Cerner strengthens ties with Amazon Web Services to seek tech gains

Cerner has a history of collaborating with Amazon Web Services and has teamed with the company again, while naming AWS as its preferred cloud vendor.

Cerner now is working with AWS on getting more benefits from digitized platforms to give patients easier access to their own heath information, but that’s only part of a broad range of initiatives that could accelerate artificial intelligence, machine learning, interoperability, data portability and improved patient outcomes.

“We are joining forces with Amazon and AWS to fuel our strategy of making Cerner more agile to deliver faster, more scalable and secure solutions,” says Brent Shafer, chairman and CEO at Cerner.

The company is promising providers that they soon will see new advancements, such as next-generation machine learning capabilties with greater scale, along with new health prediction software, while at the same time reducing operational and financial burdens.

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Under the joint agreement, Cerner and Amazon will use joint teams to accelerate innovation and speed products to market. Since CEO Shafer joined Cerner, the company has sought to increase its use of strategic relationships.


William Feaster, MD, chief health information officer at Children’s Hospital of Orange County in California, says the organization has reaped benefits from the Cerner HealtheIntent platform for many years, improving care, and now he’s getting more benefits from Amazon Web Services.

“Transforming the 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 Children’s Hospital of Orange County,” Feaster notes.

Working with AWS, Cerner also has built a new lab to enable researchers to take de-identified patient data, transform data sets into research-ready formats, and build models and algorithms to give providers more data to make better informed decisions.

“We live in a connected world and should work together to solve the quadruple aim of healthcare,” Cerner CEO Shafer concludes. “We’re looking forward to tapping into Amazon’s expertise to further help Cerner improve patient satisfaction and drive our client success.”