The spotlight is on Dr. Hants Williams, Stony Brook University, United States.

Stony Brook University, located in Stony Brook, a hamlet on the North Shore of Long Island, New York, offers 300 undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs. More than 25,800 students follow degree courses in colleges and schools distributed across the Long Island campuses at Stony Brook and Southampton and a campus in Manhattan. Stony Brook Medicine operates Long Island’s premier academic medical center, encompassing five health sciences schools, four hospitals, and 200 community-based healthcare settings. The Stony Brook School of Health Professions has 1,200 students enrolled in 15 healthcare-related credit and non-credit programs, both clinical and non-clinical. The school’s 2024-2028 strategic plan outlines its mission to transform lives through healthcare education, workforce development and engagement, research, and cultivating resources and partnerships.

Dr. Hants Williams teaches within the Applied Health Informatics masters of science program at Stony Brook, a specialty field in which technology is used to store, retrieve, and analyze health information. The objective is to educate students in data management technologies of interest to large hospital systems and digital health companies.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Behavioral Science and Psychology from San Jose State University, a bachelor’s degree in Nursing from San Francisco State University, and a PhD in Nursing-Behavioral Science from Duke University, NC. He completed his postdoctoral training at the University of Maryland, Baltimore.

Recognizing the nationwide strategic role of Oracle Health, the health industry business unit born of Oracle’s 2021 $28 billion acquisition of Cerner, Dr. Williams decided to adopt Oracle Academy resources to support his classes within the Applied Health Informatics program.

Oracle Academy: What parts of the Oracle Academy curriculum do you teach?

Hants Williams: I am using the database and cloud curriculum, integrating those resources into my two core courses: Introduction to the Cloud for Health Informaticists and Introduction to Data Science for Health Informaticists.

In the world of healthcare, it is vital to understand databases and SQL syntax, which is where Oracle Academy’s Database Foundations and Database Programming with SQL are so helpful. And to understand cloud computing, I teach using the Oracle Academy Cloud Program. There is widespread and growing adoption of Oracle technology in healthcare, including Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Oracle Academy: As a trained nurse originally, how did you get into teaching?

Hants Williams: As a registered nurse, I got exposed to clinical care delivery and from there became interested in chronic disease management, focusing on pain research: how do we better manage pain through non-opioid intervention? That got me working with different data analysis technologies, starting with SaaS and R. Then, during my post-doctoral in pain genetics, I realized that if I could become more expert in the tooling from a data perspective, I could leverage both my digital skills and nursing knowledge to find better ways of coupling technology with actual problems in healthcare. After a spell consulting to health-tech startups, I started one of my own, focusing on gait analysis — trying to understand how better to remotely measure the progress of someone with a hip or knee surgery without having to bring them back to an outpatient center. That got me more exposed to different cloud technologies and how to deploy them in modern medicine to improve patient outcomes.

Long story short: Stony Brook University offered me the chance to combine my nursing and technology skills sets by preparing students to address some of the most challenging data problems facing hospital systems, payers, and digital health companies.

Oracle Academy: And Oracle Cloud?

Hants Williams: Historically, Stony Brook has been cloud agnostic, teaching all platforms in line with the trend in organizations to take a hybrid approach. Before Oracle Academy, we exposed students to other providers’ clouds. It may be that one cloud is better in AI and another in managed database technologies, yet from a teaching perspective, I believe there are more similarities than there are differences.

But now with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) we have access to something extremely potent, especially in healthcare. Oracle’s acquisition of Cerner, a major provider of digital systems to hospital systems, now merged into Oracle Health, is going to have a huge impact on patient outcomes. We at Stony Brook, ourselves a long-time user of Cerner systems, are making the strategic bet that a lot more hospitals systems are going to adopt OCI moving forward. By educating students in OCI, we will be making them a lot more competitive in healthcare careers.

Oracle Academy: And we note you are also using Oracle APEX.

Hants Williams: That’s right. Before exposing my cohort to the full blown OCI, I introduce them to cloud concepts using Oracle APEX. It’s a super entry point, a simplified view without bells and whistles, and does not require any configuration. APEX provides them with a stepping stone for understanding cloud storage, cloud compute, and cloud databases. By leveraging Oracle APEX and OCI, we introduce students to cloud-based technologies essential for future health IT technologists, particularly in clinical settings.

Oracle Academy: How did you come to select Oracle Academy resources?

Hants Williams: In my job, I am always looking for new tools and technologies that are relevant to career paths and provide competitive edge in a tough job market. A little while back I asked myself if there were any certificate programs coming from the very creators of the technology driving healthcare. Browsing the Oracle site, I landed on the SQL developer track that leads to the Oracle Database SQL Certified Associate credential. I noted that Oracle Academy curriculum and resources came free of charge. Looking further, I saw there was professional certification for OCI too.

I contacted Oracle Academy and pretty soon Stony Brook became an Institutional member. Doing so has helped us to close the gap between academia and the health sciences industry.

