Oracle Upgrades Health Information Exchange Suite

Healthcare Innovators

Oracle has enhanced its health information exchange product offering to provide a comprehensive, one-stop, pre-integrated suite that includes many components frequently sold by other vendors as stand-alone HIE products.

The Oracle Health Information Exchange offering can help reduce the cost of implementing and supporting a regional or statewide HIE because there's less need for systems integration services to assemble multiple components that are often used in hybrid, or "best of breed" HIE deployments, Kris Joshi, VP of product strategy for Oracle's healthcare and life sciences business, said in an interview with InformationWeek.

The new Oracle Health Science Information Manager is among the enhancements to the Oracle Health Information Exchange announced Tuesday at the Health Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) annual conference in Orlando.

The Health Science Information Manager forms the foundation of Oracles' comprehensive HIE suite, the company said. The Health Science Information Manager is an open, standards-based software offering that provides health data aggregation and data management, as well as consent management and auditing for regulatory compliance.

Other components to the enhanced Oracle Health Information Exchange suite include the Oracle Health Science Information Gateway, which is "the edge appliance behind the firewall of a healthcare organization that's participating in an health information exchange," Joshi said.

Meanwhile, another piece of Oracle's HIE suite, the Oracle Healthcare Master Person Index, is software that's typically sold as stand-alone products by other vendors. The Master Person Index provides "a single point of reference to data" about a patient, clinician or other entity within a healthcare organization, said Joshi. The Master Person Index is what ensures that the data that a doctor sees from the health information exchange regarding patient "John Smith" is the correct John Smith, he said.

While Oracle is selling its Master Person Index as a component of its comprehensive HIE offering, Oracle -- like other vendors -- is also making available its Master Person Index as a standalone product to health information exchange organizations that care taking a hybrid approach to building their HIEs, Joshi said.

Finally, another key component to Oracle's "end-to-end" HIE offering is Oracle Healthcare Enterprise Analytics software that allow HIE participants to analyze healthcare data for quality of care trends and reporting, infection monitoring, and research.

"No one just wants a portal [to view healthcare data through a HIE], they want the ability to get value from the HIE," Joshi said.

Oracle is not only marketing its HIE suite to U.S. based organizations, states, and communities building health data exchanges, but it's also targeting global customers, he said.

For instance, many countries in Europe and elsewhere are looking for better ways to share patient health data among clinicians, including nations with single government payers of healthcare, he said.

Oracle's comprehensive HIE offering taps into technology developments and products of companies that Oracle has acquired in recent years, including various software "stacks" from Sun Microsystems, said Joshi.