Cerner has long been synonymous with electronic medical records for hospitals and providers, but the healthcare technology company has set its sight on a new customer: the pharmaceutical industry. “There is a ton of information that is documented and captured as a byproduct of everyday medicine,” says Cerner president Donald Trigg. “That information has the opportunity to really be a positive force for how we think about the cost and time of clinical trials.”On Thursday, the Kansas City, Missouri-based company finalized its $375 million cash acquisition of New York-based Kantar Health, a life sciences data and analytics research firm. First announced last December, the deal is part of a bigger strategy to grow Cerner’s data-as-a-service offerings into a billion dollar revenue business over the next few years. “We didn't specify a timeframe, but think about this as a Cerner 2025 ambition,” says Trigg. Cerner had $5.5 billion in revenue in 2020, with a net profit of $780 million. Most electronic medical record vendors, including Cerner, Epic and Allscripts, have spent the past decade helping healthcare providers move from paper to digital records in order to comply with the 2009 HITECH Act. Nearly 3 million healthcare providers use Cerner’s systems each day, which manage the data of nearly 250 million patients worldwide. When this patient information is anonymized, it can provide big-picture, real-world data about patient health and how drugs and other interventions really work. When combined with machine learning and other methods, this data can speed up drug discovery and get treatments to market faster.“This is a space that had trend before Covid,” says Trigg, but it was “absolutely accelerated” by the pandemic. While randomized controlled trials are still the gold standard for drug approval, both the industry and regulators are getting increasingly more comfortable with patient data generated outside of the clinical trial setting.“With Kantar, Cerner will significantly expand its capability in clinical research support, commercial planning, branding guidance, and marketing insights to serve life science customers,” Deutsche Bank analyst George Hill wrote in a research note in December, adding the market for real-world evidence is expected to grow to $11 billion in 2024. On Cerner’s last earnings call, the company estimated Kantar would bring in $125 million in revenue through the end of 2021. The Kantar acquisition is one of several related initiatives in Cerner’s nascent data-as-a-service line of business. In 2019, the company launched what it calls the Learning Health Network, which includes analytics tools and a de-identified data set of 92 million patient records that gives participating institutions a chance to participate in clinical research studies. Verona, Wisconsin-based Epic Systems, Cerner’s biggest rival, announced its big data initiative called Cosmos the same year.


All data is taken from the source: http://forbes.com
Article Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/katiejennings/2021/04/01/cerners-billion-dollar-big-data-bet/


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