Cerner Partners with Amazon for AI in Health Care

Cerner Corporation announced a multi-faceted, strategiccollaboration with Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, toaccelerate health care innovation across the globe. As part of this agreement,Cerner is naming AWS its preferred cloud provider. This expanded relationshipis expected to power enhanced clinical experiences, increase efficiencies bylowering operational burdens for health care organizations and accelerateArtificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and other cutting-edgeinnovations thereby advancing better patient health outcomes.

“Our work with Amazon and AWS is a key component for thenext chapter at Cerner,” said Brent Shafer, chairman and CEO, Cerner. “As we workto transform Cerner, we are joining forces with Amazon and AWS to help fuel ourstrategy of making Cerner more agile in order to deliver faster, more scalableand secure solutions to clients and patients. We expect this collaboration withAmazon and AWS will enable a new wave of innovation that can lead and transformthe future of health care.”

Leveraging AWS’s broad and deep portfolio of cloud services,Cerner expects to usher in a new era of health system interoperability and dataportability to ensure the best health outcomes across the continuum of care.Cerner clients should expect a new velocity of advancements while experiencinga lower operational and financial burden. For example, through its existingcollaboration with the Amazon ML Solutions Lab, Cerner has quickly developednew ML capabilities for clients and with greater scale. Cerner will continue toadvance its health prediction capabilities to uncover important and potentiallylife-saving insights within trusted-source, digital health data. Cerner’songoing work with AWS, and use of Amazon SageMaker, has allowed researchers toquery anonymized patient data to build complex models and algorithms that ledto earlier detection of congestive heart failure. AWS’s ML capabilities,including voice recognition and natural language processing technologies, willhave an immediate impact on the Cerner technology roadmap and help to redefineexperiences in health care.

Earlier this year, Cerner announced a renewed commitment torelentlessly focus on clients’ success, whether it’s a large health system, acommunity hospital or a consumer having a better experience or outcome. Thepower of AWS’s global infrastructure and breadth and depth of services, coupledwith Cerner’s health care technology acumen and source for data can bringsignificant benefits to Cerner clients. With AWS, Cerner HealtheDataLab wasbuilt and has allowed researchers to take de-identified patient data, transformthe data sets into research-ready formats and build complex models andalgorithms to give providers more information to make more informed patientdecisions.

“Our health system has reaped the benefits of Cerner’sHealtheIntent platform for many years, improving the care we provide to ourpatients,” said Dr. William Feaster, chief health information officer, Children’sHospital of Orange County (CHOC). “Transforming the HealtheIntent data andloading it on AWS has allowed us to leverage big data and sophisticated datascience tools, along with the elastic compute environment on AWS. This hasaccelerated our data science work at CHOC.”

As part of the agreement, AWS and Cerner have committed toan overall strategic framework that will allow for joint teams to driveaccelerated innovation and enable increased speed-to-market. Since Shafer’sarrival to Cerner, the company has moved down a path of strategic relationshipsthat could change health care.

“Announcing AWS as our preferred cloud provider is animportant move for Cerner. We live in a connected world and should worktogether to solve the quadruple aim of health care — improving the health ofindividuals and populations while reducing costs and increasing cliniciansatisfaction,” said Shafer. “We’re looking forward to tapping into Amazon’sexpertise to further help Cerner improve patient satisfaction and drive ourclient success around the globe."