Today, September 23, at the Oracle Health and Life Sciences Summit in Orlando, Florida, Seema Verma, EVP & GM of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, spoke with Dr. Mehmet Oz, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), who joined remotely to discuss AI in government.

Oz mentioned the FDA and how long its regulatory approval times are. This doesn’t match, he said, as companies have to release developments in months. He talked about the ACCESS (Advancing Chronic Care with Effective, Scalable Solutions) Model, explaining that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) and the new Office of Health Technology and Products (OHTP) built an ecosystem where tech companies sign a pledge to work with CMS. “The reason data doesn't flow in healthcare is because people want to tax it,” Oz remarked. “By unleashing the industry, we now have 800 companies, tech companies, who have signed to join the ecosystem, and then we started creating financial models for them to get paid.” He also noted opportunities to collaborate with the FDA to accelerate the process.

Industry collaboration reduced prior authorizations by double digits, Oz said, with digital adjudication and physician gold-card programs presented as key mechanisms.

On AI, Oz said it may be inflationary in the short term by increasing billing and clinical capacity, but potentially deflationary long term through accountable care and better clinical decision support. Oz said 50 percent of doctors now use AI as a decision-support tool. “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, whether it's finding new cures for diseases, identifying compounds that we should have thought of earlier, getting people to care faster, giving better decision support to clinicians, getting more transparency into the system.”