A Revolutionary Approach to Healthcare Technology with Stephanie Trunzo, Senior Vice President at Oracle Health

[00:00:02] Hey everybody, welcome back to the Beat Podcast at Vive. I'm so excited to be hosting Stephanie Trunzo on the podcast today. She is the Senior Vice President at Oracle Health and has over 20 years experience from executive roles at Oracle and IBM to leading her startup through a public company acquisition.

[00:00:23] She thrives building aligned, high-performing teams, compelling storytelling platforms, and meaningful market-defining products. So great to have you here, Stephanie, and glad you could join us.

[00:00:35] Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here as well.

[00:00:38] Yeah, so it's been great to have Oracle here at Vive 2024 with us. A lot of things have happened over the past two years as Oracle Health was formed by acquisition and a lot of innovative things on the horizon really for you all, your customers and potential, really potentially for the healthcare industry.

[00:00:57] What are the top two to three things that you're most excited about for Oracle Health over the next year or two?

[00:01:03] That's a big question. We have really been through a lot of adventure, I would say, over the last few years.

[00:01:10] We went from thinking about launching Oracle Health as a business, which I had the privilege of doing a few years ago coming out of the pandemic, and then very quickly going into this very major Cerner acquisition, which is the largest that Oracle has done and one of the largest in the healthcare industry at large.

[00:01:26] And it's taken us a little bit of time to not only get through that acquisition process, but start to turn the corner on taking a very large portfolio that's been developed over truly 40 plus years and modernize that with the latest and greatest technology that we know is possible.

[00:01:43] And I often like to say that technology and coming from a tech executive, it's not going to be, that's not the limiter. That's not the hard part.

[00:01:53] The hard part is going to be making the changes happen as a result of implementing some of this new technology.

[00:01:58] So a few of the things that I see coming in the next year or two here that is pretty exciting.

[00:02:05] I'll start with the patient. We talk a lot about how important it is to us to put the human at the center of all of our decisions.

[00:02:12] Given that 40 years plus of prior technology decisions often were made around transactional systems, we want this to be about the people, the humans, the users, whether that user is the patient, the provider, the front desk worker, the researcher.

[00:02:26] So on the patient experience side, we're looking at streamlining all of your patient interactions, your own health journey connected into the EHR with a single digital front door, comprehensive patient portal.

[00:02:41] And I think even some of the things like the word portal indicates how dated some of the technology is.

[00:02:46] So we're thinking about this a lot more as how do you apply a true digital strategy?

[00:02:51] How do you apply a user experience process to making that patient journey something that's more intuitive, more seamless, and more oriented even towards the emotions that they're experiencing as they go through the process?

[00:03:04] The second thing I would say is the flip side of that coin, which is the physician, caregiver, provider side experience.

[00:03:12] And we've got some really exciting things going on there with our clinical digital assistant as one example.

[00:03:19] And the idea there is how can we reduce the amount of time that clinicians are spending in data entry, in interacting with technology versus having technology enable them and empower them and bringing information to them instead of them having to input information.

[00:03:36] And our clinical digital assistant is intended to do stuff like capture information from the conversation, understand it, populate the relevant fields in the EHR, and make that something that isn't a burden to the people who invested their time in their life and actually giving care to humans.

[00:03:53] And then the third one is really about how we collaboratively solve this problem together.

[00:03:59] I don't believe, I sometimes get the question about, is it a race to see which of the tech companies can solve some of this first?

[00:04:06] And I think it's fundamentally the wrong question.

[00:04:09] We're focused on not only interoperability, but open APIs, public APIs, so that we're building something that is a true platform to connect all of these disparate systems, that we're going to be truly vendor agnostic in that approach.

[00:04:23] So any EHR, any EMR, any other system or record or other specialty systems that need to integrate.

[00:04:31] We truly believe that it's going to take everybody coming together and maybe putting some of the competitiveness and it's still a business, but at the same time, we're doing this for altruistic reasons.

[00:04:42] And I think we've all got to cooperate.

[00:04:44] So we're setting up our platform in that way to truly be a stage for collaboration.

[00:04:49] That's really great, Stephanie.

[00:04:51] Thank you so much for that.

[00:04:52] And really, just thinking through what you shared, it's that intuitive experience, bringing that to clinicians and patients.

[00:04:59] This clinical digital assistance sounds really cool and a great opportunity for people to engage and have technology work for them.

[00:05:06] And then the solving the problems together, it's this idea of coopetition, right?

[00:05:11] Yeah, that's right.

[00:05:12] We have to all be willing to be open in order to make progress together.

[00:05:17] Otherwise, we're only going to deepen the silos and create additional chasms between the data that we need to actually be connecting.

[00:05:26] 100%.

[00:05:27] So why is it so important that health systems have a consolidated, high-performing, reliable data platform?

