Cerner, Amazon Partner to Advance Health IT Innovation In the Cloud
– As part of a new strategic collaboration, Cerner named Amazon Web Services (AWS) its preferred cloud provider and will leverage Amazon’s global infrastructure to drive health IT innovation.
The partnership will help to improve clinical efficiency, lower operational budgets for healthcare organizations, and foster increased use of artificial intelligence (AI,) machine learning, and other means of development.
“Our work with Amazon and AWS is a key component for the next chapter at Cerner,” said Cerner Chairman and CEO Brent Shafer.
“As we work to transform Cerner, we are joining forces with Amazon and AWS to help fuel our strategy of making Cerner more agile in order to deliver faster, more scalable and secure solutions to clients and patients. We expect this collaboration with Amazon and AWS will enable a new wave of innovation that can lead and transform the future of health care,” Shafer continued.
By collaborating with AWS, Cerner hopes to help provide consumers with greater access to their own health care information.
Cerner will use AWS’s complete portfolio of cloud services to improve interoperability and data portability for users. Cerner clients can expect lower operational and financial burden, along with a boost in health IT capabilities.
“Health care and life sciences companies trust AWS with their mission-critical workloads, knowing that they can securely and easily invent new ways to interact with their patient populations and quickly scale the approaches that are effective,” said AWS CEO Andy Jassy.
“AWS is providing Cerner with the broadest portfolio of innovative analytics and machine learning services that will empower them to gain new clinical and business insights that have the potential to transform patient care delivery,” Jassy continued.
AWS and Cerner worked together to build Cerner HealtheDataLab, which allows researchers to use de-identified patient health data for research. HealtheDataLab organizes data into data sets in research-ready formats and enables users to build complex models and algorithms for informed patient decisions.
“Our health system has reaped the benefits of Cerner’s HealtheIntent® platform for many years, improving the care we provide to our patients,” said William Feaster, MD, chief health information officer, Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC).
“Transforming the HealtheIntent data and loading it on AWS has allowed us to leverage big data and sophisticated data science tools, along with the elastic compute environment on AWS. This has accelerated our data science work at CHOC,” added Feaster.
AWS and Cerner have also committed to a strategic framework that will allow joint teams to increase innovation and get health IT solutions and products to market faster.
“Announcing AWS as our preferred cloud provider is an important move for Cerner. We live in a connected world and should work together to solve the quadruple aim of health care — improving the health of individuals and populations while reducing costs and increasing clinician satisfaction,” said Shafer.
“We’re looking forward to tapping into Amazon’s expertise to further help Cerner improve patient satisfaction and drive our client success around the globe,” Shafer concluded.
Rumors of a partnership between Amazon and Cerner have been swirling since 2017.
At the time, sources close to the matter said the partnership would initially center on Cerner’s population health management platform, HealtheIntent. By 2017, AWS had already taken steps to ensure its services met HIPAA requirements to adequately safeguard protected health information (PHI).
In the summer of 2017, Amazon started a secret skunkworks lab to improve upon EHRs, telemedicine, and other health IT tools. The health IT team was called 1492 and focused primarily on boost interoperability.
This official partnership with Cerner is the latest in a string of moves Amazon made to enter the health IT sector.