Feinberg’s First Public Appearance spotlighted the patient experience and a call to action to eliminate the noise in healthcare
During the opening keynote at Cerner Health Conference, Cerner’s new President and CEO, David Feinberg, M.D., expressed the need to improve the usability of health records to help patients avoid unnecessary tests and medications, enable nurses and doctors to eliminate errors and predict what’s to come to improve the health of communities around the world.
“Healthcare technology needs to be reliable, understandable, complementary – we all must work to address and eliminate the noise in healthcare,” Feinberg told thousands of caregivers, innovators and other healthcare professionals during his first keynote address. “In the last few years, we’ve seen amazing medical breakthroughs – smart pills that remind users they’ve already taken their medication, AI to detect lung cancer more accurately and vaccinations developed and deployed in months instead of years. But still, the noise remains.”
Julie Louise Gerberding, M.D., M.P.H., chief patient officer and executive vice president, population health and sustainability at Merck, and member of Cerner’s board of directors, kicked off the conference introducing Feinberg.
“Since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cerner has offered many innovations that have rapidly and effectively addressed the unique problems of patients and providers,” Gerberding said. “This kind of innovation requires leadership. Dr. Feinberg has the requisite health technology knowledge and a successful track record to help achieve new solutions and improve patient care and outcomes.”
During his keynote, Feinberg noted Gartner recently acknowledged Cerner’s work to tackle clinician burnout by highlighting a key tool in this effort, Essential Clinical Datasets. Now scaled to many healthcare facilities around the world, these are data elements essential to be documented for a patient within the EHR so the care team may provide quality care. Defining this dataset is critical to streamlining the data needed from patients and reducing the documentation burden of caregivers.
“Usability of technology is just the beginning, not the true promise of the digital age,” Feinberg said. “Fixing the EHR is our first job. The pipes are laid through 40 years of digitization, which is wonderful. But now we have to make it easier to get the right information to the right people at the right time.”
In addition, simplifying billing for patients and making billing more integrated and seamless in provider organizations is a key focus. Feinberg reiterated that Cerner RevElate, Cerner’s go-forward patient accounting product which was announced last week, will bring new and enhanced capabilities to the Cerner revenue cycle management portfolio. Cerner RevElate is expected to reduce complexity by managing data and workflows that scale for large health systems and influence clinical, billing and payer workflows.
The full replay of Feinberg’s keynote can be viewed on Cerner’s YouTube channel.
