Oracle.com previews how company will use Web site to market products to health care industry - Brief Article

Health Industry Today, May, 2001 by Donald E.L Johnson

Oracle Corp., which is making a major push into health care with its database and applications products, has a strong incentive to demonstrate the power of e-commerce.

It sells database software for corporate Web sites, and its Web site is its best sales tool.

In March, HealthSouth, Birmingham, Ala., the $4.2 billion operator of five acute care hospitals and some 2,000 other inpatient rehab hospitals and outpatient rehab, diagnostic and surgery centers in the U.S. and abroad, announced that it is becoming an Oracle customer.

Oracle will sell information systems to providers

Oracle said that the systems it is developing for HealthSouth would be offered to other health care providers, with another deal expected to be announced in May and others in the works.

While John Wookey, senior vice president, applications development, said in an interview with Health Industry Today that Oracle won't begin a serious marketing effort in health care until it has products ready for market, the company has a few health care customers, and prospects will be visiting the Oracle.com Web site to see what HealthSouth's CEO, Richard M. Scrushy, has bought and why he bought it.

A little fishing around the Web site uncovers not only the vision Scrushy bought into and built on with his own vision, but also a few revealing examples of large health care organizations that are using Oracle databases--Kaiser Permanente and Health Midwest Comprehensive Care.

CEO article articulates Oracle's e-business vision

The vision statement and compelling case study are articulated in an article bylined by Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. The long article, "How we saved $1 billion," is on the "About Oracle" page. You have to download a PDF file and read the article in Acrobat Reader rather than in the text files used for most of the Web site's content. This apparently was done so users could print copies of the article and have them look more like printed brochures than like Web pages. PDF files are a bit clunky to download, clutter your desktops and are harder to navigate than standard HTML pages, but they make sense when complicated illustrations and long printed documents are involved. This is a long printed document.

It took some digging to find examples of health care customers. Searching for "hospitals", "Health care", and "medical" proved unrewarding. Going back to the home page and clicking on "Customers" takes you to a page that lets you search for "Success Stories" by company name, industry, company size and country. The site also offers content in several major languages and for the major regions of the world as well as for individual countries.

Health Midwest story promotes Oracle and partner

While there aren't a lot of health care industry "Success Stories," there is one that will interest the medical device vendors HealthSouth has signed up to work with Oracle.

HealthSouth's plan is to have all the devices and software programs used in its hospital dump their images and data into a centralized Oracle database. The Oracle databases will be hosted at a 30,000-sq.-ft. data center in Birmingham, according to Scrushy.

Take a look at how the Health Midwest "Success Story" becomes a promotion for the customer, Oracle and the Oracle partner, Physmark. On a page, "Partners at Work," Oracle profiles Health Midwest's needs, Physmark's Oracle solution and, through a link, Physmark itself. Oracle products used at Health Midwest also are listed along with Physmark's Meicomp product.

Oracle's Wookey said that the company will release application interfaces (API)s to GE Medical Systems, HillRom, Datascope and the other HealthSouth vendors in about three or four months. Those companies' developers are expected to need eight to nine months to make their products ready to work with the Oracle database, while Oracle has told HealthSouth that it will need about 30 months to complete its solutions for HealthSouth's new digital hospital.

Oracle will negotiate partnership agreements with the vendors and will participate in cooperative marketing programs with them, he said.

Note that on the Oracle.com site the company offers its Oracle logo to Web sites that are using the Oracle database. Powered by Oracle follows the example of personal computer makers putting "Intel Inside" on their computers.

Oracle.com is major customer education tool

Content is only part of the Oracle site. The company uses its site for user communities in education and other industries and, most important, it offers Oracle courses to programmers, developers and system administrators. Oracle's Web site is a good example of how medical device companies can use the Web for in-service training, customer relationship management (CRM) and sales support.

Donald E. L. Johnson is Chairman and CEO of The Business Word Inc., publishers of Health Industry Today, Hospital Materials Management, Health Care Strategic Management, Profiles in Healthcare Marketing, Healthcare Advertising Review, Financial Advertising Review, TWINS Magazine, www.TWINSMagazine.com, www.TWINS.net and www.BusinessWord.com.