[00:05:35] I think there's a few things.

[00:05:36] We talk about data a lot across a different number of different kinds of categories and different industries.

[00:05:43] But for health, what's interesting is that there is so much data.

[00:05:47] There is so much data already.

[00:05:49] We're not really activating it in a way that we can get insights from it.

[00:05:53] And having a consolidated way of looking at information, the most important part of having that kind of platform is not just consolidating the data, but interpreting it in a meaningful way.

[00:06:06] Ensuring, as I was mentioning, that we're actually using that data to provide insights to empower the clinicians, the providers, the healthcare providers to make informed decisions swiftly.

[00:06:18] So we talk about things like decision support, giving them the information at their fingertips rather than them having to parse through.

[00:06:25] And having a strategy around how to connect data is a fundamental element of being able to serve up that information then at the time of need.

[00:06:36] So we use AI to ingest, normalize, deduplicate data from a variety of different sources.

[00:06:43] That's something we've been doing for quite a while.

[00:06:45] But now, with this OpenAPI ecosystem, we're going to be able to do that across multiple sources.

[00:06:52] And really, fundamentally, the goal is to create these comprehensive longitudinal patient records instead of episodic records that only give you a very slim point of view into what's going on with a human and their health.

[00:07:05] And I think, you know, that idea that data in and of itself is not really very valuable until you can put some insights around it.

[00:07:14] And this is truly what machines are great at doing, right?

[00:07:16] They can, we can look at an amount of information that a human could never possibly in their entire lifetime consume and do it in nanoseconds.

[00:07:26] And be able to serve up insights from it, patterns, understandings, even translate information in a different way to different audiences.

[00:07:34] The way that same content might be served to a surgeon versus the patient that's undergoing that surgery should be in different language.

[00:07:44] They should be spoken in different ways.

[00:07:46] So that's all stuff that having this kind of idea of a high performing, reliable data platform that's connecting all of these things together.

[00:07:54] That's the foundation for all of the other stuff that comes on top.

[00:07:58] That's fantastic, Stephanie.

[00:07:59] And that's music to all of our ears to know the efforts going into making something like that happen.

[00:08:05] Activating the data, going from episodic to longitudinal.

[00:08:08] It's a dream.

[00:08:09] It's just fantastic to hear you guys are fully focused and investing there.

[00:08:13] The topic of security has been big at the conference as well as in the industry.

[00:08:19] How should organizations address the critical issues of data security and patient privacy?

[00:08:24] And do you have any examples of what they could be doing and what you guys are doing to help?

[00:08:29] Yeah, and it is a hot topic.

[00:08:31] I was saying how critical it is that we connect all these data sources.

[00:08:35] The more data sources that you connect, the more that you're incorporating different sensitive data, especially,

[00:08:40] the more increasingly important that securing that and making sure that it is safe, that it's trusted and it's protected becomes.

[00:08:48] We have something that we just recently launched called Oracle Health Data Intelligence.

[00:08:53] That is the fundamental underpinning of what I was just previously discussing around connecting all of these different data sources.

[00:09:01] So I would say when you're thinking about things like security, starting with security, number one, you have to start thinking about it.

[00:09:08] And I think a lot of the things that we've seen, especially in the news over the last few months with different kinds of issues around security, leakages, those kinds of things are preventable.

[00:09:20] There's a lot of sneaky ways of getting into data, of hacking systems.

[00:09:25] But security doesn't happen by accident.

[00:09:27] You have to think about it through the entire process of how you're designing a system.

[00:09:31] And that means not just the technology, but the processes as well.

[00:09:34] From an Oracle perspective, we major on security.

[00:09:37] So our cloud and the underlying infrastructure has world-class security built in.

[00:09:43] And so the first thing to think about is which vendors are you working with?

[00:09:48] Who are you partnering with from a technology perspective to make sure that you're beginning with the most foundationally safe kinds of platforms possible?

[00:09:57] But then on top of it, you have to think about the humans and the processes.

[00:10:01] I've seen examples, and I know that it happens, where people are using things like FaceTime to share information because the systems are too difficult to use.

[00:10:11] So it's easier for a doctor to FaceTime a patient and talk to them than it is sometimes to use some of the existing solutions that they have in place.

[00:10:19] So even if you have the most secure cloud, you have the most secure infrastructure and technology, you still need to be mindful about thinking about security at every step of the process that you're putting together, the workflows that you're using, which humans have access and don't have access.

[00:10:36] And that gets us to the privacy part of the question, which is really around consent management and having, I think, also a thoughtful way of looking at the difference between identified data that has all of your personal information attached to it versus either anonymized or de-identified data where you can look at populations or you can look at certain pieces of information without associating it with the particular human that data comes from.

[00:11:05] And so using the data in the right ways with the right permissions and thinking about the kinds of privacy consent processes that you're following in addition to those security processes.

