patient's health situation, Oracle’s solution offers valuable time back so physicians can focus on the patient, not a computing device.

"Before, I would have to click through so many windows and screens and rely more on my patient to be the courier of their health information,” says Dr. Kushner. “Oracle Health Data Intelligence takes that burden away – for both the patient and me. Even if it’s just few extra minutes of face time, that’s significant when you’re building a relationship with your patient and helps ensure that you’ve truly understood each other.”

This is a vast improvement over what has become the norm:  A patient coming in for a routine checkup faces a physician, PA, or nurse who, instead of engaging in a focused conversation about patient needs, is checking multiple screens navigating a welter of records on that person’s medications, conditions, and test results, each of which may reside in siloed systems.

It is not unusual, for example, for a doctor to spend valuable minutes of a typical 20-minute check-up, clicking to find the right radiology report or test result. Most clinicians, including Dr. Kushner, feel a much better use of that time is spent interacting with the patient face-to-face, listening to their concerns and issues.

This fragmented view of patient data remains a systemic barrier to quality care. But with Oracle Health Data Intelligence it need not remain our reality. True interoperability, which integrates data from different EHRs and makes the secure exchange of information between systems in real-time possible, is the very achievable goal.

Oracle’s suite of cloud applications, services, and analytics integrates disparate data from multiple sources, including any EHR, to create a single, unified patient record. Creating this comprehensive view can improve care delivery while also driving efficiency—a great outcome for doctors and patients alike.

Oracle Health Data Intelligence can also improve accuracy and reliability for reporting and analytics. This enhanced data management capability enables providers to be more predictive and proactive in planning and delivering care, identifying potential risks and opportunities for earlier intervention. Further, its robust analytics capabilities allow users to track key performance indicators and pinpoint areas for improvement in operations and financial performance.

At a time when the industry is ripe for radical transformation, the integration of EHR-agnostic cloud infrastructure and AI-enabled analytics finally offers a promising solution to the industry-wide challenges that have too long plagued providers and frustrated patients.