Larry Ellison, co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corp., speaks during the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Oct. 22, 2018.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Oracle unveiled a brand-new electronic health record on Tuesday, its most significant health-care product update since acquiring the medical records giant Cerner for $28 billion in 2022.
An electronic health record, or an EHR, is a digital version of a patient’s medical history that’s updated by doctors and nurses over time. EHR software can be complex and cumbersome for clinicians to use, but it’s become an integral component of the modern U.S. health-care system.
Oracle’s latest EHR is equipped with cloud and artificial intelligence capabilities that will make it easier to navigate and set up, the company said. There are no menus or drop-down screens, and doctors can pull up the information they need by asking questions with their voices. Ideally, this will allow doctors to spend less time searching through records and more time caring for patients, Oracle said.
“It’s not just a scribe. It’s not an assistant. It’s almost like having your own resident,” Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, told CNBC in an interview.
Oracle’s new offering could help boost its position within the fiercely competitive EHR market, where it has struggled to maintain its footing in recent years. In 2023, Oracle saw its largest net hospital loss on record while market leader Epic Systems, Oracle’s top rival, was the only company that saw a net increase in acute care market share, according to a report from KLAS Research.
Cerner contributed $5.9 billion to Oracle’s total revenue in fiscal 2023. Epic generated $4.9 billion in revenue last year.
Oracle co-founder and Chairman Larry Ellison delivers a keynote address during the Oracle OpenWorld on October 22, 2018 in San Francisco, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
The new EHR has been in the works since Oracle acquired Cerner, but it was not built on top of Cerner’s existing infrastructure, Verma said. That means current Cerner customers will have to decide whether to migrate to the separate system.
“Just think about crumbling infrastructure in a house, you’re not going to put new things on top of it,” she said. “That was the conclusion that we came to when we looked at the Cerner technology, so what we’re introducing to the market is something that’s brand new.”
Suhas Uliyar, Oracle’s senior vice president for product management in clinical and health-care AI, walked CNBC through a virtual demo of the new EHR. He showcased what it might look like for a doctor to get up to speed, respond to messages and fill prescriptions ahead of a day packed full of patient visits.
The EHR is browser based, and physicians will see a search bar and a chronological list of their appointments when they open it. The interface is very simple. A doctor can click on the microphone in the search bar and ask questions like, “How many openings do I have for today?” or “How many new patients do I have on schedule for today?” The doctor will then get an AI-generated answer within seconds.
If a doctor clicks on a patient, they’ll open their chart, where they can find AI summaries as well as more detailed explanations of their medical history. The physician can see what’s changed since the patient’s last visit, whether they’re taking any new medication and other details like lab results, clinical documentation, past treatments, risk factors, messages, allergies and vitals.
Additionally, the doctor can click the microphone and ask patient-specific questions like “Has she ever complained about panic attacks or shortness of breath?,” “Has he had a CT screening for lung cancer, and are his vaccinations up to date?” or “Which antibiotics have you treated her urinary tract infection with?”
“It’s going through the entire history, all the records, and it gives me a very specific answer,” Uliyar said. “I didn’t have to go scroll through 15 different documents and find that.”
The voice-activated questions can build on one another, and the EHR’s AI will start to learn the doctor’s habits, like the types of medications they prescribe and refill often. Even when Uliyar stumbled over his words or didn’t phrase a question exactly right, the system still pulled up the information he was looking for.
If a doctor wants to go into more detail or double-check an AI-generated answer within the new EHR, they can always click on the citation and look through the original record that’s referenced, Uliyar said. And answers that include content like medication dosage information or other evidence-based recommendations will link to validated databases, he added.
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on July 12, 2023 in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images
While Oracle has been developing its new EHR, the company has also been rolling out features to existing Cerner customers to try and improve their experience with the product. Uliyar said many of these features, including Oracle Health Clinical AI Agent (formerly called Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant), are already embedded within the new EHR.
Oracle announced the general availability of Clinical AI Agent in June, and it aims to automate much of the documentation that doctors are responsible for.
Physicians can access the Clinical AI Agent through an app on their phone, and they hit a button to record their visits with patients. Once they stop recording, Oracle’s AI automatically generates a clinical note based on the appointment, so the doctorsno longer need to write it themselves.
