Cerner, AWS Work to Reduce Patient Re-Admissions and Time Spent Documenting Patient Visits

Cerner Corporation, a provider of healthcare technology, announced its plans to assist clients to further lower re-admission rates for patients, reduce health care waste and help cut the amount of time physicians spend documenting patient visits.

Globally, the healthcare industry spends more than $7 trillion each year, with the U.S. accounting for nearly half of that spend ($3.5 trillion). The American Medical Association recently estimated that a quarter of all U.S. spending – nearly $1 trillion – is wasted on unnecessary follow ups to doctor’s appointments, overtreating patients and gaps in digital information caused by people seeking care from different doctors and health systems over a lifetime.

Cerner is working to reduce this financial waste by leveraging de-identified patient data to help make early determinations of what is causing return hospitalizations. The insights that Cerner unveils will give physicians the resources to make more informed decisions on treatment approaches, thereby helping reduce patient re-admissions.

As an example, a Cerner client—one of the largest providers of post-acute healthcare in the U.S.—recently asked for help predicting the patients at risk of being re-admitted from a rehabilitation facility back to the hospital. By applying machine learning to historical data migrated to the AWS Cloud, Cerner created a model that helped the health care system reach the lowest re-admission rate in more than a decade and sent more patients directly from rehabilitation to their homes.

Earlier this year, Cerner announced its focus on addressing macro trends in healthcare, including physician burnout. During his keynote, Shafer also addressed a challenge many physicians face, the time it takes to document patient visits. Reports have shown that physicians spend more than half of their days documenting patient information. Shafer announced that Cerner is developing a digital virtual scribe, working with Amazon Transcribe Medical, to help reduce the documentation burden.

Cerner’s focus on developing leading-edge technology will help shape health care of tomorrow. Recently, Cerner reached an important milestone, it’s 500^th issued patent. The new patent, featuring voice-activated documentation, captures important details shared between the clinician and patient, further showcasing the company’s focus on leveraging voice inputs and natural language processing to reduce the physician’s burden of documentation.