Healthcare is high stakes. When people go to the hospital, it’s often during some of the most difficult moments of their lives. When someone’s health is on the line — even during a routine visit — patients want capable, compassionate clinicians prepared to deliver high quality care and offer sound guidance. Unfortunately, this experience often eludes too many patients due to barriers to care and an overburdened clinical workforce.
The challenges that shape this reality are well-understood: workforce shortages and administrative and cognitive overload burn out physicians, poor documentation undermines organizational financial performance, rising costs and economic headwinds keep patients from receiving the care they need. The list goes on.
What has been less understood — until recently — is how the healthcare industry might carve a path to a future where physicians can look up from their screens and truly see their patients. Today, such a future is coming into focus, and the possibilities are bringing fresh optimism to conversations about healthcare’s perennial challenges.
A vision of this future took center stage at the 2025 Oracle Health and Life Sciences Summit. Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager with Oracle Health and Life Sciences, outlined the company’s plan to help shape healthcare’s future and the potential for AI to transform the entire health ecosystem. With a suite of AI-powered solutions, Oracle aims to fix long-standing problems including unburdening clinicians, supporting better care delivery and democratizing clinical expertise.
Ms. Verma described the potential results of these efforts as “nothing short of revolutionary.”
Off stage, conversations among health system leaders rooted Ms. Verma’s future-focused comments in present-day transformations.
How Banner Health slows down to ‘move faster’ on AI
On site at the Oracle Health and Life Sciences Summit in Orlando, Fla., Alan Weiss, MD, senior vice president for clinical advancement at Phoenix-based Banner Health, discussed how his system had pursued AI as both a technological and cultural initiative. His team was tasked with making significant reductions in cognitive and administrative burden for physicians.
“We want to reduce the administrative and cognitive burden on providers by about 50% in five years,” Dr. Weiss told Becker’s. “AI tools are one of the big ways we’re trying to do that.”
Before Banner Health could truly embrace AI, Dr. Weiss’ team had to address the “non-AI work” first. This entailed internally optimizing existing EHR functions and automating routine processes before layering on more advanced tools.
Banner then turned its attention to AI. Early pilots included chart summarization technology that’s condensed hours of manual record review into minutes and ambient listening systems that’s captured clinical conversations and generated notes, freeing physicians to focus on their patients. Each new AI application underwent a rigorous evaluation process before deployment.
Today about 1,700 ambulatory physicians are using the Oracle Health Clinical AI Agent and will extend to emergency department and inpatient centers in early January. “Feedback has been extremely positive with a reduction in both Banner Health’s physician documentation time and time spent after hours at the keyboard,” said Dr. Weiss.
Banner expects to expand the use of AI beyond documentation into diagnostics and clinical pattern recognition, especially in radiology, and revenue cycle automation.
How Hudson Physicians brought the ‘doctor back’
While Banner Health worked at enterprise scale, tech success at Hudson Physicians — a 60-plus provider independent practice in Wisconsin — demonstrated how similar principles could reshape smaller organizations.
Ryan McFarland, MD, a family medicine physician and shareholder, was among the first to beta test the Oracle Health Clinical AI Agent. His group’s motivation for integrating the technology included staffing shortfalls, documentation delays and widespread frustration among physicians who were spending hours each night finishing charts.
“We had providers charting late at night from home, which was a big pain point,” Dr. McFarland told Becker’s. “Now that’s pretty much gone away.”
Hudson Physicians had long relied on human scribes to support documentation but sustaining that model became increasingly difficult. When Oracle invited the group to join its beta program, Dr. McFarland became one of the first physicians to use the technology and help shape its development.
“We helped build, troubleshoot and create what it is now,” he said.
The AI agent acted as an ambient scribe and workflow assistant, listening to patient encounters, drafting clinical notes and capturing relevant orders for physician approval. Its integration into the Oracle EHR eliminated the manual copy-and-paste steps that had slowed earlier digital tools. Operational performance improved. Billing tasks were executed in a timelier fashion and revenue cycle efficiency increased.
“Having this documentation supported billing and helped decrease denials,” Dr. McFarland said.
The technology eliminated late-night charting, streamlined documentation and improved the physician experience, which yielded benefits for patients also.
“Patients were getting their doctor back,” Dr. McFarland said. “Their doctor wasn’t busy typing away on the computer.”
In the future, Dr. McFarland believes Oracle’s AI-enabled EHR tools will allow physicians to retrieve key patient details more efficiently. Currently, the process of extracting those details manually is labor intensive and prone to error.
“This new EHR is going to help physicians find a patient’s history quickly and accurately,” he said. “It is going to support better, more efficient care.”
AI and the ‘joy of medicine’
Across organizations large and small, AI is exhibiting the potential to restore physician’s time, focus and purpose.
At Banner Health, AI had complemented a deliberate effort to redesign clinician workflows and evaluate technology through the lens of supporting a better patient and clinician experience. At Hudson Physicians, similar principles guided a community-based practice and its providers toward operational improvement and emotional renewal.
As AI is embraced as a practical tool and no longer considered a distant ambition, it can help restore what intricate administrative tasks and cumbersome technology platforms have too often stripped away from the healthcare experience — the cognitive space to look up, connect and practice what Banner’s Dr. Weiss called “the joy of medicine.”
