Oracle Healthcare Marketplace aims to make buying health services an app-like experience

Oracle has added a new feature to its Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite: last week, the company debuted the Oracle Healthcare Marketplace, within its Fusion Cloud Procurement.

Oracle Healthcare Marketplace will offer “a B2C shopping experience”, which the company hopes will streamline how healthcare businesses buy from both contractors as well as new suppliers.

Healthcare Marketplace aims to simplify the way businesses find products available from existing contracts and suppliers by integrating contracts across different parts of the business. It will also clean up the data healthcare companies hold for product catalogues to help make sure they’re working with up-to-date information and ordering current catalogue items rather than more expensive alternatives.

For products that aren’t covered by existing contracts, Healthcare Marketplace will display a range of medical and surgical products and devices which can be bought from third-party suppliers.

It’s Oracle’s most recent move to boost its healthcare-focused offerings. A move that makes sense, as healthcare isn’t merely recession-proof but also awash in data and inefficiencies.

At the recent Oracle Health summit, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison revealed the company will be moving its “world headquarters” to Nashville, Tennessee as he considers the city the centre of the healthcare industry – a sector that’s becoming increasingly important to the software vendor.

Related: Top companies disrupting healthcare with artificial intelligence

Building upon Cerner acquisition

In 2022, Oracle closed a $28.3 billion acquisition of Cerner, one of the biggest electronic health records providers. In the UK, Cerner is typically used to manage patient records in secondary care trusts; by the end of 2023, around 10% of UK trusts had not implemented electronic patient records and instead were relying on paper notes for patient care.

Earlier this month, Oracle announced that over 1,000 of its Cerner customers have since moved to its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and debuted its Autonomous Shield initiative to encourage more businesses to follow suit.

According to Oracle, Autonomous Shield offers a methodology that will make it easier for customers to migrate to OCI. It will offer security best practices, application migration, and architecture development as well as go-live support for those businesses making the switch.

Oracle is pitching OCI to healthcare companies as a means of shoring up security, with the infrastructure offering real-time threat detection and monitoring, as well as autonomous patching.

Late last year, the company also debuted generative AI capabilities for Cerner with the introduction of its Clinical Digital Assistant.

The assistant will listen in on appointments and summarise the consultations for patients’ notes, as well as propose follow-up actions, such as further investigations. Patients will also be able to use the software to interact with their healthcare providers, for example, by booking appointments or asking for information on their treatment.

Oracle said the new functionality will be available this year.

Related reading: Hospitals aren’t ready for AI — but it’s ready for them