Brent Shafer, Chairman and CEO, Cerner
The ongoing global pandemic has underscored how important it is to have a complete picture and insights into patient care. With COVID-19 cases rising at an alarming rate across the globe, having access to real-time metrics has become more critical than ever to determine the availability of hospital beds, staffing, and medications. Placing a sharp focus on intelligence and interoperability, a leading company that is not only delivering masses of data where it needs to go regardless of its origination but also making it more useful to help solve the challenges faced by healthcare today is Cerner. Incepted in 1979, Cerner is a pioneering U.S. supplier of health care information technology solutions. The prominent company has been providing important insights and making clinical and operational decisions easier for more than 40 years. Today, it is using actionable data to support the work of health care providers across the globe.
“More than ever before, we have tools, technology, and innovations to fight this global pandemic. Whether it’s working with health systems from around the world to set up field hospitals, sharing data to help stop the spread, or delivering intelligence to better manage patients, equipment, or bed availability, we rushed to support the work of health care providers across the globe,” asserts Brent Shafer, chairman, and CEO of Cerner.
Reducing Physician Burnout
Physicians and clinicians often experience burnout and a loss of professional fulfillment. Especially, in the wake of the pandemic, these frontline health care workers are experiencing high rates of depression, and professional burnout. Cerner strives to reduce this burnout and increase clinician satisfaction. In fact, it has saved clinicians over 35,000 hours of documenting in the past year. It has also launched Cerner Learning Health Network SM – a network comprised of nationwide, heterogeneous health systems that transform data collection and application to support research regarding underlying illnesses, chronic conditions, treatments, lab results, clinical complications and ultimately improve outcomes and drive important medical decisions. Now it is helping to track the spread and surge of COVID-19. Cerner also offers Cerner Unite™ and Cerner Discover™, a portfolio of intelligence-integrated products to improve data quality, simplify data reconciliation and seamlessly integrate data-driven insights into clinician workflows – on any health platform.
“On average, doctors spend more than 16 minutes per patient in the EHR with only 15 minutes allotted for most patient appointments. Cerner is committed to giving more time back to doctors and nurses. Providers who have adopted the most recent technology have saved four million hours per year in the EHR. Cerner analysis shows that, if health organizations running Cerner platforms adopted the most recent updates and trained on the latest technology, together we could save our doctors and nurses an additional 13 million hours per year,” elucidates Shafer.
Dedicated to Enhance Patient’s Health Care Experience
Cerner provides a wide array of robust patient engagement tools to empower healthcare organizations to better engage and intervene with their patients at the right place and time. To place the consumer at the center of their health care journey, it offers Cerner Consumer Framework™, an open ecosystem designed to elevate the patient portal to a digital front door and digital practice. It also provides HealtheLifeSM, a web-based solution that enables interaction and engagement between health care organizations and people in their population, and HealtheLife: EngagementSM, an extension of HealtheLife, aimed at helping organizations maximize engagement and interaction with their population by providing additional tools and opportunities for users to understand their health. Besides this, to help increase access to care and help clinicians create happier, healthier patients, it has a suite of virtual health solutions that includes virtual visits, remote home, and mobile monitoring, and secure messaging.
“Our goal is to modernize each patient’s health care experience, making it easier for them to engage with their organization and care team members, strengthen patient loyalty and increase satisfaction,” opines Shafer.
Continues Shaping the Health Care of Tomorrow
At the onset of Covid-19, Cerner rapidly helped health systems and clinicians adjust to the overwhelming impact of the pandemic. Leveraging the potential of artificial intelligence, the Cerner Command Center™ dashboard was able to put the most critical pieces of information in one location. Today, it continues to support healthcare organizations by surfacing data that enables them to make informed decisions for better management of operations. By putting critical information at the fingertips of clinicians, researchers, and communities, Cerner is helping to resolve several issues that health care is facing in these unprecedented times.
“It’s our mission to relentlessly seek breakthrough innovation that will shape health care of tomorrow. And we believe that what we do doesn’t just impact health care – it impacts the world. This is why, more than ever, health care is too important to stay the same,” concludes Shafer.