When Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences took the stage to kick off the Oracle Health and Life Sciences Summit, she set the tone for the days ahead: artificial intelligence is no longer on the horizon. It’s here, and it’s reshaping industries.

“This year’s theme is AI in action, and that’s because AI is changing the world, and Oracle is at the center of this transformation,” said Ms. Verma during her keynote presentation. “For us, AI isn’t a distant promise for tomorrow. It’s here. It’s real and a force today that will define the future in every industry. Artificial intelligence is upending business practices and stands as a strategic imperative for unlocking massive productivity gains. That imperative means building organizations where AI is fully integrated into core operations to amplify human performance.”

AI has the potential to transform the healthcare ecosystem, fixing longstanding problems and addressing the unprecedented convergence of challenges including workforce shortages, access to care, and financial strain. Oracle built its platform to help healthcare organizations unlock their full potential enterprisewide, said Ms. Verma, and it’s capable of collecting every piece of authorized data safely and securely to provide the foundation for more coordinated care.

Oracle has taken a unique approach to integrating AI into the broader healthcare platform. The company announced plans to embed OpenAI technology into the Oracle Health Patient Portal for more conversational AI so patients can ask questions about their medical notes, educate themselves on their condition and create relevant follow-up questions to their clinicians. The EHR is powered by AI and voice-first, so the ambient technology listens to the conversation and pose the right billing process, lab, medication, payer coverage and clinical trials; it identifies care gaps and pitches the next best actions.

But not all EHR companies are leveraging AI in the same way.

“We’re all hearing that some EHR companies are saying AI, but don’t be fooled, because not all AI products are created equally and there are a few major factors that differentiate Oracle’s AI approach,” said Ms. Verma. “First, Oracle’s AI isn’t bolted on, it’s built in. It’s like having GPS built into your car versus having a device that you used to clip on your dashboard.”

Ms. Verma also noted Oracle’s semantic database was built specifically for AI, which requires a technology capable of understanding many types of data.

“The Oracle semantic database gives us a foundation, not just from clinical data, but also coverage rules, coding, research, treatment guidelines and anything else that our customers have,” she said. “The Oracle differentiator is that our database allows the AI to work off the live, evergreen data, and that’s really critical because we all know that medicine and healthcare are changing every day.”

When new data comes into the system, Oracle’s AI agents automatically adjust so they don’t need to retrain their models. Oracle has also placed its knowledge graph on top of its database to capture the relationship between datapoints.

“This is Oracle’s secret sauce. This is what separates us from our competitors,” said Ms. Verma. “Our knowledge graph provides the critical layer of context for the data, mapping its relationships across the different domains, diagnosing, class variations, procedures and payers. This Knowledge Graph is how AI knows that a heart attack and myocardial infarction are the same thing. It knows that the diabetes is connected to a hemoglobin A1c collaborative and this web of relationships creates a unified platform for an army of AI agents, not just three agents with cute little names.”

Oracle’s AI agents can answer queries across a wide range of data sources and are paired with Frontier AI’s reasoning capabilities to understand instructions and draw inferences across the data. Humans still need to approve recommendations, but once the agents get approval, they can fill out prior authorization requests, send prescription and lab orders, and do billing. It also shows its work.

“Oracle AI explains where every decision came from and cites the source of every recommendation,” said Ms. Verma. “Unfortunately, what we see from our competitors, is the AI trained on old data frozen in time, and this AI repeats the mistakes of the past, which means it’s taking historical inaccuracies, biases, racial biases, gender biases, and presenting them as truth. It keeps doctors and patients in the dark about the latest cures and scientific advances, and moreover their AI is static. There’s no ability to adapt to change, whether it be codes or new therapies. In healthcare, that’s a big problem.”

Without the right context and frequently updated information, AI makes mistakes and hallucinates. Old data and unreliability hinders clinician trust and patient care.

“Oracle’s AI is superior, designed to see the truth. The semantic knowledge graph was built from the ground up by Oracle, not a bolt-on to holder in our technology,” said Ms. Verma. “Our competitors are taking that approach, and that’s an epic mistake. For AI to enable impactful action, it must be embedded. It’s why we’ve been investing in this model since day one.”

The AI data platform powers Oracle’s advanced agents and allows customers to build their own agents for organizational use. The company’s complete product suite addresses the needs of patients, providers, payers, partners, public health and researchers with the goal of providing a more connected network.

“All of this runs on the most innovative and powerful AI Cloud infrastructure in the world; every critical ingredient required to ignite AI to transform healthcare,” said Ms. Verma. “But the AI is only as good as the data it deals with and in healthcare, data is both our burden and our potential salvation.”

Healthcare providers are sometimes downing in data without clear organization; clinicians have to sift through long drop-down menus or duplicate records and disorganized files to develop treatment plans. Other times, clinicians don’t have enough data to make the right decisions. Other times there are shelves filled with expired drugs while the one critical drug needed has run out.

When data isn’t organized and shared between providers, care stalls and outcomes worsen. Early disease warning signs are missed and patients may not know about life-saving clinical trials. Payers lack the full clinical context to make coverage decisions, which delays care and frustrates clinicians. Healthcare becomes more expensive when patients don’t have access to quality, coordinated and timely care.

“To put AI in action, to truly solve these problems, we must first heal our relationship with data and that’s why at Oracle, we believe data interoperability isn’t a feature; it’s the foundation and it’s why we’re in the final stages of becoming a qualified health information network,” said Ms. Verma. “It’s why we built the Oracle Health Connection hub to create a national interoperability network partnered with military-grade cyber defenses, and it’s why, last year, we released our clinical data so payers and providers exchange data seamlessly.”

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