LAS VEGAS: For years, the world has prioritised тАЬshopping way over healthcareтАЭ, Larry Ellison told a packed gathering at Oracle CloudWorld here last month. тАЬShoppingтАЩs important, health is not тАУ thatтАЩs not right. тАЭ
For tech magnate Ellison, now 78, the Covid pandemic has been a wake-up call. тАЬWe have such a fabulous global system for credit,тАЭ Ellison, OracleтАЩs co-founder, points out. тАЬOur credit score, our salaries, our bank transactions, our loans, they are all common knowledge тАФ accessible at the click of a mouse. But our health data is totally fragmented. тАЭ And Ellison wants to change that. тАЬWhy canтАЩt we build a similar system for healthcare?тАЭ he says.
Say, someone lives in Stanford and visits the hospital there. All his health records would be at that hospital. Now, suppose this person is visiting his parents in Montana and meets with an acci-dent. The doctors attending him there would be clueless тАФ whatтАЩs his blood group, is he allergic to penicillin, does he have a heart condition?
This, Ellison admits, is a very ambitious goal. тАЬYour health records are scattered in dozens of databases,тАЭ he says. And he wants to link it all. This will, of course, be anonymous data and can only be accessed by a doctor when the patient says so.
But can it be done? Oracle recently acquired Cerner, a US-based hospital facility management firm, and it hopes that CernerтАЩs expertise in healthcare coupled with OracleтАЩs tech will help in building a cutting-edge national healthcare platform that can then be scaled up to a global database.
тАЬWe canтАЩt do this alone,тАЭEllison admits. But through the Covid years Oracle has worked with several partners. тАЬWe worked with Oxford. We worked with the CDC. тАЭ
тАЬDuring Covid, the scale and pace of everything changed.тАЭ And that probably was the spark that led Ellison to plan for a future where we are better prepared to handle crises.
The other big venture Ellison is pushing for is connected clouds. MicrosoftтАЩs Azure and Oracle clouds are already connected. Ellison believes that customers will increasingly opt for multi-cloud platforms, forcing AWS and Google to also link up their clouds with Oracle and Azure.
(The correspondent was in Las Vegas at the invitation of Oracle)
