This year, more than 11,000 members of the health care community joined us in Kansas City for Cerner Health Conference 2019 (CHC19). We welcomed physicians, clinicians, data scientists, engineers, IT professionals and health care executives from 18 countries and 47 states.
Attendees represented providers, employers, federal agencies, community members and technology partners. Monday’s keynote speakers included an inspiring presentation from the first woman Thunderbirds pilot, Nicole Malachowski, on how she’s overcome adversity, followed by a humorous take on our technical lives from The New York Times best-selling author David Pogue.
The theme for CHC19 was NOW/NEXT ─ the idea that we must address challenges in the now while transforming to the next. This theme was woven throughout the keynotes, more than 200 education sessions, the conversations we had with clients, and the ideas they exchanged with their peers. It’s clear that the NEXT in health care is becoming the industry’s NOW at an accelerated pace.
Matt Wood, Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) vice president of artificial intelligence, opened Cerner Chairman and CEO Brent Shafer’s Tuesday keynote session. Matt spoke about how the AWS cloud infrastructure is fueling disruption across the entertainment, travel, retail, manufacturing and life sciences industries.
Brent shared that the collaboration with Amazon and AWS is a catalyst for Cerner’s transformation to become 1) the software-as-a-service platform for health care, 2) the premier strategic health network partner and 3) the acknowledged source for curated health data.
In addition, Brent explained how Cerner’s innovation with Amazon and AWS will:
- Restore the joy of practicing medicine by using AI and machine learning to create a more cognitive system experience
- Foster a more engaged patient population using data to inform consumers’ health care choices
- Accelerate innovation of platform features and functionality by deploying them to providers through the AWS cloud
- Provide deeper analytics to identify care delivery inconsistencies, develop evidence-based models and integrate near real-time monitoring to improve patient outcomes and health care economics
Dr. Shez Partovi, worldwide lead for health care, life sciences and genomics at AWS, delivered a power session with Cerner COO Mike Nill on “Harnessing the Power of the Cloud.” The presentation gave clients more insight into the cognitive platform for health we’re creating. The cloud-based platform will enable clients to adopt technology faster, leverage additional predictive insights and open an expanded world for new applications – all of which will continuously improve the quality of patient care and provide a vehicle for solving health care’s most complex problems.
We depend on the thousands of Cerner associates representing the industry’s best engineers, strategists, consultants, visionaries and partners (like AWS) to make our big ideas realities. We’ll continue to accelerate our rate of innovation to ensure we make breakthroughs in leaps, not steps.
Cerner shines in the reflected light of our clients, and that spotlight was bright at CHC19. Let’s harness this post-conference energy and continue to challenge each other, share big ideas, push boundaries and ask why. Transformation requires being bold every single day.
If you weren’t able to attend CHC19, check out our recaps from days 1, 2 and 3 for summaries and highlights of the keynote presentations, power sessions and other special events at the conference.
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