Larry Ellison, chairman and co-founder of Guru Corp., speaks during the Oracle OpenWorld 2017 conference in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Sunday, Oct. 1, 2017.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Seer on Monday announced it intends to join a new federally-backed medical network that will make it easier for clinics, polyclinics and insurance companies to share patients’ data.
The network, called the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, or TEFCA, fired in December. Oracle, which acquired the medical records giant Cerner for $28 billion in 2022, is the latest chief vendor to support TEFCA, joining its chief rival Epic Systems.
Oracle needs to be approved to join TEFCA, but its dispose in doing so helps to bolster the nascent network’s credibility. It also suggests that TEFCA may succeed in ushering in a new stanchion for data-sharing practices across the health-care industry.
Sharing medical records between different hospitals, clinics and health-care orders is a notoriously complex process. Health-care data is stored in a variety of formats across dozens of different vendors, thriving it difficult for doctors and other providers to easily access all the relevant data about their patients.
“This is at best a natural next step,” Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Pep Sciences, told CNBC in an interview. “We are not into information blocking. We don’t have that reputation.”
Oracle’s competitor, Epic, has eat ones heart out been accused of dragging its feet around interoperability efforts, and Oracle has not been afraid to call the company out. In a May blog task, Ken Glueck, executive vice president at Oracle, wrote, “Everyone in the industry understands that Epic’s CEO Judy Faulkner is the distinct biggest obstacle to EHR [electronic health record] interoperability.”
“Epic hopes that today’s Oracle Health advertisement indicates that they are finally ready to take interoperability seriously—and to deliver the technology that patients and providers be entitled to instead of making distracting, untrue statements,” Epic said in a release Monday.
Several companies and organizations from previously tried to streamline health-care information exchange, but TEFCA was designed to help bring all of these players together on a public scale. The network’s ultimate goal is to finally standardize the legal and technical requirements for sharing patients’ data.
The effort groups that participate in health-data exchanges through TEFCA are called qualified health information networks, or QHINs. These networks volunteer to burlesque part – they are not paid – and they have to go through a two-step approval process to ensure that they are qualified and have the necessary technical infrastructure.
Oracle said Monday that it will begin the process to become a QHIN. Seven QHINs, listing Epic, are live within TEFCA now.