Cerner, telemedicine company? John Glaser, newly named senior vice president of population health and global strategy for the electronic health records vendor, wants people to think so.
Glaser joined Cerner just about 13 months ago, when that company bought the health IT business of Siemens. In that role, he oversees innovation in sectors such as telehealth and the Internet of Things.
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“Telehealth is a critical part of population health,” Glaser said in an interview ahead of HIMSS16, which kicked off Monday in Las Vegas.
Glaser talked about the many ways North Kansas City, Missouri-based Cerner is providing or supporting telehealth and telemedicine.
Cerner long has provided remote technology for virtual ICUs. Last year, it signed a deal with Validic to pull data from activity trackers and other consumer wearables into the Cerner HealtheLife patient portal. Cerner itself has an app for the Apple Watch.
Like many other EHR vendors, Cerner has a relationship with Vidyo to enable clinician-to-clinician video communications. The company works with Qualcomm Life for remote patient monitoring services, including integration of data from home-based medical devices into the EHR.
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Cerner also is starting to support semi-urgent care via telemedicine, even though that’s not part of its core business. “EHR integration for urgent care is less critical than with ‘business substitution,'” Glaser said, using a term for virtual visits that replace face-to-face patient encounters. “In [business substitution], you need good EHR integration,” he said.
The latter is happening at the University of Missouri’s Tiger Institute for Health Innovation and at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., Glaser noted. About the only area of telemedicine that Cerner isn’t part of is overseas teleradiology, Glaser said.
In other topics, Glaser said that he is hard at work trying to advance interoperability, particularly through SMART on FHIR, a development platform based on the fairly new Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard.
On the charges of “information blocking” leveled by federal officials, Glaser said, “It’s one of those issues where nobody’s sinners and nobody’s saints. I think Cerner’s really clean on this,” he added, however.
Glaser also said that Cerner co-founder and CEO Neal Patterson is “doing well” in his cancer treatment. “People are really optimistic that he will be back in the saddle by the summer,” Glaser said. However, he hasn’t seen much of his boss lately, in the interest of privacy.
Personally, Glaser just released a book, “Glaser on Health Care IT: Perspectives from the Decade that Defined Health Care Information Technology.” It’s a compilation of columns he’s written over the years for Hospitals & Health Networks, a publication of the American Hospital Association’s Health Forum. He will be signing copies Tuesday at HIMSS.
Photo: Cerner