How Cerner Will Make Their Data Business Worth a Billion Dollars

While the Cerner EHR is installed in a third of hospitals nationwide, the company believes it has a unique profile of customers.  They have large groups of hospitals that are community based and also a large number of clients that don’t usually have the opportunity to participate in clinical trials.  Cerner is hoping to leverage these customers in a mutually beneficial arrangement to get its clients exposure to opportunities afforded by economies of scale.  They believe that data from these customers, new relationships, and new uses for their data could become a billion dollar business.

Cerner isn’t just sitting back and hoping that this business materializes though.  Last month they spent $375 million on the acquisition of Kantar Health, a data and analytics firm with pharmaceutical ties that specializes in oncology, rare diseases, and treatment.  This will allow healthcare providers to have a much closer partnership with pharmaceutical companies as real world data from the EHR can be shared back and forth.

Part of this new acquisition will also focus on Cerner’s Learning Health Network, which is a bit like a registry, and acts as a repository of de-identified healthcare data for the partners involved in it to draw insights to improve patient care.  With Kantar on board, this group will be able to work more closely with companies offering funded clinical trials.  The Learning Health Network already has 55 members with data on over 500 million patient encounters. 

Throughout the COVID pandemic, Cerner shared some of this data freely to help pharmaceutical and life sciences companies, which ended up producing great peer-reviewed research on the virus and its effects.  Doing this really had a few benefits for Cerner. 

One is that they were able to make a meaningful impact in our response and understanding of COVID using data that may have otherwise been locked in scattered EHRs.  The other is that they were able to market test their data repository and get a real idea of how useful it can be to other organizations in healthcare.  They now know that there’s strong value in it and that it can produce revenue for them after the pandemic.

The ability to get more complete data into the hands of researchers, clinicians, and even patients is always something that provides a benefit.  The past decade’s focus on interoperability standards has helped data become more transferrable between healthcare organizations and is allowing a more comprehensive view of patients.  This is especially valuable when using interfaced data sources that deliver data directly to an EMR. 

For everything else though, like external lab results or faxed, scanned, and paper documents, Extract acts as an interface.  Our software reads everything on a document, categorizes the document, and retrieves any information you need, delivering it to the destination of your choice.  If you’d like to learn more about how we do this, please reach out.