Disney might be proving the world’s most famous investor wrong.

Last year, Warren Buffett, “The Oracle of Omaha,” told CNBC’s Becky Quick he had no faith in the business of streaming video.

“Streaming … it’s not really a very good business,” Buffett said on April 12, 2023. “The shareholders really haven’t done that great over time.”

Buffett wasn’t lying. Legacy media companies such as Comcast’s NBCUniversal, Disney, Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery have all underperformed the S&P 500 since Jan. 1, 2022, largely due to billions of dollars lost while launching subscription streaming services.

But Disney’s quarterly earnings results, released Thursday, indicate streaming is about to become a much better business.

A combination of pulling back on content spending and steadily increasing Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ subscribers hasn’t just turned streaming into a profitable business, it’s actually turned streaming into an even better business than traditional TV, according to Disney Chief Financial Officer Hugh Johnston.

For Disney’s fiscal 2025, streaming will generate enough operating income to offset the parallel decline in operating income from linear TV, Johnston said in an interview.

Disney projects entertainment direct-to-consumer operating income will increase by about $875 million next year over fiscal year 2024. That would put the division at over $1 billion in operating income for the coming fiscal year.

“I think we’re well-positioned if [consumers] decide to stay in linear for longer, and I think we’re well-positioned if they decide to move over to the streaming side,” Johnston said during Disney’s earnings conference call.

Those results are borne out in Disney’s earnings. Disney’s combined streaming businesses improved their profitability in the company’s fiscal fourth quarter, posting operating income of $321 million. For the year, Disney’s entertainment streaming platforms (Disney+ and Hulu) made $143 million in operating income. Last year, the entertainment platforms lost $2.5 billion.

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. 

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.  

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 doctors no 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.”

Oracle on Monday announced it intends to join a new federally-backed medical network that will make it easier for clinics, hospitals and insurance companies to share patients’ data.

The network, called the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, or TEFCA, launched in December. Oracle, which acquired the medical records giant Cerner for $28 billion in 2022, is the latest major vendor to support TEFCA, joining its chief rival Epic Systems.

Oracle needs to be approved to join TEFCA, but its interest in doing so helps to bolster the nascent network’s credibility. It also suggests that TEFCA may succeed in ushering in a new standard for data-sharing practices across the health-care industry.

Sharing medical records between different hospitals, clinics and health-care organizations is a notoriously complex process. Health-care data is stored in a variety of formats across dozens of different vendors, making it difficult for doctors and other providers to easily access all the relevant data about their patients.

“This is just a natural next step,” Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, told CNBC in an interview. “We are not into information blocking. We don’t have that reputation.”

Oracle’s competitor, Epic, has long been accused of dragging its feet around interoperability efforts, and Oracle has not been afraid to call the company out. In a May blog post, Ken Glueck, executive vice president at Oracle, wrote, “Everyone in the industry understands that Epic’s CEO Judy Faulkner is the single biggest obstacle to EHR [electronic health record] interoperability.”

Epic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Several companies and organizations have previously tried to streamline health-care information exchange, but TEFCA was designed to help bring all of these players together on a national scale. The network’s ultimate goal is to finally standardize the legal and technical requirements for sharing patients’ data.

The main groups that participate in health-data exchanges through TEFCA are called qualified health information networks, or QHINs. These networks volunteer to take part – they are not paid – and they have to go through a two-step approval process to ensure that they are eligible and have the necessary technical infrastructure. 

Oracle said Monday that it will begin the process to become a QHIN. Seven QHINs, including Epic, are live within TEFCA now.