Media Report: Amazon Web Services, Cerner Working on Healthcare Deal
Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud service business, is reportedly in the late stages of talks with Cerner on a project that will involve the health technology company’s population health solution, HealtheIntent, according to a media report from CNBC.
CNBC’s Christina Farr and Jordan Novet reported last week that AWS and Cerner plan to announce a deeper partnership at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week. AWS CEO Andy Jassy is scheduled to give a keynote speech at the conference at 8 am PT on Wednesday.
AWS already is working with top clients in industries such as energy and technology to financial services and government, and a deal with Cerner would push it further into health care.
In the CNBC article, Farr and Novet reported, “As part of his keynote at re:Invent, AWS CEO Andy Jassy is planning to announce that Amazon is teaming up with Cerner, one of the world's largest health technology companies, to help health-care providers better use their data to make health predictions about patient populations, according to sources familiar with the matter.”
Further, Farr and Novet reported, “The sources, who asked not to be named because the discussions are still in the final stages, said the partnership is initially focused on Cerner's so-called population health product — HealtheIntent — which enables hospitals to gather and analyze huge volumes of clinical data to improve patients' health outcomes and lower treatment costs.”
The healthcare industry has been slow to move to the cloud, compared to other industries, due to concerns about the security of medical records and privacy issues related to protected health information.
However, Farr and Novet noted that in their article that leading cloud infrastructure providers have all invested in recruiting health experts and are looking at the health care sector.
“What the companies are set to unveil now is potentially much more significant, because it gives big medical institutions access to the HealtheIntent analytics engine at AWS speed and scale and with additional artificial intelligence technologies. For example, a hospital that wants to analyze the likely outcome of a group of people in Australia could quickly set up a HealtheIntent project because AWS has locations across the Asia-Pacific region,” Farr and Novet reported.
Last week, AWS announced plans for a cloud service for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other members of the U.S. intelligence community. The launch of the AWS Secret Region comes six years after AWS introduced GovCloud, its first data-center region for public-sector customers.
