EvidenceCare's CEO, Bo Bartholomew, sits down with Seema Verma, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, at the Nashville Healthcare Sessions conference to discuss how health system leaders should approach AI strategy, data infrastructure, and safety as adoption accelerates. Seema talks about her career-long focus on execution over strategy, why an AI strategy must start with a data strategy, and the risks of "bolt-on" point solutions that handle only one task at a time. She also discusses AI governance, transparency, and traceability in clinical AI, why hallucinations often stem from a lack of real-time data access, and how health systems should prioritize partners in a crowded vendor market. The conversation closes with a look at Oracle's growing presence in Nashville. Key Takeaways: Data Strategy Before AI Strategy: Why AI is only as good as the data it can access in real time, and why organizations need to unify data across the EHR, ERP, supply chain, and revenue cycle before layering on AI tools. The Problem with Point Solutions: How bolt-on AI tools that handle only one task at a time increase cybersecurity risk and fail to deliver full task completion, and why embedding AI into the core application tends to work best. Safety, Transparency, and Traceability: Why clinical AI recommendations need a clear "why" behind them, and how human-in-the-loop decision-making remains essential. AI Governance: How organizations should think about who gets to build AI models, what they're allowed to touch, how they're tested, and how disagreements between humans and AI get resolved. Why AI Hallucinates: How outdated database architecture and lack of real-time data access - not the model itself - often drive hallucinations, and why moving data between systems carries its own risks. Picking Partners: Why cybersecurity posture and platform flexibility should guide how health systems prioritize among vendors. Seema Verma Bio: Seema Verma is Executive Vice President and General Manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, leading the effort to bridge clinical research and clinical care to improve patient outcomes and care delivery. She serves on the Board of Directors for Lifestance and the Board of Councilors for the University of Southern California, and is an advisor to Tapestry Health and a member of the Eskenazi Community Board and the Nashville Health Care Council. She previously served as a board advisor for Monogram Health and as a senior advisor to private equity firms TPG and Cressey & Co., including on the Cressey Distinguished Executive Committee and the boards of Wellsky, Lumeris, Lyric Health, and ShiftKey. In 2017, Verma was nominated by President Trump to serve as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on a bipartisan basis, becoming one of the longest-serving CMS administrators in history. She oversaw a $1.4 trillion budget, coverage for 145 million beneficiaries, more than 6,000 employees, and over 100,000 contractors, and led the agency's strategic plan to advance value-based care, interoperability, drug pricing, telehealth, remote care, and the COVID response. Verma was named Modern Healthcare's #1 most influential person in healthcare in 2019, and her work has been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Health Affairs, Modern Healthcare, Newsweek, CNN, USA Today, and STAT. The Better Care Podcast is produced by EvidenceCare. Sign up for email updates when new episodes are released. --- Follow Seema Verma LinkedIn Follow Oracle LinkedIn X Follow EvidenceCare LinkedIn X
