Oracle Sees Healthcare as a Promising Segment for Collaboration with Indian Govt

Oracle aims to increase its involvement in India, specifically with state and central governments. They aim to assist these government bodies in handling their tasks more effectively in the healthcare sector.

Mike Sicilia, the executive vice president of Oracle's global vertical businesses, sees the healthcare sector as a strategic area for collaboration between Oracle and the Indian government.

During the recent 'Oracle CloudWorks' event, Sicilia expressed Oracle's commitment to expanding its presence in India, especially within the state and central governments, to help them manage their workloads more efficiently.

Sicilia highlighted Oracle's recent acquisition of Cerner healthcare solutions, noting that Cerner has chosen to allocate its corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds to support the digitalisation of primary health centres (PHCs) across India. This initiative aims to enhance healthcare services in local communities.

Oracle has also partnered with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) responsible for managing PHCs to introduce innovative solutions. Notably, one of these partner organisations oversees approximately 73 PHCs, while others manage varying numbers of healthcare facilities. India has approximately 30,000 PHCs distributed across the country.

Sicilia said, "Particularly in the area of public health, our hope and goal is to work with governments worldwide, including in India, to develop and deploy public health dashboards which will be quite advantageous when there are disease outbreaks or pandemics. Providing governments with real-time information about what's happening in large population centres is really crucial to containing and preventing the potential next health crisis. Healthcare is an area that we can work with the states as well as the Central government."

India's highly skilled workforce was also praised by Sicilia, who noted the country's proficiency in creating new technologies and advanced engineering skills. However, he acknowledged the challenges posed by numerous bespoke solutions that are currently in use. Although instrumental in India's rapid technology adoption, these customised applications tend to be expensive due to the need for ongoing maintenance.

Sicilia emphasised the importance of transitioning from bespoke applications to cloud-based services, starting with migrating these applications to the cloud. Over time, this transition can lead to more cost-effective, reliable, and secure cloud services with standardised systems.

He highlighted Oracle's 'Fusion Data Intelligence Platform,' a data, analytics, and AI platform designed to help Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications customers make data-driven decisions. This platform can potentially aggregate patient information, such as clinic visits and prescriptions into a central database, improving healthcare coordination.

Addressing concerns about the platform's feasibility in a country as diverse as India, Sicilia emphasised its potential applicability worldwide. He anticipates that voice recognition, voice dictation, voice navigation, and generative AI will revolutionise existing systems by reducing the need for manual data entry.

While acknowledging India's rich intellectual property and software development capabilities, Sicilia noted that many healthcare systems are built on bespoke solutions, which can hinder standardisation. He emphasised the gradual transition to standardised systems, acknowledging the complexity of implementing such changes in a country as vast as India.