Oracle Health upgrades AI agent with coding, charting features

The AI arms race among EHR companies is well underway, and this week saw two EHR titans launch new AI-based capabilities in an effort to reign supreme.  

Following Epic's launch of its AI-supported Ergo Visit, Oracle Health announced expanded capabilities for its clinical AI assistant. The new capabilities include automated professional fee coding for ambulatory workflows, dictation for clinical documentation and assistance with chart review.

According to Oracle, its Clinical AI Agent manages multiple AI agents to coordinate clinical tasks and provide data-driven insights and recommendations across clinical, operational and financial workflows.

The agent's new coding capability will analyze conversations during patient visits and suggest professional fee charge codes within the orders workflow. Clinicians can review and confirm the codes before submitting them.

The Clinical AI Agent will now also allow clinicians to dictate clinical notes into the text field, while ambient AI will transcribe the speech in real time. However, clinicians are still responsible for reviewing, editing and signing off on the clinical documentation.

Further, Oracle Health is adding AI-assisted workflows to chart review. The AI will identify and summarize relevant clinical information from across a patient's EHR, including medical history, lab results and medications.

According to the company, the new capabilities aim to reduce manual work, mitigate inaccuracies and increase efficiency. With the dictation capability, in particular, Oracle noted that it can help clinicians capture information between patient visits or after rounds while details are still fresh.

"Care teams can't afford to spend hours on documentation and administrative tasks," said Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager, Oracle Health and Life Sciences, in the press release. "With our expanding portfolio of AI capabilities embedded directly into clinical and revenue cycle workflows, we're helping healthcare organizations operate more efficiently while enabling clinicians to stay focused on delivering high-quality care."

EHR companies have spent the last few years bulking up their AI capabilities, and this trend shows no sign of slowing down.

Just this week, Epic unveiled Ergo Visit, a system that uses AI and human intelligence to gather relevant information from the wealth of data in the Epic EHR, MyChart patient portal and Cosmos, Epic's deidentified electronic database. Similar to Oracle's updated AI agent, Ergo Visit involves various AI tools, such as Epic's Art and Emmie, working together to provide clinical decision support before, during and after patient visits.

Meanwhile, Oracle added automated order creation to its Clinical AI Agent earlier this year and released an AI-powered EHR last August.

Anuja Vaidya has covered the healthcare industry since 2012. She currently covers healthcare IT and innovation, including artificial intelligence, digital healthcare, EHRs and interoperability.