Transforming healthcare: How AI agents are powering data-driven oncology care with PwC and Google Cloud

In the healthcare industry, data is crucial—not only for improving patient outcomes but also for advancing research, reporting, and driving business performance. However, healthcare data, from physician notes to clinical trial data, is often scattered across various systems, locked in silos, and stored in disparate formats. Consolidating all of this into a single, unified source can feel like a daunting challenge—especially considering the need for strict privacy and compliance regulations.

Faced with these complexities, PwC teamed with a leading healthcare provider to develop a solution that would not only enhance patient outcomes but also help drive business success. The project began in the oncology services division, which serves over 200,000 patients. We are excited to announce that this solution, a Google Cloud-based platform, enhanced with AI-powered agents, developed by PwC, is now live. This represents not just the future of healthcare but the future of work in action—where AI agents work hand-in-hand with clinicians to help streamline processes, save time, reduce administrative burdens, and make previously impossible tasks achievable.

The transformation journey

Step 1: Unifying data with a new platform and AI agents

Together, PwC and the healthcare provider created an innovative oncology data platform, leveraging Google Cloud, Vertex AI and Google's Healthcare Data Engine 2.0. This platform ingests oncology data and converts it into the FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) format, the industry standard for healthcare data.

What was once an impractical task due to resource constraints—creating a single, unified source from so much siloed data—has now become both possible and cost-effective, thanks in large part to PwC’s AI agents. Customized to meet the specific needs of healthcare, these AI agents extract and standardize unstructured data from sources such as electronic medical records, genomic reports, clinical notes, and lab results.

Additionally, PwC incorporated data governance measures to confirm compliance with healthcare regulations such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and CDISC (Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium). With a responsible AI approach, human oversight is integrated to confirm high-risk or high-value decisions are made by qualified professionals.

Step 2: Enhancing analytics and AI capabilities

With a unified, secure, and compliant data platform in place, the healthcare provider can now extract value from its data. The platform utilizes Google’s BigQuery and Looker for advanced data analytics, supporting value-based care, clinical trials, patient population health analysis, business performance reporting, and more.

PwC and the healthcare provider also integrated Vertex AI for AI-powered natural language processing (NLP) to perform deep searches and retrieve information from over 70 million records. Generative AI capabilities help identify patient trends, treatment patterns, potential candidates for clinical trials, and more.

Step 3: Scaling and innovating

Today, this healthcare provider can work more efficiently and make data-driven decisions with the help of this platform. Patients receive more personalized care, while researchers have access to more timely and complete data, accelerating scientific discoveries. The improved data fidelity also enables more effective clinical trial matching, connecting patients to the right studies faster.

Clinicians can now deliver more effective value-based care, leveraging insights that were previously difficult to access. As the platform is scalable, it is ready to support further data modernization efforts in other areas, including population health management and supply chain optimization.

The keys to success: Trust and collaboration

Trust has been essential to the success of this project. From the initial platform design to its execution, leaders from the healthcare provider, PwC, and Google Cloud worked closely together; putting in the time and effort to ensure buy-in from clinical, technical, and executive stakeholders. This high-touch, high-trust collaboration model positions the healthcare provider to continue spreading intelligent, data-driven healthcare throughout the organization.

The future of work: Scaling AI-powered transformation with PwC’s agent OS

The success of this AI-driven oncology platform helped inform a broader, scalable solution: PwC’s agent OS. Drawing from hands-on learnings, PwC’s agent OS was developed to help organizations accelerate the deployment of AI agents by up to 10x—without compromising on safety, quality or compliance—across various AI platforms.

Purpose-built for flexibility, PwC’s agent OS enables connected agents to work seamlessly across different AI agent provider platforms (e.g., Google Agentspace, Salesforce Agentforce, Oracle, Workday, etc.) and functions. In healthcare, this means agents can now collaborate across clinical, operational, and research domains—delivering intelligent automation that scales and adapts as needs evolve.

With built-in governance controls and visibility, PwC’s agent OS helps organizations manage AI deployment responsibly, maintaining trust while enabling innovation. For healthcare clients, it offers a proven, ready-to-deploy foundation that incorporates everything from responsible AI oversight to domain-specific models, making it easier than ever to modernize workflows, reduce administrative burden, and deliver better care—faster.

The same principles that drove success in oncology—collaboration, trust, and innovation—are now enabling a new wave of transformation across the industry, helping healthcare workers focus more on care and less on complexity.