On September 23, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis addressed attendees of the Oracle Health and Life Sciences Summit in Orlando. Introducing Governor Ron DeSantis, Seema Verma, EVP & GM of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, noted that Florida is a fast-growing state and ranks second in the nation for its share of the population over 65.

DeSantis spoke about Florida’s economy and the income that has moved to Florida since 2019. “We're spending less today than we did four years ago, even though we've gained population and even though we've continued to see inflation in the economy.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, DeSantis said schools remained open, and businesses were protected from local government intervention. DeSantis said there was a “hysterical perspective” from the medical and political elites. “People have lost more confidence in the medical establishment due to COVID than in any other event in my lifetime by a country mile, and the reason is because they were being told that a piece of cloth is necessary to put on a five-year-old's face and have them sit in kindergarten all day. There was no evidence to back that up.” People were putting politics and ideology ahead of what was evidence-based medicine, he said. Many of the medical institutions had draconian visitation policies, DeSantis said. This, he said, did incalculable damage to many people.

Regarding rural healthcare, DeSantis said more than 209 million has been awarded through the federal rural health transformation program. The focus, he said, is on workforce training, technological infrastructure, innovation, and access to care. The money is going to practical solutions such as mobile health units, remote patient monitoring, and advanced telehealth.

“We're also very much working with the Trump administration on combating Medicaid fraud in Florida,” DeSantis underscored. “We have established a new program to utilize technology to uncover sophisticated fraud schemes. A lot of this is artificial intelligence powered.” Additionally, he noted, “We've also directed our hospital administration agency to impose enrollment moratoriums on high-risk providers; we want to cut down on pay-and-chase models where fraudulent claims are paid first and then investigated years later."  Furthermore, he said, “We've also ordered a comprehensive statewide revalidation effort for all active Florida Medicaid unqualified, verified, and unqualified providers, and that's going to play a big role.”

On AI, DeSantis said that there is a lot of AI slop. “I’m not sure how much benefit that’s ultimately going to provide for society….On the more narrow applications of robotics, of military operations, and then of course medical, you have an opportunity to see some really positive advances.” There is a great deal of promise in targeted applications, he added. “There's also going to be a need to make sure that individuals are protected, that their data has integrity, and that they do maintain an amount of medical and personal privacy.”