Becker's Hospital Review

29 CIO / HEALTH IT The AWS-Cerner collaboration 1 year in: What they've accomplished and where they're headed By Laura Dyrda C erner and Amazon Web Services inked an agreement in July 2019 aimed at improving efficiency and lowering costs. e organizations initially planned to modernize Cerner plat- forms and soware development processes to focus on innovation and accelerate time to market. Cerner also planned to move its HealtheIn- tent platform to Amazon Web Services during the first half of 2020. Within a year of signing the deal, the EHR giant has engaged with AWS across its core platforms and is currently in different phases of cloud enablement. e HealtheIntent population health platform has mostly migrated to AWS cloud without affecting client performance, according to Cerner Senior Vice President of Cloud Strategy Dan De- vers. Some of Cerner's CareAware solutions are also running in the AWS cloud, including the version responding to the pandemic, and more versions are expected to follow. "We're also developing our virtual scribe solution by leveraging Am- azon Transcribe Medical to help reduce the documentation burden," said Mr. Devers. "e technology will be designed to use voice recog- nition technology to capture and understand medically relevant in- formation from a conversation between physicians and patients, and ultimately produce documentation as a byproduct of care, giving the physicians more time to interact directly with the patient instead of manually entering data in the EHR." During the pandemic, Cerner worked with AWS to rapidly deploy the Cerner Command Center dashboard to clients on the AWS cloud, which provided real-time data and predictive analytics for health sys- tems to monitor critical resources, including available beds and equip- ment. Health systems with hospitals across multiple states could use the dashboard to see bed utilization and identify where they would need to deploy staff and resources next. Cerner also provided select U.S. health systems and academic research centers with complimentary access to de-identified COVID-19 patient data. Eligible healthcare researchers gained free access to Cerner's COVID-19 dataset, which supports epidemiological studies, clinical trials and medical treatments related to the coronavirus. e company has approved 40 proposals to date. "e de-identified patient data secured and stored on Cerner Heal- theDataLab, powered by AWS, will include COVID-19 related de- mographics to help track spread and surge, underlying illness and chronic conditions, treatments, lab results and clinical complica- tions and outcomes that could help drive important medical deci- sions," said Mr. Devers. Cerner and AWS plan to continue adding intelligence to workflows with the goal of reducing cognitive load on healthcare teams and le- veraging the cloud to provide advanced levels of interoperability and care coordination. Mr. Devers said the organizations are focused on engaging consumers more deeply with cloud technologies as well. "We are also investing heavily to bring data science at scale to health- care with our Cerner Machine Learning Ecosystem," said Mr. Devers. "e end-to-end approach lets us automate maintenance and deploy- ment of machine learning models into workflow. is automation lets us efficiently support the full lifecycle of large catalogs of models cre- ated by Cerner, our clients or third parties." Finally, the work is advancing Cerner's strategic shi from an EHR company to a digital platform company, which CEO Brent Shafer laid out in a January 2019 presentation at the 37th Annual JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. Cerner has formed a seam- less architecture across its systems for common data formation and developed an open platform on the cloud to make the data foundation available to clients and third-party developers through a set of appli- cation programming interfaces. "e collaboration is allowing Cerner to innovate more rapidly and in- troduce new capabilities to our clients more quickly and efficiently to meet their clinical, financial and operational needs," said Mr. Devers. n University Health System begins $170M Epic EHR implementation By Laura Dyrda S an Antonio-based University Health System decid- ed to move forward with its Epic EHR implementa- tion after a two-month delay, according to the San Antonio Express-News. The health system initially delayed implementation due to the pandemic, but launched the implementation July 11 as COVID-19 cases were surging in Texas. The $170 million implementation moved the health system, UHS clinics and Bexar County Jail to Epic's cloud-based EHR. Epic conducted a virtual EHR rollout to support the health system's nearly 10,000 employees, who have un- dergone training on the system. "Over the past couple of months, our staff and physicians have invested many hours to be trained on Epic. They need to put what they've learned into practice now while the information is still fresh," UHS spokesperson Leni Kirk- man told the San Antonio Express-News in early July. While the health system didn't expect to undergo an implementation during a pandemic when its board ap- proved the project in October 2018, Ms. Kirkman said transitioning to Epic will help the system stay abreast of new COVID-19 treatment recommendations. n

• Cover