Baraga County Memorial Hospital (BCMH) in Michigan is deploying technology from Oracle to align and integrate systems across its organisation, streamline workflows for clinicians and staff, reduce administrative tasks, and enhance patient care.

The hospital will deploy Oracle Health CommunityWorks and expand its use of Oracle Health Clinical AI Agent. It also will adopt the firm’s Health Seamless Exchange to aggregate, cleanse and normalise patient data from trusted external sources to create comprehensive patient histories.

Oracle brings nearly two decades of experience working with rural healthcare organisations and an understanding of the challenges and transformative opportunities in rural geographies. Health CommunityWorks is tailored to the clinical, financial and operational needs of smaller health systems and critical access hospitals and helps these providers streamline workflows, alleviate staffing burdens and enhance patient access through a blend of digital infrastructure, seamless interoperability and virtual care capabilities.

BCMH is a 15-bed critical access hospital serving Baraga County in Michigan. Employing more than 200 people, BCMH also includes a family medicine clinic, walk-in convenient care clinic, round-the-clock emergency services and several specialties. After using Oracle’s ambulatory technology in its clinics for the past five years, BCMH realised the advantages it could gain from standardising on Oracle technology across its hospitals and clinics, bringing together multiple systems and helping clinicians save time by replacing the manual processes needed to share patient information and documents between systems.

“Oracle Health understands the unique needs of critical access hospitals, and we expect that adopting a more integrated approach will help us boost operational efficiency and enhance care quality in our community,” said Rob Stowe, chief executive officer at Baraga County Memorial Hospital. “With Oracle Health CommunityWorks and Clinical AI Agent, we are enhancing the clinician experience and enabling them to make more informed decisions regarding patient care.”

Expanding the use of Health Clinical AI Agent across its facilities, BCMH doctors will no longer have to spend time sifting through drop-down menus and typing on their laptops to document patient visits. Instead, the AI-powered, voice-enabled technology automatically drafts structured notes from patient-physician interactions, so doctors only have to review and approve the notes. This reduces the administrative work that contributes to provider burnout and enables them to spend more time with patients.

With Health Seamless Exchange, BCMH can securely aggregate data from third parties, such as national and local exchanges and immunisation registries, and easily bring the data into the clinician workflows once it is cleansed and normalised. This process creates a comprehensive patient record and helps limit documentation burden so clinicians can spend less time gathering information and more time focused on patients.

“Oracle is committed to empowering rural hospitals with innovative, AI-powered options that streamline operations and expand access to quality care,” said Seema Verma, executive vice president at Oracle (www.oracle.com). “We’re teaming with BCMH to equip them with a more unified system that reduces the administrative burden on caregivers and helps care teams access the right information at the right time to optimise patient care.”

Founded in 1952, BCMH (bcmh.org) is a rural healthcare system focused on addressing the needs of community members of Baraga County. Employing more than 200 people, it houses a family medicine clinic, walk-in convenient care clinic, specialty clinics, surgical services, round-the-clock emergency services, imaging, rehab, laboratory and social services.

Learn more about Oracle Health’s support for rural healthcare at www.oracle.com/health/community-hospitals/.