Around 70 customers are already using the Clinical AI Agent, Uliyar said. The company is currently building a similar tool for nurses.
Since the Clinical AI Agent is already embedded within the new EHR, customers will not have to worry about integrating it. The tool will also remain available as a stand-alone product that’s EHR agnostic, Uliyar said.
The early adopter program for Oracle’s new EHR begins next year, and Oracle said it will work with customers to determine the customizations they need. The company has been moving its health-care customers to the cloud, so that should make the EHR implementation process much easier, Verma said.
“We see it as very disruptive to the market,” she said. “Our EHR is going to solve a lot of long-standing problems that we’ve had in health care.”
Illustration of the China and U.S. flag on a central processing unit.
Blackdovfx | Istock | Getty Images
President-elect Donald Trump is unlikely to roll back the Biden administration’s CHIPS and Science Act, despite his campaign rhetoric on the bill, experts say.
The legislation, which provides incentives for chipmakers to set up manufacturing in the U.S., became a point of contention in the final month of the election cycle.
Still, the key Biden policy, which has massive implications for Asian chips makers like TSMC and Samsung, is likely safe in the near term, according to chip experts.
Despite signaling he’s “not thrilled” about the bill, Trump is probably not going to roll it back, Paul Triolo, senior vice president for China and technology policy lead at Albright Stonebridge, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Thursday.
“There’s support for this kind of onshoring of advanced manufacturing,” he added.
The Biden administration signed the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act in August 2022, committing almost $53 billion to invest in domestic semiconductor manufacturing and research with the aim of boosting U.S. competitiveness with China.
The former president made headlines in October by attacking the legislation as a “bad” deal during a three hour interview with popular podcaster Joe Rogan.
“We put up billions of dollars for rich companies to come in and borrow the money and build chip companies here, and they’re not going to give us the good companies anyway,” he said, arguing instead that his proposal to increase tariffs would attract chip companies for free.
The allocation of the CHIPS Act has been slow, with the lion’s share of the earmarked funds yet to be doled out.
So far, the bill has attracted Asian chip makers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Samsung to build U.S. facilities. The two companies have already been offered $6.6 billion and $6.4 billion, respectively.
The largest CHIPS Act beneficiary has been the American chip maker Intel, which has been awarded $8.5 billion in funding.
While Trump may want to modify and change some of the priorities of the bill and its fund allocation, he’s expected to leave most of it intact.
The Trump administration will probably try to reinterpret the bill “so they can spread the money a little differently than Biden, but I don’t think they’re going to roll it back,” Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Thursday.
Posen said that this would mirror what Biden had done by leaving Trump’s China tariffs in place when he took office, despite pivoting to a more industrial policy focused strategy.
“But I do think there’ll be much more expansion on the tariff front, rather than industrial policy expanding,” he added.
Shares of Adyen lost ground in early Thursday deals, as the company reported a slowdown in the growth of its transaction volumes in the third quarter.
Shares of Adyen initially failed to open Thursday after the company’s third-quarter report, but resumed trade. The stock was down 9.8% at 8:35 a.m. London time, taking it to the bottom of the pan-European Stoxx 600.
Adyen’s sales growth came off the back of a rise in total processed volume (TPV), which climbed 32% year-over-year to 321 billion euros. In the first half, Adyen posted a 45% jump in TPV, after previously reporting 46% year-over-year growth in the first quarter.
Analysts at Citi said in a research note that “weaker” transaction volume was likely to attract most of the focus from investors Thursday, amid concerns over end-market weakness.
“Either way, the take rate on the processed volume is comfortably higher than expected and, if sustainable, should support sales growth acceleration in 2025/26, while the lower run-rate of hiring should support continued margin uplift,” they wrote.
Digital processed volumes grew 29% year-over-year, Adyen said, lower than in the previous quarter due to impacts from a single large-volume customer, Block’s Cash App.
The company otherwise reported a jump in sales in the third quarter as the Dutch payments firm gained wallet share and added new customers, diversifying its merchant mix. Adyen, whose technology allows businesses to accept payments online and in-store, reported third-quarter net revenue of 498.3 million euros ($535.5 million), up 21% year-on-year on a constant currency basis.
