Cerner, in collaboration with Duke Clinical Research Institute, will launch the Cerner Learning Health Network, which aims to automate data collection from multiple sources, including electronic health records.

WHY IT MATTERS
Cerner and Duke say the initiative will enable clinicians to more easily and efficiently gain health insights and guide care. In addition, it aims to give medical researchers faster and easier access to data that can help them innovate new approaches to health.

The pilot of Cerner Learning Health Networks seeks to improve clinical research registries. DCRI's Learning Registry will make use of Cerner technology to explore and assess proven therapies for chronic cardiovascular disease.

It will analyze de-identified patient data from the University of Missouri Health Care and Ascension Seton, in partnership with Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin, with the goal of finding the most effective treatment options, officials say.

The hope is for  Cerner Learning Health Network to have significant applications in life sciences, pharmaceuticals and healthcare at large, automating and streamlining health data for clinical research.

Cerner says its clients will be able to use its HealtheDataLab – which builds upon its HealtheIntent population health technology – with the network to aggregate de-identified patient data from both Cerner and non-Cerner EHRs.

Researchers can use HealtheDataLab to take de-identified patient data, transform the data sets into research-ready formats and build complex models and algorithms to give providers more information for care decisions and enable more effective and cost-efficient treatments.

THE LARGER TREND
The value proposition of research networks such as this one is obvious, and providers such as Boston Children's have taken advantage of similar efforts to enable easier access to potentially transformative data.

For its part, Cerner continues to build out its offerings for healthcare clients and life sciences researchers alike. It recently announced a new partnership with AWS to expand its cloud infrastructure, for instance. And we've shown how the cloud is enabling big innovation for pharma, life sciences and other healthcare researchers.

ON THE RECORD
"Current models for clinical research and registries that rely on mostly manual chart abstraction are too expensive, too slow and too small to continue," explained Dr. Ann Marie Navar, principal investigator and cardiovascular prevention researcher, the DCRI. "We have to figure out better ways to leverage existing electronic resources to transform how we do clinical research."

"The EHR is an obvious starting point and HealtheIntent has all the right ingredients," she added. "It incorporates data from multiple EHRs, can link to national mortality and claims databases and helps us to harness the power and information security of cloud computing."

"Collaborating with the DCRI on the Learning Registry to pilot the Cerner Learning Health Network is an exciting step forward in improving the health of those living with chronic cardiovascular disease," said Art Glasgow, senior vice president, Strategic Growth at Cerner. "We have an opportunity to use clinical research and data-driven insights to develop an intelligent network of health systems that can truly improve health experiences and outcomes for patients."