Oracle applies to join Epic and others in new federal medical record network

Oracle on Monday announced it intends to join a new federally-backed medical network that will make it easier for clinics, hospitals and insurance companies to share patients’ data.

The network, called the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, or TEFCA, launched in December. Oracle, which acquired the medical records giant Cerner for $28 billion in 2022, is the latest major vendor to support TEFCA, joining its chief rival Epic Systems.

Oracle needs to be approved to join TEFCA, but its interest in doing so helps to bolster the nascent network’s credibility. It also suggests that TEFCA may succeed in ushering in a new standard for data-sharing practices across the health-care industry.

Sharing medical records between different hospitals, clinics and health-care organizations is a notoriously complex process. Health-care data is stored in a variety of formats across dozens of different vendors, making it difficult for doctors and other providers to easily access all the relevant data about their patients.

“This is just a natural next step,” Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, told CNBC in an interview. “We are not into information blocking. We don’t have that reputation.”

Oracle’s competitor, Epic, has long been accused of dragging its feet around interoperability efforts, and Oracle has not been afraid to call the company out. In a May blog post, Ken Glueck, executive vice president at Oracle, wrote, “Everyone in the industry understands that Epic’s CEO Judy Faulkner is the single biggest obstacle to EHR [electronic health record] interoperability.”

“Epic hopes that today’s Oracle Health announcement indicates that they are finally ready to take interoperability seriously—and to deliver the technology that patients and providers deserve instead of making distracting, untrue statements,” Epic said in a release Monday.

Several companies and organizations have previously tried to streamline health-care information exchange, but TEFCA was designed to help bring all of these players together on a national scale. The network’s ultimate goal is to finally standardize the legal and technical requirements for sharing patients’ data.

The main groups that participate in health-data exchanges through TEFCA are called qualified health information networks, or QHINs. These networks volunteer to take part – they are not paid – and they have to go through a two-step approval process to ensure that they are eligible and have the necessary technical infrastructure. 

Oracle said Monday that it will begin the process to become a QHIN. Seven QHINs, including Epic, are live within TEFCA now.