Cerner conference focuses health care on the person beyond the process

When a guy who tried to kill himself by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge says that health care systems need to focus more on mental health, he gets attention.

Kevin Hines, who survived his suicide attempt in 2000, took to the Sprint Center stage Monday afternoon in Kansas City to open the 2016 Cerner Health Conference.

Capturing both the personal and holistic parts of health care delivery, Hines reflected the Cerner Corp. aim to evolve from a health information technology provider to a company with a broader vision that encompasses individualized, hands-on health care.

Hines, who wrote “Cracked, Not Broken: Surviving and Thriving After a Suicide Attempt,” was joined at the conference’s opening general session by Cerner president Zane Burke.

Burke took the lead role usually held by Cerner co-founder Neal Patterson, who has been sidelined by cancer treatments.

Burke repeated several of Patterson’s frequent phrases, such as describing Cerner’s data-focused work as “hard and complex” in his remarks to thousands of conference participants and Cerner associates.

The annual Cerner conference, this year meeting Monday through Thursday at several venues in downtown Kansas City, expects 15,000 attendees representing 26 countries. The VisitKC convention and visitors’ agency estimates that the conference infuses $18 million into the local economy.

The development of shareable data among health care providers has been key to Cerner’s work so far, Burke said. Going forward, though, the focus expands toward making the data accessible for the consumer.

Burke said it’s never been more important than now to digitize all aspects of health care, and that sentiment was emphasized by other speakers who, like Hines, put the focus on behaviorial health.

Kana Enomoto, principal deputy administrator for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a federal agency, and Eva Karp, Cerner’s chief clinical officer, also made personal appeals to the health care industry to treat mental health with the same research and treatment attention as given to physical health.

Both called for better integrated health care systems that help identify people most in need of care. Enomoto noted that 54.9 million U.S. adults over age 18 had some sort of mental illness in the past year but only 33 million received any kind of treatment — a treatment rate that wouldn’t be acceptable for any physical illness.

The convention agenda includes 740 speakers and 340 sessions, most of them led by Cerner clients. Topics include population health, genomics, telehealth, clinical and financial integration, and data system interoperability.

Cerner also used the opening day of the conference to announce a telehealth agreement with American Well, a national telehealth company. The agreement will integrate the American Well platform with Cerner’s electronic health records system.

This story was originally published November 14, 2016 at 7:13 PM with the headline "Cerner conference focuses health care on the person beyond the process."