International, News

Cerner picks AWS as its preferred cloud and machine learning provider

At the 2019 Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent in Las Vegas, Cerner CEO and Chairman of the Board Brent Shafer announced the corporations plans with Amazon Web Services.

Cerner has selected AWS as its preferred cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) provider.

Shafer said to the audience “For 40 years, Cerner ushered in health care’s digital age by moving medical data from paper charts and manila folders into electronic health records. As we enter into a new era of digital transformation, our work with AWS will lead a wave of breakthrough innovations focused on making health care better and clinicians’ work easier.”

As part of the multi-year agreement, Cerner is working to migrate its core applications to AWS and is standardising its AI and ML workloads on AWS to create predictive technology. The Cerner Machine Learning Ecosystem (CMLE), a new platform will assist data scientists in building, deploying, monitoring, and managing ML models at scale. This work will help the company further uncover predictive and digital diagnostic insights that will offer earlier health interventions.

A Cerner client—one of the largest providers of post-acute health care in the U.S.—recently asked the company for help predicting the patients at risk of being re-admitted from a rehabilitation facility back to the hospital. By applying machine learning to historical data migrated to the AWS Cloud, Cerner created a model that helped the health care system reach the lowest re-admission rate in more than a decade and sent more patients directly from rehabilitation to their homes.

During his keynote, Shafer addressed a challenge many doctors face, the time it takes to document patient visits “The digitisation of health care has inadvertently caused an increase in documentation for doctors,” said Shafer. “Working with AWS will allow us to capture doctor-patient interaction and integrate it directly into the electronic workflow of the doctor. This new advancement will help doctors and providers spend less time filling out forms and more quality time with their patients.”

“We’re on the leading edge of healthcare’s cognitive age, making technology more relevant and data more actionable for health systems. Where we’re headed is taking the digital age to a new level to reduce costs, providing more insights into diseases, and giving clinicians back valuable time.”