Oracle has developed a new tool designed as a companion to be used with Oracle Health Foundation electronic health records. The mobile extension Oracle Health Community Care not only connects providers to patient data during in-home patient visits and at mobile clinics, the company says, but also enables offline chart updating.
WHY IT MATTERS
Remote updating of patient charts is needed to support a growing shift to home-based care, Oracle said in a website announcement about the mobile extension’s new availability in the United States.
Unreliable network connections in some areas have historically limited access to comprehensive patient data, hindering the quality and timeliness of patient care in the field.
“Care settings are increasingly moving from a centralized environment to a model that incorporates home health, mobile venues and rural environments where consistent network connections are not always available,” Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, said in a statement.
Clinicians with limited or no connectivity in Europe, Australia and other regions outside of the U.S. have been using Oracle’s mobile cloud extension to access patient charts and document their patient visits.
“As a cloud-based extension of the EHR, we also made sure the data is securely moved to and stored on the mobile device,” a spokesperson from Oracle explained by email Friday.
Any information clinicians add to a patient record when offline is synchronized with the EHR’s master record when their mobile device is reconnected to a network.
Oracle calls automatic updating via the cloud “near real-time.”
The Oracle Health Community Care records app has the same user interface as the EHR, whether connected or offline, which simplifies tool training and onboarding, the spokesperson added.
It also includes integrated mapping tools for navigation and enables field practitioners to make direct calls or send messages to primary care providers for advice during patient visits and faster access to treatment.
THE LARGER TREND
With rising healthcare costs, aging populations and staffing shortages driving a paradigm shift to care delivery in both remote and virtual settings, EHR vendors are regularly rolling out tools to facilitate patient care outside of hospitals and providers’ offices.
In September, Oracle announced new EHR performance upgrades aimed at enhancing interoperability, promising to roll out new patient record features quarterly – including streamlined patient data reviews, AI-driven documentation tools and near real-time mobile charting.
“Since the Cerner acquisition, Oracle has invested tens of thousands of engineering hours and millions of dollars to enhance our core clinical applications and improve the performance, usability and security of our EHR,” Verma said in that announcement.
Then in March, she told Healthcare IT News that the cloud services vendor has been reinventing its EHR to help health systems “drive efficiency, improve clinical care, accelerate innovation and reduce costs.”
ON THE RECORD
“With Oracle Health Community Care, we are delivering comprehensive patient health records to caregivers in the field, so they have the information they need to provide quality care anytime, anywhere,” Verma said in a statement.
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: [email protected]
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
