Healthcare is at a critical inflection point. As organizations navigate rising complexity, workforce strain, and accelerating innovation, the technology decisions they make today will define their ability to lead tomorrow. Oracle Health, emerging from the $28.3 billion acquisition of Cerner, has positioned itself as a central player in this next chapter, fusing deep clinical experience with the technical scale and engineering muscle of one of the world’s most powerful enterprise platforms.

At the Oracle Health and Life Sciences Summit in Orlando held September 9–11, the company unveiled its next-generation electronic health record (EHR). Set against the theme of “AI in Action,” the announcement showcased how intelligent automation, modern design, and embedded clinical insight are converging to support a more intuitive, connected, and outcomes-driven care experience.

Perhaps even more significant, Oracle announced a major strategic shift for legacy Cerner clients: lifting the requirement to move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure prior to adopting the new platform. Consequentially, Oracle Health is offering a 547 Deep Dive Assessment to its clients as a pragmatic path to evaluate their readiness, sequencing, and organizational fit, without delaying innovation.

This moment represents more than just a product milestone. It reflects a broader change in posture, one that acknowledges the operational realities healthcare leaders face (particularly legacy Oracle clients that are evaluating their go-forward EHR strategies) while offering new flexibility in how health systems approach transformation.

Outlined below are major themes from the event and key insights for executives to consider as they develop their digital health strategies.

Technology with Purpose: Enabling Clinical Excellence at Scale

The unveiling of Oracle’s next-generation EHR signals a strategic shift in how healthcare technology can and should support clinicians, patients, and health systems at scale.

1. Oracle’s EHR Redefines the Foundation

Oracle Health has fully moved beyond incremental upgrades. The new EHR reflects a foundational rebuild with modern infrastructure and a radically improved user experience.

How to Prepare:

• Evaluate how a cloud-native EHR aligns with your long-term IT and infrastructure strategy, ensuring it supports enterprise goals through enhanced agility, resilience, and the ability to adapt over time.
• Position user experience as a competitive advantage in clinician satisfaction and retention by offering enhanced voice and touch capabilities.

2. Artificial Intelligence Is Built In, Not Bolted On

AI is not an enhancement layer, and it is core to the new platform. Oracle has woven automation, machine learning, and real-time intelligence into clinical workflows to support faster, more accurate care delivery.

How to Prepare:

• Identify use cases where embedded AI can deliver measurable efficiency gains with documentation, triage, diagnosis, and clinical decision-making.
• Develop internal governance for responsible AI adoption that supports clinical trust and data integrity.

3. Clinicians Are at the Center

Every aspect of the new EHR reflects input from physicians and clinical teams. From cognitive load reduction to intelligent workflows, the system is clearly built to support the way clinicians practice today.

How to Prepare:

• Involve clinicians in early-stage evaluation and planning to ensure strong alignment with daily workflows and access to complex patient data.
• Define success metrics that include both clinical outcomes and user satisfaction that can adapt to different care settings, offering a consistent and responsive experience.

4. The Patient Portal Is a Core Strategic Asset

The Oracle Health Patient Portal has evolved into a true digital front door. It supports more than patient communication; it plays a central role in engagement, financial transparency, and care coordination. Patients will have the ability to self-manage appointments, prescriptions, billing, and test results from a single platform.

How to Prepare:

• Integrate the portal into your broader digital engagement strategy.
• Invest in patient education to increase adoption and maximize operational efficiency.

Strengthening Financial Health: Oracle Health Patient Accounting and Payments

As Oracle Health advances its platform strategy, it is also elevating its financial and interoperability capabilities to stand alongside its core clinical solutions. Together, Oracle Health Patient Accounting (formerly RevElate), Oracle Health Payments, and Clinical Data Exchange offer a more unified, data-driven approach to operational performance, helping healthcare organizations modernize revenue operations, reduce friction in payment cycles, and move toward true data fluidity.

1. Oracle Health Patient Accounting: Aligning Financial Operations with Clinical Insight

Built as a modern, cloud-native revenue cycle platform, Oracle Health Patient Accounting brings together clinical and financial data in a single system, enabling greater accuracy, automation, and agility. Enhanced AI-enabled workflows accelerate claims processing, helping improve reimbursement cycles.

How to Prepare:

• Align finance and clinical teams around a unified platform to improve performance and reduce operational silos.
• Look for configurable systems that can adapt to changing payer models without an extensive IT lift to improve billing accuracy and reduce the need for manual intervention.

2. Oracle Health Payments: Elevating the Patient Financial Journey

As patient financial responsibility continues to grow, Oracle Health Payments delivers a simplified, secure, and transparent payment experience, fully integrated into the broader Oracle Health ecosystem.

How to Prepare:

• Implement fixed-rate, secure payment infrastructure that adheres to industry standards to lower processing costs and reduce security risks.
• Use real-time payment insights to identify gaps in collection performance and patient engagement, offering visibility and operational transparency to patients.

3. Oracle Health Clinical Data Exchange: Unlocking Connected, Actionable Data

Data Exchange is more than an interoperability tool; it’s a foundational enabler of coordinated care, faster reimbursement, and improved system-wide efficiency. By supporting secure, standards-based data sharing, it helps reduce administrative complexity and gives clinicians access to timely, structured patient information.

How to Prepare:

• Choose interoperability solutions that support both clinical and financial data exchange to maximize return.
• Ensure vendor partners are building to evolving national standards, enabling future scalability and compliance to connect payers, third-party platforms, and national networks.

Our Perspective

Oracle Health is actively signaling transformation and engineering it. The unveiling of its next-generation ambulatory EHR, combined with the continued rollout of modernized financial and interoperability solutions, marks a decisive step forward in its journey to unify the healthcare experience through a single, intelligent platform. These advancements are not incremental upgrades. They represent a shift in how care is delivered, documented, paid for, and coordinated.

Still, healthcare leaders must face the reality that the full suite is not yet complete. The acute care EHR and several downstream capabilities remain under development, and timelines remain fluid. This leaves health systems with a choice. They can seize the opportunity to adopt what is available now, taking advantage of early gains in usability, automation, and workflow modernization. Or they can delay, waiting for a more complete product roadmap to materialize at the potential cost of lost momentum and deferred innovation.

Waiting for perfect timing has rarely served healthcare transformation well. Leaders who act decisively with clear alignment between strategy, readiness, and enterprise goals will be best positioned to turn this moment into a long-term competitive advantage. That means using structured assessments to evaluate risk, building internal consensus, and assembling the right mix of internal and external expertise to support a phased implementation approach.

Oracle has laid down a bold vision for the future of healthcare technology and digital transformation. Now, it is up to the vendor to empower healthcare leaders to translate that vision into action.

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