[00:11:17] Some great insights there, Stephanie.

[00:11:19] Thanks for sharing.

[00:11:20] And a lot of it goes back to that doing something about it, thinking about it, and that intuitive experience that you talked about.

[00:11:27] Really appreciate that.

[00:11:28] So look, time flies when you're having fun.

[00:11:30] This is the last one I have for you.

[00:11:33] A bit farther down the road is artificial intelligence or AI.

[00:11:37] You guys have been using this for a long time.

[00:11:39] It's definitely the other hot topic in the industry and something that's gained a lot of attention.

[00:11:45] What are some of the ideas around AI for Oracle Health?

[00:11:48] Well, and I think you're exactly right.

[00:11:51] It is another hot topic.

[00:11:53] However, I'd say it's a hot topic because there have been new advances.

[00:11:57] However, there's nothing fundamentally new about artificial intelligence, right?

[00:12:01] It's using data with the proper kinds of algorithms, machine learning.

[00:12:05] What has really changed recently, though, is gen AI or content creation that's coming from semantic understanding and processing of large language models.

[00:12:16] And what might be interesting, I think, is just even understanding that the compute power, the GPUs instead of the CPUs, the things that are actually necessary to run AI quickly, those have been in shortage for a while.

[00:12:31] So we have Oracle has a partnership with NVIDIA.

[00:12:35] And that partnership enables us to have access to the kinds of large compute power that's necessary to process these massive data sets in order for AI to be effective and useful.

[00:12:46] But I'd say even closer than some of the really cool things that are a little more science fictiony down the road, what we're doing today, and I truly mean today, is when we talk about things like our clinical digital assistant.

[00:12:59] That's leveraging AI today to do things like reduce administrative burden.

[00:13:05] So maybe not quite as sexy as it will be when we get to novel disease prediction and personalized medicine using AI, but very tactically important.

[00:13:15] And especially with the challenges that healthcare systems have today in just keeping margins, like the cost.

[00:13:21] So if we can use AI to help gain efficiency, streamline workflows, create the listening capabilities that offload the physicians from data entry,

[00:13:32] that enable the right kind of chat conversations with patients so that they know what their care plan looks like and what needs to happen next.

[00:13:40] Or even truly things as simple as intelligently scheduling appointments, managing workforce.

[00:13:48] Those are all things that AI can help us with today.

[00:13:51] And so those are truly transformative impacts of these technology advancements.

[00:13:56] Even if AI has existed for quite some time, there are new ways that we can apply it to have impact today while we learn about some of the things that are going to take a bit longer for us to build the right kind of trust and accuracy

[00:14:08] that's necessary for an industry like healthcare.

[00:14:12] Yeah, no, Stephanie, I love how you made the distinction between there's AI, but then there's this, the large language models and what we're able to do with Gen AI.

[00:14:21] And the opportunity that we have is huge to your point.

[00:14:24] And listen, time back to spend with your family as a clinician, additional profit as a health system.

[00:14:29] All those things are very attractive and certainly promising.

[00:14:33] This has been a lot of fun.

[00:14:34] I've really enjoyed speaking with you, learning more about the vision that Oracle Health has for the industry.

[00:14:41] Any closing thought that you have for us?

[00:14:43] And then what's the best place for the listeners to get in touch?

[00:14:46] Yeah, I would say as a closing thought, just to harken back to an earlier comment around collaboration,

[00:14:53] my call to action to anyone listening would be where are the ways that you can collaborate differently?

[00:14:58] Are there places where you can offer up data sharing so that we can all benefit from that in an anonymized way?

[00:15:05] Are there places where you can incorporate bringing multiple of your partners together to facilitate a tighter way of partnering?

[00:15:13] So I think the more that we collaborate, the better.

[00:15:15] And certainly I would encourage people to reach out to Oracle.

[00:15:19] We're happy to talk with you, share more details on some of the things I just chatted about here,

[00:15:23] or also to learn from your challenges, because the more that we talk to people,

[00:15:28] the more that we understand, the more that we're going to be able to build technology that helps.

[00:15:32] So feel free to check out oracle.com slash health.

[00:15:36] And if you head there, we will be able to route you to the right place.

[00:15:39] And on top of it, I'm on LinkedIn.

[00:15:41] So please reach out directly as well.

[00:15:44] Outstanding.

[00:15:44] Stephanie, thank you so much for today.

[00:15:46] And for everybody listening, make sure you check out the show notes.

[00:15:50] So you have a summary of what we discussed today, as well as relevant links.

[00:15:54] So you can get in touch with Stephanie, as well as Oracle Health.

[00:15:58] Thank you all for tuning in.

[00:15:59] And Stephanie, thanks for your time today.

[00:16:01] Thank you, Saul.