At the recent Cerner user conference, Dr. David Feinberg, new CEO at Cerner addressed the Cerner community and shared at least his initial vision for the organization. He recorded the address on day 3 on the job, so no doubt this vision could change as he gets to know the company better and refines his plans for the future. However, his initial thoughts tell us a lot about what’s important to him and what he’ll likely focus on at Cerner.
Dr. Feinberg definitely leveraged the theme of the user conference in his address: One Patient. One Community. One World. Plus he pointed out an interesting perspective on the healthcare experience when he said that “Healthcare is a personal, but shared experience.” That dichotomy is quite fascinating. He also highlighted the importance of the patient in what Cerner does. “Our job is to make sure caregivers around the world have the right information to get their communities back to health. We do that by keeping the patient at the center of everything we do.”
It was interesting to have Dr. Feinberg acknowledge both the “promises” and the “frustrations” of the digital age of care delivery. As a Cerner user in his previous roles, he knew some of the promises that were made and how well we’ve lived up to those promises. He certainly acknowledged that there’s still more work to be done to fulfill those promises. Although, he highlighted how his experience at Geisinger also taught him of what healthcare can accomplish when they love their community. He said multiple times that “Healthcare is about people caring for people.”
What does this look like for Cerner? He said, “We haven’t fully reached our potential. – Digitized records for one need to be usable. They need to be measured by how they enable caregivers to spend more time at the bedside and less time at the terminal. Improving the usability of Cerner solutions is the top of my list of things to get done.”
Plus, along with acknowledging their need to improve their revenue cycle solution and the announcement of their Cerner RevElate Patient Accounting solution, he said, “Usability is just the beginning, not the true promise of the digital age. If healthcare is people caring for people, then our job is to provide caregivers with the tools that allow them to do their jobs. Records should help patients avoid unnecessary tests and medications because the record is so easy to find and understand. Records should help nurses and doctors avoid errors and suggest what treatments might be best. Records should allow all of you to understand the health of your community. Who’s at risk and what interventions are working. Records should predict. Records should help the world avoid or at least minimize the effects of the next pandemic.”
What was also interesting was how Dr. Feinberg framed the work Cerner does and what failure in healthcare looks like more broadly when he said “When we get it right…things like hospitalizations are seen as failures of outpatient care. Outpatient care as a failure of home care. Home care fundamentally as a failure of caring for our communities.” It’s going to be interesting to see how his leadership can push Cerner to address some of these “failures.” One way he mentioned was making sure that the information is to the right people at the right time to care for the people. In fact, he said, “We all know the promise of healthcare technology is to identify ways we can improve care that otherwise might be missed.”
Then he described what I think every person at Cerner should be thinking about and customers should be watching for:
Our technology needs to be reliable. It needs to be understandable. It needs to be complementary. It needs to enable not disable.
As he wrapped up, he acknowledged something the late Jeanne Patterson, employee #7 at Cerner and wife of Founder Neil Patterson, said about her experience with the healthcare system when she said, “It’s the noise in the healthcare system that will drag you down.” Dr. Feinberg said he wants to do great things together and that “We must eliminate the noise.”
You can watch the full keynote address here:
What did you think of Dr. Feinberg’s first address to the Cerner community as CEO of Cerner? What do you think this means for Cerner? Was there something else you wish he’d said? Let us know in the comments and on social media with @HCITToday.
“We do that by keeping the patient at the center of everything we do.” Where have I read something like it 15 years back? Hmmm… Is there something like epic.com?
It’s too bad they having lived it? Reminds me of the Google, do no evil. The concept has been around for a while. We need move companies living it though.