AiThority Interview with Seema Verma, EVP and GM, Oracle Health and Life Sciences

Seema Verma, EVP and GM, Oracle Health and Life Sciences, in this Q&A talks about strategic use of AI and technology to enhance healthcare efficiency, security, and patient care through innovations and collaborative partnerships and more about transforming healthcare by improving data interoperability.

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Hi Seema, welcome to our AiThority Interview series; walk us through your journey at Oracle and your learnings from being in the B2B SaaS industry

After spending four years as chief administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the largest payer in the world, I joined Oracle in April 2023 as senior vice president and GM of Oracle Life Sciences. In January 2024, I also became EVP and GM of Oracle Health, one of the largest EHR providers in the world, which marked a strategic shift for the company as we further strengthen the connection between these industries for the betterment of patients.

I’m about eight months into my new role, and there is still so much to be done as we continue to evolve our offerings, but I’m energized about the path forward. The opportunity to create a more effective, efficient, and secure healthcare system is immense – but achievable. What is unique about Oracle’s approach is that we are not just dipping our toe in the water. We have a breadth and depth of technology – the enterprise applications and cloud infrastructure, as well as the clinical trial applications and the EHR – that enables us to address the entirety of the industry’s challenges. We’re delivering leading technology and AI coupled with a long history of understanding how healthcare works to help health organizations worldwide reduce costs, increase efficiency, and improve patient care.

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Oracle is known for its autonomous database. How is this technology being utilized today within the health and life sciences sector to improve data security?

Oracle is the only healthcare technology provider that uses autonomous databases and operating systems to automatically patch and minimize any threat. At a time when cybercriminals are getting more sophisticated, this is game changing for the health and life sciences sector.

Given the impact that hacks can have on the delivery of care, cybersecurity should really be considered a subset of patient safety and receive similar levels of attention and investment.

The Oracle Autonomous Database is the first automated data management solution that helps eliminate cybersecurity’s biggest weakness – human error and delay. With our solution, healthcare organizations can take advantage of reliable security and compliance for sensitive data.

This includes leveraging AI and machine learning to transform operational reporting and get deeper insights into patients’ needs, helping enable quicker resolutions to critical health problems.

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How is Oracle leveraging AI to enhance interoperability and streamline care coordination among different healthcare providers?

Allowing patient data to flow with the patient through their healthcare journey, no matter where they are, is a priority for Oracle. To this end, we are making significant investments in interoperability and AI and doing so in a way that supports security and safety to create efficiency and cut costs in the healthcare system. With our complete suite for hospital automation, patient engagement systems, and everything in between, we are bringing all of these elements together: clinical, patient, enterprise, and data.

We’re embedding AI across all of these applications. This provides hospitals and life science companies with more intelligence and helps automate entire processes, enabling hospital systems to be more efficient, more secure, and more effective. Recent product innovations we’ve rolled out that are leveraging AI to help connect the healthcare ecosystem include:

• Oracle Health Data Intelligence, which stands at the forefront of the next generation of healthcare interoperability – capable of integrating data from over 2,000 sources and generating insights that are infused directly into the provider’s workflow to help close care gaps and improve quality measures.
• Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant, which takes advantage of generative AI to participate in patient appointments, capture patient-clinician interaction details, and draft structured clinical notes that doctors can quickly review and approve or edit. The offering dramatically reduces the amount of time clinicians spend interacting with the EHR and increases the amount of time they are focusing on patients. This is a game-changer that is helping to bring the joy back to practicing medicine for our customers.

Can you share some insights on the collaborative partnerships Oracle has formed to drive innovation in the healthcare sector?

We are committed to working with companies across the healthcare and life sciences industries to make healthcare more efficient, less expensive, and more effective. In some cases that means delivering new and deeply integrated APIs so customers can extract more value from our technology. For example, NetHealth (formerly known as Tissue Analytics), is focused on improving wound care documentation workflows. Its technology integrates advanced wound management and photo analysis directly within our EHR.

In other cases, we are enabling our partners to easily take advantage of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to deploy and scale their innovative healthcare offerings and services. For example, Imagene runs its AI inference on OCI, providing rapid AI-based molecular profiling from biopsy images to help transform cancer diagnosis and care.

We also join forces with like-minded organizations to expand our capabilities in accelerated computing and AI, so our customers and partners have access to the solutions they need to help solve the industry’s most complex and critical healthcare challenges. This includes enhancing our collaboration with Cohere to develop powerful, generative AI services for organizations worldwide. With Oracle’s comprehensive portfolio of cloud applications, data management expertise, and best-in-class AI infrastructure, combined with Cohere’s state-of-the-art large language models, we are deploying new models for healthcare and embedding generative AI throughout our healthcare-specific applications. We also team with NVIDIA to power healthcare solutions with accelerated computing in the cloud to help enable breakthroughs in research and advance the future of medicine.

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What are the key areas where AI can significantly impact drug pricing and pharmaceutical research, and how is Oracle’s product team contributing to these areas with new enhancements?

We expect AI to play a huge role in the life sciences industry. Obviously, the ability to recognize patterns and analyze vast amounts of data quickly is critical pharmaceutical research. The advances in AI are going to make it easier to pinpoint potential therapies faster and with greater accuracy. In turn, this will help companies to bring products to market more quickly and cost effectively. We are really just scratching the surface in terms of the impact AI will have on this industry. For example, we recently announced new capabilities in our AI-supported Oracle Argus and Safety One Intake solutions to help life science organizations meet evolving regulatory requirements and the rising volume of adverse event case workloads. And we are working to harness the full potential of AI to break down the silos between clinical care and research.

With your extensive experience in healthcare policy, how does Oracle ensure its AI solutions comply with stringent healthcare regulations and standards?

Policy experts around the world are grappling with how to regulate AI. It’s our job to work with our customers and comply with the regulations, which will vary by industry. With personal health information, there will be more conversations between medical providers and governments about how AI is applied. The requirements will likely be more extensive for healthcare than for something like menu management in the restaurant business. We will adjust the technology to meet those requirements and to make the technology easy to apply, even in highly regulated industries.

Before we conclude, can you talk about the future initiatives or advancements we can expect from Oracle in the healthcare and life sciences sector and how these efforts will continue to shape the landscape of healthcare technology?

So much of our work at Oracle is focused on putting patients first and supporting providers and caregivers by reducing the burden of tedious, manual administrative tasks that often overwhelm them and divert their time away from patients. This focus will continue to shape the future direction of our innovations and solutions across Oracle Health and Life Sciences.

The challenges facing our industry are vast and complex, but it’s also an incredibly exciting time. It’s a moment ripe for radical transformation that can propel us toward a genuinely value-based and more innovative healthcare system – the kind of healthcare system that we all want for ourselves, our families, and our communities. One where providers are measured based on the clinical outcomes they achieve and the cost of those results. Where teams of providers are encouraged to keep patients well rather than waiting for them to become sick. Where we connect clinical research to clinical care to get solutions to expedite solutions where none existed.

We have the technology to make this happen. We can create a healthcare system where we reduce the cost of administration, and those dollars can be reinvested into delivering cutting-edge treatments, improving care quality and accessibility and the health of the population. Seeing the work that Oracle is doing and the innovation that is coming from our team, I’ve never been more optimistic about the industry.

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