Epic founder and CEO Judy Faulkner is the "single biggest obstacle to EHR interoperability," an Oracle executive wrote in a blog post.
Ken Glueck, executive vice president of Oracle, was responding to a news report that the software giant acquired Cerner in 2022 — a deal worth $28.4 billion — because that EHR vendor had a "more relaxed approach to data privacy" than Epic.
But "everyone in the industry understands" that Ms. Faulkner stands in the way of a more freely flowing exchange of information in healthcare, Mr. Glueck asserted.
"She opposes interoperability because it threatens Epic's franchise," Mr. Glueck wrote in the May 28 post. "By contrast, Oracle believes outcomes are easier to obtain when providers can collaborate and gain insights across systems, data, and application silos. Our strategy is to build everything in a modular way that is EHR agnostic. We are continuing to deliver on the industry's most open, interoperable EHR system and increasing our APIs [application programming interfaces] by more than 300%."
"Privacy? Epic's contracts expressly appropriate all patient EHR data as Epic's own, stretching HIPAA beyond recognition, while Oracle/Cerner's explicitly state medical centers must opt-in to any data sharing," he added.
Mr. Glueck said the same factors that have caused others to fail in modernizing healthcare "will also cause Epic to fail. And these factors will lead to Oracle's success."
"The biggest differentiator Oracle brings to this effort is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure — scaled, secured, and autonomous," he wrote. "If you want to start to modernize healthcare you need to start with a modern cloud, not by supergluing on-premise systems onto AWS [Amazon Web Services] in hosted environments and saying cloud quickly (read, Epic)."
An Epic spokesperson declined to comment to Becker's about the remarks.
Mr. Glueck's comments came a month after Oracle co-founder and chair Larry Ellison said his company's aims in healthcare go far beyond those of Epic.