Cerner executives focus on connecting medical records and providers

Cerner Corp. executives focused on connecting health care providers and medical records at the company’s shareholders meeting Friday.

Cerner has been a central player in the medical industry’s shift toward electronic medical records, and one topic at the meeting was the effort to allow records from various companies to work together.

“We are the largest advocate of creating interoperability among all health care records,” chief executive Neal Patterson said, according to the company’s Twitter posts, during the meeting.

Cerner helped form the CommonWell Health Alliance, which is a fee-for-membership venture involving other large health information technology providers.

The idea extends to converging technologies that tie data collection, mobile broadband access and “smart” equipment that combine as the Internet of Things.

The North Kansas City-based company also is at the forefront of using big data to improve medicine, an effort it calls Population Health.

Cerner co-founder Cliff Illig pointed out during the meeting that Patterson recently was listed by The Wall Street Journal as the fifth-longest-serving chief executive among the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index.

An audio version of the meeting is available at Cerner’s website.

At the meeting, Cerner shareholders re-elected Illig, William Neaves of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, and Purdue University president and former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels to their board of directors.

This story was originally published May 22, 2015 at 9:12 AM with the headline "Cerner executives focus on connecting medical records and providers."