Cerner has announced a collaboration with cloud giant Amazon Web Services, with the aim of accelerating healthcare innovation. As part of the agreement, Cerner is naming AWS its preferred cloud provider.

The two companies expect this expanded relationship to power enhanced clinical experiences, increase efficiencies by lowering operational burdens for healthcare organizations, and accelerate artificial intelligence, machine learning and other innovations, ultimately advancing better patient health outcomes.

WHY IT MATTERS
Increasingly, consumers are expecting high-quality, accessible healthcare balanced with affordable costs and increased transparency. The collaboration with AWS is one way Cerner plans to ready itself for this changing healthcare landscape.

As Cerner celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2019, it's also looking to the future. Its collaboration with AWS is part of that, and will help provide consumers with more power by enabling greater access to their own healthcare information than ever before, the company said.

Leveraging AWS’s portfolio of cloud services, Cerner expects to make advances in health system interoperability and data portability, advances the company said would ensure the best health outcomes across the continuum of care.

As part of the new agreement, AWS and Cerner have committed to an overall strategic framework that will allow for joint teams to drive what the two companies hope is accelerated innovation and enable increased speed to market, they said.

THE LARGER TREND
The use of machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence is trending in healthcare today. Cerner said that as a result of the new collaboration, its clients should expect a new velocity of advancements while experiencing a lower operational and financial burden. For example, through its collaboration with the Amazon ML Solutions Lab, Cerner developed new machine learning capabilities for clients and with greater scale.

AWS’s machine learning capabilities, including voice recognition and natural language processing technologies, will have an immediate impact on the Cerner technology roadmap and could help the two companies redefine experiences in healthcare, Cerner said.

ON THE RECORD
"Our work with Amazon and AWS is a key component for the next chapter at Cerner," said Brent Shafer, chairman and CEO of Cerner. "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 healthcare."

"Healthcare 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 Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS. "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."

Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: bill.siwicki@himssmedia.com

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