Cerner poised for Amazon partnership on health, an unconfirmed report says

North Kansas City-based Cerner Corp. is poised to form a partnership with Amazon Web Services, according to a published report.

CNBC said Andrew Jassy, head of Amazon’s service that provides cloud computing to other companies, will announce a partnership with Cerner next week during a conference in Las Vegas called AWS re:Invent.

Jassy, who far outearned Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos last year, is scheduled to deliver a keynote address Wednesday morning.

“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,” CNBC reported without naming its sources because “the discussions are still in the final stages.”

Shares of Cerner gained $3.35, 5 percent, to close Wednesday at $70.03.

Cerner’s business mostly involves providing electronic health records services to hospitals and clinics. The reported partnership would focus on Cerner’s emerging business of using vast medical data resources to improve health and healthcare, a business called population health and branded as HealtheIntent at Cerner.

Neither company talked with CNBC, its report said. Cerner declined to comment to The Star.

Investment analyst David Grossman of Stifel Nicolaus & Co. Inc. said the suggested partnership could do more than boost Cerner’s population health business, which he said accounts for only 5 percent of revenues.

“We have not yet spoken to either company; however, at first glance, we believe (Amazon) AWS could enhance Cerner’s ability to scale its core business as well,” Grossman wrote in a note to investors Wednesday.

Cerner is among the Kansas City area’s largest employers with about 13,000 employees in is headquarters, new South Kansas City campus and other area offices.

This story was originally published November 22, 2017 at 2:03 PM with the headline "Cerner poised for Amazon partnership on health, an unconfirmed report says."