Oracle summit unveils new oncology, revenue cycle AI tools
Between the Mickey Mouse pretzels and the AI safety talk, Oracle’s summit had range.
Morning Brew Inc, Photos: Unsplash
Between the Mickey Mouse pretzels and the AI safety talk, Oracle’s summit had range.
Morning Brew Inc, Photos: Unsplash
The 2026 Oracle Health and Life Sciences Summit, held from Sept. 22 to 24 near Orlando, FL, highlighted AI’s potential promises—and pitfalls.
Seema Verma, EVP and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, led an opening keynote in which she introduced new AI products and shared the importance of building AI with strong security protections, governance, and human-in-the-loop protocols. She said that healthcare worker shortages, an aging population, and “unsustainable” high healthcare costs give the industry “no choice but to change.”
“Healthcare doesn’t just need AI; it needs AI built specifically for healthcare,” Verma said. “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.”
Her comments about guardrails and trust came after months of reports of rogue AI agents hacking computer systems and warnings from researchers that developers are moving too quickly toward creating life-threatening “superintelligence.”
Oracle—the second-largest electronic health record (EHR) vendor behind Epic—has heavily invested in AI and borrowed billions of dollars to build a controversial New Mexico data center.
New products. During the conference, Oracle announced new health AI features including several in revenue cycle management, as well as a new oncology EHR featuring an AI-powered assistant for oncologists. The company also demoed its new AI-powered patient portal, which was released on Aug. 12.
Interoperability—the ability for data to be easily shared between different healthcare systems and software providers—was a hot topic.
Oracle has been expanding an AI data platform that can aggregate information from different EHRs and data sources, even if the data comes from a platform run by one of Oracle’s competitors, Verma said in her keynote.
Verma specifically touted the company’s Oracle Life Sciences Data Intelligence Solution, a data platform that the company says contains over 122 million de-identified patient medical records with data ranging from genomic information to claims and prescriptions.
The platform allows customers to combine their own data with Oracle’s data library. Its AI-powered features assist researchers with tasks, including clinical trial recruitment and evidence generation.
“These are not isolated product announcements; they are pieces of a much larger transformation across payers, providers, pharma, and for all patients,” said Verma, who led the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) from 2017 to 2021.
The good and the bad. While breaks between sessions offered attendees a chance to play on an Oracle- and Red Bull-branded racing simulator and chomp on Mickey Mouse-shaped soft pretzels, the conference largely focused on AI’s potential benefits.
Still, concerns lingered.
This month, CEOs of frontier AI model companies endorsed a slowdown of AI development and the addition of third-party safety evaluators. On Sept. 23, they addressed the United Nations Security Council about AI’s potential “risk to humanity.”
During a Sept. 23 oncology keynote panel, after being asked what guardrails should be put in place for the technology, Thomas Laur, CEO of precision health biotech DNAnexus, said this is a “critical, super important topic that has kept us all captivated over the summer and probably awake at night over the past couple of weeks, with what we’re hearing on the news.”
Within oncology, he said, it’s important to use racially and ethnically diverse data to develop and train AI models in order to avoid creating models that exacerbate health inequities. He added that “responsible AI” is transparent about exactly how it came to its answer, and that humans should ultimately be making all decisions.
CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, who joined remotely from Washington, DC, on Sept. 23 to participate in a keynote on AI and government, praised AI’s potential to find cures, identify new compounds, speed up care, and give decision support and transparency to clinicians. He also gave a blunt assessment of the technology’s risk.
“It is possible that AI destroys humanity, but I guarantee you, we will lose lives if we don’t use AI in the day-to-day trench warfare of fighting disease in America,” Oz said.
