Amazon, Cerner team up on AI, machine learning

Cerner is joining forces with Amazon as the EHR giant positions itself to deal with the rapidly changing healthcare environment, including the rise of consumerism. Partnering with a brand predominantly known for speed, convenience and affordability could be a good move for Cerner, especially now that Amazon's done more than just dip its toe in the market. "AWS's global infrastructure and breadth and depth of services, coupled with Cerner's health care technology acumen and source for data, can bring significant benefits to Cerner clients." the companies said in a Tuesday blog post. Amazon's foray into healthcare stretches across at-home diagnoses with Alexa's voice recognition technology, pharmaceutical distribution with subsidiary PillPack, a venture to lower healthcare costs in tandem with industry heavyweights J.P. Morgan and Berkshire-Hathaway, and machine learning, AI and data hosting through its cloud services arm. "If you look even just at Amazon Web Services, everything that we do is because customers are asking us to help," Taha Kass-Hout, Amazon's senior leader of healthcare and artificial intelligence, told Healthcare Dive earlier this year.