Healthcare IT company Cerner Corp. has found a good use for the billions of anonymous patient records it has accumulated: marketing the information to biotech and pharmaceutical researchers.
According to the Kansas City Business Journal, revenues for the company's life sciences group have increased some 20 percent during each of the past five years, and expectations are that the figure will rise.
The positive results are in line with thinking expressed by a panel at the recently concluded BIO show in Atlanta. "Government and the healthcare community are ripe for a new model of healthcare, one that could include a new model of biomedical research and development," said panel chair Ken Buetow, associate director for bioinformatics and IT at the National Cancer Institute. Buetow said he envisions electronic health records, which have yet to be standardized, feeding back into the clinic, allowing researchers a valuable view of data in context.
- read the article
- here's the BIO report