Connecting the Mind and Body: How Oracle Is Using AI to Unify Mental and Physical Health Care

Over the past decade, the prevalence of mental health conditions among Americans has grown dramatically. These conditions, especially depressive disorders, now rival leading physical chronic diseases among adults.

Today, we better understand the inextricable link between mental and physical health—how depression, anxiety, and substance-use disorders worsen chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease, and how pain or illness can fuel mental distress.

Yet these two dimensions of health are still too often treated separately, managed through different systems, and financed through disconnected models of care. The result: duplicated services, missed warning signs, and patients who fall through the cracks.

At a recent mental health conference I attended in Indiana, presenters highlighted the toll of mental illness on individuals, families, and workplaces and explored how technology can help address these problems. Mental and substance-use disorders are now major causes of absenteeism, poor productivity, and job loss. Employers were urged to adopt wellness strategies that recognize the need for behavioral health support for employees and dependents alike.

Unfortunately, efforts to meet this demand are constrained by a worsening shortage of mental health professionals. Roughly 122 million Americans—about one-third of the population—live in designated “Mental Health Professional Shortage Areas.” The average wait time for an appointment is 48 days, often longer.

At Oracle, we believe we can harness the power of data and AI to address the growing demand for behavioral health services by breaking down existing data silos and supporting front line providers with better tools that allow them to see more patients and give them more attention by reducing the administrative burdens they currently face in their practices every day.

Oracle Health behavioral health solutions integrate behavioral health workflows, documentation, and analytics with the same data environment used for physical health. Behavioral health data no longer sits apart—it lives within the EHR, giving providers a comprehensive view of each patient.

Oracle Health Care Coordination Intelligence uses unified information to help prioritize patient care and close care gaps. AI-generated summaries delivered through the EHR suggest issues to address based on each patient’s history and care priorities, including behavioral health needs.

Meanwhile, Oracle Health Quality Management connects patient information, workflows, and population trends across systems. Supported quality measures can include behavioral health metrics—such as how many patients complete the PHQ-9 for depression or the GAD-7 for anxiety.

AI is also transforming how we detect and respond to mental health needs. We are working on AI agents that can analyze large, diverse datasets—from clinical notes to wearable data—to identify subtle indicators of risk long before a crisis occurs. These insights can guide early outreach and personalized interventions, helping clinicians manage high caseloads more effectively.

Importantly, Oracle’s approach keeps a human in the loop. AI augments—but never replaces—clinical judgment. In an era of widening workforce gaps, AI can amplify human capacity, extend reach, and ensure empathy remains at the heart of care.

It can also ease administrative burdens. The Oracle Health Clinical AI Agent can transcribe and summarize therapy sessions, automatically generating draft notes for provider review—returning valuable time to clinicians and their patients.

And we expect our new suite of AI-powered applications to eventually increase automation in the time consuming and often frustrating processes of prior authorization, eligibility and coverage determination, medical coding, and denial management. With the ability to embed AI agents that are built to be payer-rules aware, we plan to enable providers to apply payer-specific rules to increase clean submissions at every stage of the process. This has the potential to increase submission accuracy and significantly reduce the time providers must spend on documentation and enable faster claims processing. 

True progress in mental health won’t come from technology alone. But as patient needs grow and provider capacity lags, we believe AI can help extend the reach of care, reduce clinician burden, and unify the mind and body in pursuit of true whole-person health.