Cerner pursues new healthcare strategy

Cerner is giving an indication of the direction it thinks things are moving in healthcare IT. CEO Neal Patterson told shareholders at the company's annual meeting on Friday that he believes the time has come for Cerner to expand in four key areas after years of focusing its energies on the automation of care in the physician and hospital market. That means that Cerner will become more involved in research, eventually becoming a provider of aggregate data collected by health information networks for analysis of health trends, drug discovery and epidemic tracking.

Patterson says Cerner will also focus on healthcare financing, marketing itself to employers, insurers and government as a partner in the effort to contain healthcare costs. The company also hopes to focus on the market for medical devices, wiring everything from "hospital beds to medicine cabinets" to its software. Asked about the recent problems on Wall Street, where Cerner shares have lost 10 percent of their value, Patterson sounds very optimistic. "In the long term, the stock market gets it right," he said.

- see this article from Kansas City Business Journal