The firm observed stronger traction from in-store payments in the third quarter, with its “unified commerce” point-of-sale terminals seeing 33% year-over-year growth, as it installed base of physical payment devices increased by 46,000 to 299,000.
Adyen also said that it expanded hiring slightly, adding 35 new people in the quarter. The firm has been slowing hiring in the past year following concerns over its pace of investment.
Last year, the Dutch payments giant’s shares tanked nearly 40% in a single day on the back of worse-than-expected sales and declining profits in the first half of 2023
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Payments firms saw a boost from an increase in online shopping during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
But in recent years, companies such as Adyen have faced pressure from lower consumer spending.
Adyen, however, has benefited from significant growth from partnerships with its North American clients, such as Cash App in the U.S. and Shopify in Canada.
Adyen kept guidance unchanged Thursday, saying it expects to achieve net revenue growth between the low to high-twenties percent, up to and including 2026.
The firm added it expects to improve its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization to levels above 50% by 2026.
Capital expenditure will remain consistent at a level of up to 5% of net revenues, Adyen said.
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon speaks at the Computex forum in Taipei, Taiwan, June 3, 2024.
Ann Wang | Reuters
Qualcomm reported fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday that beat Wall Street expectations for earnings and revenue, and the company guided to a strong December quarter.
The shares rose 10% in extended trading at one point before falling to a gain of about 4%.
Here’s how the company did versus Refinitiv consensus expectations for the quarter ending Sept. 29:
Earnings per share: $2.69, adjusted $2.56 expected
Revenue: $10.24 billion versus $9.90 billion expected
Qualcomm said it expects revenue in the current quarter of between $10.5 billion and $11.3 billion, with the midpoint of that range beating LSEG consensus expectations of $10.59 billion.
The company reported $2.92 billion in net income, or $2.59 per share, a sharp jump from last year’s $1.49 billion, or $1.23 per share. Qualcomm reported $33.19 billion in total revenue in its fiscal 2024, a 9% increase from 2023.
Qualcomm’s fortunes have historically been tied to the smartphone industry, where the company provides a range of chips to handset makers, including system-on-a-chip processors, modems, and antennas. The company makes the chip at the heart of most high-end Android devices, and many lower-end phones as well. Qualcomm also sells modems and related chips to Apple for its iPhones, and last year said its contract for 5G chips ran through 2026.
Qualcomm reported a 12% increase in handset chip sales to $6.1 billion, in line with FactSet estimates. Qualcomm introduced its high-end chip for 2025, called Snapdragon 8 Elite, in October.
“In handsets we delivered greater than 20% year-over-year growth in Android revenues,” said Qualcomm CFO Akash Palkhiwala on a call with analysts.
Under CEO Cristiano Amon, the company has diversified away from being a smartphone supplier and has introduced and invested heavily in producing chips for PCs, cars, and industrial machines.
“We will continue to transform Qualcomm from a wireless communications company into a connected computing company for the age of AI,” Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said on the earnings call with analysts.
Qualcomm has also made efforts to brand itself as a leader in AI, having developed smartphone chips with specialized parts for machine learning since 2017. But unlike Nvidia, the company doesn’t produce the kind of graphics processors for data centers that are used for big AI programs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The automotive business grew 86% on an annual basis to $899 million in sales. Qualcomm says it has billions of dollars in business with automakers currently in its development pipeline, and highlighted it was the fifth consecutive quarter of growth. Qualcomm said that it expected automotive sales in the current quarter to rise 50% on an annual basis.
The company’s “internet of things” business includes both chips for industrial purposes as well as the chips Meta uses in its Quest handsets and Ray-Ban Smart Glasses. It also includes the new business selling chips for laptops running Microsoft Windows. The division reported $1.68 billion in revenue, a 22% increase from a year earlier.
Qualcomm’s chip business, including its handset, automotive, and other chips, which together is reported as QCT, saw sales rise 18% during the quarter to $7.37 billion in total.
The company’s profitable technology licensing business, QTL, reported $1.52 billion in revenue, a 21% increase over the same period last year.
Qualcomm said its board had approved $15 billion in additional buybacks. During the fourth quarter, it repurchased $1.3 billion worth of shares and paid out $947 million in dividends.