Amazon Web Services Partners With Cerner EHR

Cerner, a major electronic health record (EHR) vendor, has developed a strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud computing provider.

• As part of this partnership, Cerner is naming AWS its preferred cloud provider.
• Cerner’s goal is to leverage AWS’s sizable portfolio of cloud services to bolster health data interoperability and portability. Improving data portability is in line with the approach to EHR as a longitudinal health record, which touches a variety of systems and providers.
• Cerner collaborated with AWS before. The vendor leveraged AWS and Amazon SageMaker to enable researchers who use Cerner’s EHR platform to query anonymized patient data to build complex models and algorithms that led to earlier detection of congestive heart failure.
• The partnership is part of a long-term effort to shift healthcare data to the cloud.

Source: Cerner at SoftwareReviews, August 15, 2019

Our Take

An expanded partnership between Cerner and AWS has been expected in recent years. Cerner has been looking to improve its information interoperability capabilities, while AWS has been investing in health IT tools and also achieving HIPAA compliance for several of its offerings. Amazon expressly stated that they have positioned AWS “to speed the development of new therapies, personalize the patient experience, and improve health outcomes”.

Despite these developments, AWS’ efforts have for the most part flown under the radar of decision makers in healthcare institutions. Those who are not in developer positions infrequently pay attention to the networking and cloud computing space. Therefore, when AWS collaborates with Cerner, one of the largest EHR vendors, AWS gets exposure to thousands of healthcare institutions. It would not be surprising if Amazon’s cloud computing competitors like Microsoft Azure are expected to establish partnerships with other EHR vendors in the coming quarters.

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