AtlantiCare gives providers more time to listen to patients by using Oracle AI

With more than 110 clinical locations, two hospitals, and three emergency departments, AtlantiCare is an award-winning healthcare provider that has been serving the people of southern New Jersey for more than 125 years. The organization recently implemented Oracle Health Clinical AI Agent, which uses AI to listen to the provider-patient conversation, draft notes, and provide summaries for the providers to then review and approve. The technology is integrated through the Oracle Health Electronic Health Record (EHR) system that AtlantiCare uses. Providers quickly saw that they could type less and listen more during appointments, letting them better connect with patients. It eased the post-visit administrative burden, saving providers more than an hour a day and giving them not only more time for patient interactions but also their personal lives, reducing burnout risk. And patient satisfaction scores rose. “One of the most meaningful things we heard from patients was that they felt heard,” says Michael Charlton, president and CEO, AtlantiCare.

AtlantiCare’s technology investments are part of Vision 2030, a six-year strategy to expand access to care, strengthen clinical care, and improve health across south Jersey. Its strategy also aims to address the broad issues affecting people’s health, including food insecurity, homelessness, and chronic diseases. On the technology front, AtlantiCare has built strong partnerships with research institutes and technology providers to adopt leading-edge treatments, helping ensure patients receive high-quality care close to home.

AtlantiCare had been using Oracle Health EHR, and the organization embraced Oracle Health’s vision for using data in new ways to improve care, boost efficiency, and provide a better environment for the health workforce. Oracle Health Clinical AI Agent was one example of how Oracle’s innovation roadmap could help the provider achieve its goals. AtlantiCare is also implementing Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications to support back-office operations, including supply chain.

Using Oracle Health Clinical AI Agent, AtlantiCare providers saw improvements in patient engagement and higher provider satisfaction because they spent less time on manual documentation. On average, providers saw a 41% reduction in total documentation time, saving them 66 minutes per day, a two-month comparison study found.¹

 “In healthcare, administrative burdens often fall too heavily on caregivers and providers. Our job is to build smarter, more supportive systems that allow our teams to focus on what matters most and that’s caring for patients,” Charlton says.

Oracle Clinical AI Agent helped lessen the administrative burden with capabilities such as ambient listening to gather data and populate the EHR. For example, the AI agent can provide draft notes within a few minutes after a visit. It can propose follow-ups such as referrals for the provider to review and approve, and synchronize the information to patients’ individual medical records. The AI agent can also extract relevant data from patient notes to help automate medical coding requirements.

A key AtlantiCare goal is to do whatever is needed to overcome barriers to a healthy community. For example, it uses Oracle Clinical AI Agent to produce notes in multiple languages, helping its non-English speaking patients. “With Vision 2030, we've said we can no longer afford to partially solve the problems facing healthcare. We need to address the root causes that challenge health systems, so that we can move ahead of them and transform how care is delivered,” Charlton says.

¹Oracle compared documentation time across a two-month period of using Oracle Health Clinical AI Agent vs. Powerchart.