Oracle Academy: That’s powerful. How did you roll out the courses?

Hants Williams: It began as a pilot for a small group of students doing an internship in a healthcare company, New York’s largest not-for-profit health insurer, which has Oracle databases. Since they needed some additional training, I assigned them the Oracle Academy database/SQL and cloud content previously mentioned.

That went well and so I introduced the courses to a cohort of 40 students who take the two courses Introduction to the Cloud for Health Informaticists and Introduction to Data Science for Health Informaticists. These are courses offered under the Hyflex educational model, where students get to decide, on class-by-class basis, whether they come into the classroom or attend online.

This is because many of them are already working, as care providers, respiratory therapists, social workers, or registered nurses. In any case even those coming from an undergraduate university can, with Hyflex, choose how they want to consume the information. Incidentally, my classes provide a fast track to graduation, 15 months versus the traditional two years.

Oracle Academy: Are you planning to expand the scope?

Hants Williams: Yes. Feedback to date is strongly positive and if this continues its forward momentum, as it looks like, then I will be offering these courses to other parts of the university. For instance, in the School of Medicine we have a Department of Biomedical Informatics where resident physicians, already graduated from an accredited medical school, are engaged in population health management. These people follow a course called Health Data Insights which requires them to have some insight into Oracle SQL syntax along with data analytics, and machine learning skills. Oracle Academy is a perfect fit. That’s where I’m thinking about taking it next.

Oracle Academy: Every success with that! What type of practical exercises do you give the health informaticists?

Hants Williams: I am leveraging students to be more collaborative between our academic and our hospital side. I want them to learn these systems and rapidly apply them. There are many opportunities for helping our medicines IT department that serves our three hospitals on Long Island. The idea is to teach them technology skills and have them very quickly translate what they learn to places that can use them in real-life. It’s why the program is called ‘Applied’ Health Informatics. This way they can get to use their skills in realistic settings before waiting until they get a job offer. Naturally, as mentioned above, we have internships too.

Oracle Academy: You came across Oracle Academy while looking for certification… are you promoting certification too?

Hants Williams: Yes, and I am encouraging my cohort to take the Oracle Certified Associate level database developer and cloud exams and later to study for the Oracle Certified Professional exams run by Oracle University. I am not mandating this, but my personal perspective is that there are a lot of junk certificates out there — which I don’t trust because they are compiled by professors like me — and we are not the ones who create and own the technology. Employers care more about certificates that come from the company that built the technology; that’s where the value lies. And so, my goal is to have my students go take the professional exams and then leverage those certificates to be more competitive in the market.

Oracle Academy: At the outset you mentioned Oracle Health. How do you see its impact in the industry?

Hants Williams: Clearly Oracle Health, following the acquisition of Cerner, is a major player in the U.S. health technology industry, and globally for that matter. It combines all the technology created by Oracle into one health-tech oriented organization. Apart from supplying hospitals systems with database and cloud solutions, Oracle Health plays a key role in the development of a unified medical record, being one of six collaborators in the U.S. government Trust Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA).

Oracle Academy: Impressive. And what are your activities outside of teaching?

Hants Williams: I’m a big outdoor person and my fun stuff is running, cycling, and rock climbing — these are my go-to sports. They are all individualistic pursuits, but I need them as a form of catharsis after so much work in front of a keyboard or whiteboard. If you want to live long you ought to stay active, have healthy relationships, eat right, and get good sleep. To prevent 90% of all adverse conditions, you need to do those four things, then you are off to the races. That’s me with my nursing hat on!

Alongside being outside, getting sunlight and being active, I enjoy watching all the big cycling stage races, the Tour de France, Giro d'Italia, and so on, plus rock climbing events. This year I managed to do all three of my enjoyments during two weeks in the Dolomites with my wife. And we had lots of good food too!

Back home I have a weekend place on Long Island, with the Atlantic Ocean in my back yard. I wake up 2 kilometers from a beach community, run down to the coast and back again for breakfast.

Oracle Academy: And what is your overriding takeaway from using Oracle Academy resources?

Hants Williams: I would say to Oracle Academy to keep on providing free content for educational purposes. That content and surrounding resources help me to equip students with the technical skills needed to manage and analyze health data effectively. The benefits of Oracle Academy are tremendous to universities like ours, rendering learning technology more affordable and decreasing the costs of education. As teachers we are sick and tired of textbooks, stale information that students have to pay a hundred dollars for. What Oracle Academy does is not only supply free resources, but also provides us with a consistent source of the truth, constantly updated and supported by very detailed, student-friendly documentation. All of this comes from creator of the software, and that is of extremely high value to us.

The perspectives/opinions expressed by Dr. Hants Williams do not necessarily represent those of Stony Brook University.

Thank you, Dr. Hants Williams, for your passion for Oracle Academy and for preparing your students to make a positive impact.