ORLANDO, Fla.—Healthcare is entering an AI era, and the industry needs a fundamentally different architecture designed for AI from the start, Oracle Health executives said Wednesday.
The software giant is betting that it can leverage its foundational database expertise, cloud computing tech, data access and agentic AI capabilities to win in the healthcare market.
"Healthcare doesn't just need AI; it needs AI built specifically for healthcare," Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, said during a keynote presentation at the company's healthcare-focused conference.
"Healthcare requires AI that is trustworthy, with humans in control and always in the driver's seat. AI that puts patient safety first, with strong guardrails, outputs that are transparent, traceable, and continuously monitored," she said.
Oracle Health is rapidly building out AI-powered tools and platform expansions across clinical, financial, back-office, payer, pharma and life sciences workflows. The company claims it is now delivering production-ready AI tools, live deployments and measurable results.
Healthcare organizations are under pressure with rising demand for care, workforce shortages, tight operating margins and rising costs. At the same time, one of healthcare's biggest challenges is disconnected data and workflows along with siloed systems. AI-native platforms can fundamentally redesign the healthcare system rather than merely automate it, Verma asserted.
"If we simply layer AI onto fragmented systems, disconnected data, manual processes and technology architectures built for another era, we risk amplifying the discord rather than creating harmony. AI changes what the underlying technology has to do. It can't just be a system of record anymore," she said.
AI can only be effective if it has access to the full picture across clinical, financial, administrative and research systems, Verma noted.
"We're building the capabilities for an AI-driven healthcare future, including excellent cloud infrastructure, the Oracle database, which provides an AI-ready data foundation, bringing together all the data needed to power AI at scale, best-in-class financial supply chain and HR applications, clinical trial systems, real-world data, administrative and claim systems repairs, and new AI embedded EHRs [electronic health records] across all clinical specialties, revenue cycle, patient portal, pharmacy, and laboratory systems-all of it with AI embedded," Verma said during the keynote.
Both Oracle and its rival Epic Systems are racing to embed generative and agentic AI directly into EHR systems.
Verma makes the distinction that Oracle Health rebuilt its EHR system and broader healthcare platform around an AI-first architecture rather than "bolting on" AI solutions to existing technology stacks.
A year ago, Oracle Health launched its next-gen, AI-native EHR, built from the ground up on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and equipped with the latest AI and voice capabilities. It marked the first major upgrade to Oracle's EHR solutions since the company bought Cerner in a $28 billion deal in June 2022. Oracle Health also offers new AI modules for healthcare organizations using its existing Millennium EHR.
Oracle Health continues to expand specialty-specific workflows. This week it launched an AI-powered oncology EHR on top of this next-gen ambulatory framework. Later this year, the company plans to begin testing new modules for pharmacy, radiology, behavioral health and primary care, executives said.
But Oracle Health's ambitions go beyond EHRs and ambient AI. The company is investing in building out AI solutions, including agentic AI, across the breadth of healthcare and life sciences, including clinical, financial, back-office administration, payers, medtech, pharma and clinical research.
"If you think about everything that we're offering for healthcare, most companies will have a point solution around the electronic health record, or the rev cycle, or something for patients, or something for ERP or supply chain. Oracle is really the breadth of the entire solution, and we also bring a platform, so it doesn't really matter what EHR you're using, what clinical trial system that you're using. We bring it on this platform so we can help you bring your data together and make it ready for AI, no matter what you're using," she told Fierce Healthcare in an interview.
The company is building out a suite of AI agents to handle administrative tasks, including a clinical AI agent for physicians as well as agents for inpatient nursing workflows and to tackle medical coding. Oracle executives pointed to early results from providers that are using the clinical AI agents, such as a 33% reduction in charge lag days, a 12% drop in primary claim generation days and a $5 payment increase per encounter.
Since launching nearly two years ago, Oracle Health's clinical note AI tools have saved physicians more than 400,000 hours across health organizations in the U.S., the company reported.
This week, the company announced that it deployed domain-specific AI agents within its Life Sciences Data Intelligence Platform for researchers, including a clinical trial matching agent.
The company also announced on Wednesday AI agents specifically engineered for revenue cycle management. Oracle Health says it is shifting AI upstream to front- and middle-office operations with new AI tools for prior authorization, clinical document quality integrity, charge capture and integrity and appeals management.
"Oracle Health AI agents are already reducing documentation burden, increasing accurate coding and helping clinicians spend more time with patients. We're expanding those capabilities with new AI agents supporting nursing, discharge planning, care pathways, care coordination, prior authorization, and many other clinical workflows," Verma said during the keynote.
New AI agents will also reduce the manual work still embedded in clinical care coordination, billing plans and contract management, she noted.
Verma made a clear distinction between automation and transformation using AI. "The goal is not to automate every step of a broken process," she said, adding that Oracle's objective is not "faster bureaucracy" but "less bureaucracy."
In August, the company debuted a revamped digital platform for patients with an AI assistant that can explain medical records in plain language and assist with scheduling appointments. The patient portal is "EHR agnostic," executives said.
"These are not isolated product announcements. They are pieces of a much larger transformation across payers, providers, pharma, and for all patients," she said during the keynote.
Mike Sicilia, Oracle CEO, said the company is building an "end-to-end healthcare automation platform" and insisted that "no other vendor in the space is investing in healthcare at the rate and pace that Oracle is."
The company also is developing a state-of-the-art transport vehicle, called Oracle Ambulance, with always-connected patient telemetry and embedded AI to help close information gaps between first responders and emergency departments, Sicilia noted.
Verma contends that solving healthcare's toughest challenges requires addressing the entire ecosystem and that requires an end-to-end approach that brings together providers, payers, patients, clinical trials, data infrastructure and applications. "There really isn't anyone else that's doing it end to end. We're a hyperscaler. We have the data centers. We have the database. We have the infrastructure side, we have all of these applications, and we have applications for every part of the ecosystem. And, we're working on things like interoperability and the pain points between all of them," she told Fierce Healthcare during the interview.
As AI innovation accelerates, concerns about its risks are growing, and some leaders are calling for a slower pace of development.
With a focus on trustworthy AI, Oracle Health and Life Sciences established a formal governance framework which provides a structured review process for all AI features prior to their release, Verma noted. The framework is grounded in a set of core principles that guide how AI systems are designed, deployed, governed and continuously monitored.
Investments in AI and data should ultimately benefit both providers and patients, Verma said, noting that patients do not care about the tech infrastructure powering their healthcare experiences.
"Patients will not applaud the architecture. They won't celebrate interoperability. They won't care which cloud processed the data or which AI agent generated the insight. But they will remember that the diagnosis came sooner, that their doctor already knew their story, that the right treatment reached them at the right time, that expertise could find them wherever they lived, that they spent less time navigating the system and more time living their lives behind the scenes," she told the audience during the keynote.