St. Joseph's Health Took AI to the Hardest Place First
In Paterson, N.J., the health system is using artificial intelligence to close care gaps that have persisted for decades
Paterson, N.J., is one of the most hospital-dense cities in America. Drive three miles in any direction and there is another hospital.
For the roughly 158,000 residents who call it home, that density should mean better access to care. In practice, it has meant something more complicated: patient records scattered across competing systems, care gaps that go undetected, and a population that is already at a disadvantage, nearly one in five residents is uninsured, and the community is majority Hispanic and Black, groups that bear a disproportionate burden of cardiovascular disease.
That fragmentation has a price.
As CVS Health discovered after spending $69 billion trying to integrate American healthcare, disconnected records drive up costs. A 2025 preprint study found that adults caught in highly fragmented care spent nearly 38 times more annually than those whose care was coordinated.
Read more: CVS Spent $69 Billion Trying to Fix Healthcare. Now It's Trying Again
For New Jersey, St. Joseph's Health is the largest provider of charity care, and it sits at the center of this challenge.
For years, its care teams operated across hospitals and outpatient centers with patient data spread across disconnected EHR and payer systems. "Our IT systems have gone from being very bifurcated, very disparate to now being unified," said Beth Kushner, St. Joseph's chief medical information officer. That unification came through a partnership with Oracle Health.
What Clinicians Couldn't See
St. Joseph's implemented Oracle Health’s Quality Management, Care Coordination Intelligence, and AI Data Platform to bring its patient data together.
Because patients in northern New Jersey routinely seek care across multiple systems, St. Joseph's clinicians were frequently working with an incomplete picture. A patient managing congestive heart failure might have records at two or three different institutions, and without a unified view, identifying who needed intervention was largely guesswork.
The Oracle Health platform aims to consolidate data from across EHR and payer systems into a single longitudinal record for each patient.
The company claims clinicians have gained the ability to see care gaps in real time and act on them before minor concerns become costly hospitalizations. They say the results in cardiac care have been measurable: St. Joseph's has maintained a congestive heart failure readmission rate below the market average for three consecutive years.
Kushner has been convincing physicians skeptical of new technology. "I told one doctor: You did organic chemistry. You're going to figure this out," she said. "It's one big button. You're going to be fine."
With a unified patient record in place, AI capabilities embedded in the Oracle Health platform can now surface relevant clinical information to physicians at the point of care, in context, without requiring them to hunt for it.
The platform's intelligence layer is designed to work within existing clinical workflows rather than add to them.
St. Joseph's is also among a very small group of hospitals pushing that intelligence further.
Through its affiliation with Trinity Health, the system is one of only three hospitals in the United States currently piloting AI-powered EKG technology. The technology can analyze thousands of data points from a single EKG to predict rhythm disturbances, measure heart function, and assess a patient's likelihood of developing atrial fibrillation: conditions that often go undetected until they become emergencies.
St. Joseph's is pairing that capability with handheld echo devices that deliver real-time cardiac imaging at the bedside.
The devices allow clinicians to determine whether a patient is in congestive heart failure up to 30 minutes earlier than traditional methods, compressing the time to treatment and shortening hospital stays. This is vital for a patient population already at elevated cardiovascular risk.
"This technology is going to bring those patients to where they will get the best care," said Dr. Russell Silverman, a cardiologist at St. Joseph's Health.