This year’s Cerner Health Conference (CHC) was the biggest so far with approximately 15,000 attendees, more than 400 coming from outside the U.S. The event focused on Creating Healthier stories with our partners, our associates and patients.
If you didn’t have the chance to attend CHC 2016, find below the highlights of these 4 days of collaboration.
CHC16 Day 1
Monday marked the end of Cerner Physician Community and the beginning of the formal CHC programme.
The day was highlighted by our first general session speakers. Kevin Hines, a best-selling author on brain health who survived an attempt to take his life by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge, shared his incredibly moving story and spoke to the importance of promoting mental health around the world. Additionally, Kana Enomoto, the principal deputy administrator for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, discussed the U.S. national efforts to improve care for mental health conditions across the continuum.
Cerner President Zane Burke greeted 15,000 Cerner clients, partners and associates by saying "Together, we can make a difference and create healthier stories."
Following the general session, CHC attendees walked from the Sprint Centre to the opening of Cerner's solutions gallery reception at the Kansas City Convention Centre.
CHC16 Day 2
We kicked off Tuesday with an engaging general session from Charles Duhigg, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, who spoke about working smarter, faster and better together.
After the general session, attendees browsed the solutions gallery to learn more about Cerner’s solutions. Throughout the conference, there was more than 340 diverse education sessions featuring more than 700 speakers.
Jane Wilson, Medical Director, Sarah Gigg Deputy Director of Nursing, and Shaun Kidd, IT Manager at Kingston Hospital NHS Trust talked about their journey from receiving an NHS Funding award which helped them integrate vital signs, sepsis and rapid response alerting in their Millennium EHR , allowing nurses to spend more time caring for patients.
Stephen Dunn, CEO, Helen Beck, Deputy COO, Dermot O’Riordan, CMIO, Sarah Judge Physiotherapist at West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust, talked about their big bang go-live scope. They explained the power of leadership during their deployment, from the top and clinical leadership. It really was all about the people, people on the West Suffolk team and their patients.
CHC16 Day 3
Dr. David Feinberg, president and CEO of Geisinger Health System, kicked off Wednesday sharing principles of Geisinger Health’s Proven ExperienceTM portfolio, which places patient experience and satisfaction at the heart of the health system. Feinberg shared how a person-centred approach can radically elevate the patient experience, advance organisations and revolutionise the health care industry.
Cerner Chairman, CEO and co-founder Neal Patterson made a surprise appearance to a standing ovation.
“I’ve got great news,” Patterson said. “I’m getting stronger and getting better daily, which is a great place to be”
“It was on New Year’s of last year when I got the phone call that I had cancer. I made a plan, got a strategy for treatment and then went to execute it. […] It’s not like you have one doctor, one surgeon, a radiation oncologist and a medical oncologist – it’s a team. It’s time for the patient to be part of the team. They have to be part of the team. We’re going to make it easier to care for us (patients).” He added.
In education sessions throughout the conference, Karim Ahmad, Emergency Medicine Consultant at Barts Health NHS Trust, highlighted the need for an integrated electronic documentation system to optimise workflows and reporting and to advance the delivery of quality patient care. He also highlighted how Barts designed a standardised clinical documentation workflow to capture and integrated clinical data throughout the patient pathway and support best practice and national reporting requirement.
David Allison, CEO and Mark Blakeman, Director of Informatics and Infrastructure at Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS Trust, presented about the Wirral commitment to developing new processes to improve the health and wellbeing of the local population. They also spoke about delivering a new models of integrated care, by shifting from payment by results to outcomes-based contracting.
In another session, Andrea Ledgerton, Associate Director of Nursing Infection Prevention and Control and Mark Blakeman Director of Informatics and Infrastructure at Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS Trust, addressed the challenges of the sepsis deployment. Surveillance of health care-associated infections is the foundation of an effective infection-prevention and control programme and relies on a fully resourced and flexible observation system to monitor infection and drive continuous improvement.
CHC16 Day 4
CHC16 came to a close Thursday with several final education and power sessions.
EHR integration for optimal interoperability data access was a key topic during a morning power session.
“Providers don't want to log into multiple systems,” Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital CHCIO Sajid Admed said. “We need information within the workflow. We’re still making that journey.”
“We need to take a look inward and think about what we're doing. We need systems that are simple to use and allow users data access.” eHealth Initiative CEO Jennifer Covich Bordenick said. “The information needs to be there regardless of the system. Let’s not wait another 20 years to interoperate. The time is now.”
