India can offer tremendous IP to healthcare AI: Oracle

Oracle Corporation expects India to play a major role in developing artificial intelligence (AI)-based applications for the global healthcare sector. In an interview, Mike Sicilia, executive vice president of Oracle’s global business units, said the wide diversity of healthcare data emerging from India could help improve healthcare AI research.

Sicilia was speaking on the sidelines of Oracle Cloudworld, the company’s yearly event held in Las Vegas this week, where chairman and CTO, Larry Ellison, said healthcare technology is one of the key areas in Oracle’s roadmap going forward.

During his keynote, Ellison said the company is looking to build electronic healthcare records (EHR) that are not only made available on a national scale, but can be used to share healthcare data worldwide.

“I think India is uniquely positioned, given its AI and ML focus, to contribute a tremendous amount of intellectual property (IP) to digital care plans. In other words, the computer will assist the doctor, nurse etc. to determine the best care plan for a patient by rapidly simulating all the different inputs that you receive from a patient,” Sicilia said, noting that the country has a “preponderance” of health tech startups specializing in AI and ML.

He said India is a massive market for healthcare and technology in general, and Oracle expects a rapid growth in partnerships from Indian startups as it continues to expand its data centres and applications base in the country. “I think what we can do is take a lot of these startups and help them scale,” he added.

Further, Sicilia said that India has the “greatest diversity of healthcare in the world”, which comes from top-tier hospitals, rural clinics and even an influx of expats who come for elective and critical procedures to the country. “The population diversity in India is not unique to citizens of the country; people are coming to India for all kinds of care. It’s a fantastic data set. AI and ML require data, and you’ve got a lot of data in India,” he said. “That’s why I’m very bullish on India. The sheer size and diversity of the data set.”

According to Sicilia, a high degree of fragmentation of systems for healthcare and continued usage of legacy systems isn’t unique to India either. This has often been cited as a key issue in the creation of the Indian government’s National Health Stack, which is meant to be a nationally shared digital infrastructure for health data, which will be available to public and private sectors, and central and state governments.

“I don’t think the fact that India runs legacy systems for healthcare is unique. I’ve worked with governments throughout the world, and there are a lot of legacy health systems out there. Health was one of the first areas to digitize many years ago. The problem is that they got stuck in a rut. They didn’t make the leap to the next generation of applications,” Sicilia said, adding that Oracle is starting to see more opportunities in India through its discussions with governments and other stakeholders.

Oracle, based in Austin, Texas, completed this June the $28 billion purchase of Cerner Corporation, an American healthcare information services provider. Cerner also has a presence in India, and has digitized 135 facilities in the country so far, including 47 primary health centres, according to a blog post on the company’s website.

“I don’t think we can fix worldwide healthcare without a data sharing methodology and philosophy. Data is the key to better outcomes for patients,” said Sicilia.