Cerner - Brochure 2017 by Business Chief Middle East

Healthcare in the 21st century PROJECT PARTNERS

Healthcare in the 21st century Written by Jackie Cosh Produced by Stuart Shirra

The Managing Director of Cerner Middle East and Africa explains how, in the ever-changing world of healthcare technology, much is available to make the patient safer and healthier and the provider more efficient

eing voted number two in Fortune 2016’s World’s Most Admired Company in the Healthcare, Pharmacy and Other Services category is an accolade to be proud of. For Michael Pomerance, Managing Director, Cerner Middle East and Africa, it is a reward for many years of hard work. “Cerner has been doing what they do since 1978, and it is good to see that the effort and the vision which has really been there since the very beginning has led our company to achieve such great things and be recognised as the number two,” he says. Pomerance describes the Cerner Middle East office as being like a mini Cerner Corporation, with all the relative

business units its parent company has. The company is 100 percent selfsufficient, so his role encompasses everything from setting strategies to execution, implementation and financial responsibilities. Liaising with clients and motivating and mentoring staff takes up much of his time. “We have come a long way since the inception of our operations in Saudi Arabia in 1991 and are well entrenched in this geography with our pioneering presence that exceeds a quarter of a century. Our regional footprint has expanded considerably and currently we have more than 200 client facilities spanning Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and Egypt, ranging from mega governmental hospital networks to elementary health clinics,” affirms

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1978

Pomerance. translation of names The year Cerner On an average, from English to Arabic more than 68,000 users and vice-versa, and also was founded log into Cerner’s system adherence to Gregorian every month and over 37 or Hijri calendar dates as million people across the Middle applicable,” remarks Pomerance. East have health information stored Healthcare is ever changing, in Cerner Millennium, a premium with companies such as Cerner application suite facilitating a single needing to stay on top of both latest patient database that gives holders technology trends and the change in a different view of the patient’s data what clients want. But the fact that in the hospital or clinic. “Cerner the patient is central never changes. solutions can be localised and “Our core belief system is that adapted for regional applications, everything we do should make the as exemplified in our patented patient better,” says Pomerance. process that allows the ready “It should help the patient get

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better faster, it should help them have better outcomes, and one of the major elements of that is patient safety during medication.” He recalls one of the company’s clients in Qatar who migrated from a paper-based medical ordering system to a fully electronic Cerner one, including matching drugs with patients through barcoded administration. This change led to a notable 50 percent reduction in medical errors. Electronic medical records (EMR) are slowly being implemented across all areas of healthcare, but what separates

Cerner from its competitors is that it has moved beyond using EMR simply as a vehicle for data collection. “Today we provide consulting services for systems that are not Cerner. We are looking at how we take information that is contained in an EMR and then leverage that to help predict which patients are going to be sick soonest, which ones are most likely to come back and visit the hospital, so that we can start building intelligence with the data that has been collected over the past 15 years. Most EMR’s of today are just a data collection tools. Just

because you put data in a tool doesn’t mean you get any benefit from it. ” The EMR can provide a wealth of information for population health management, but Pomerance describes the idea that this is all we need as a fallacy. “Cerner sees population health management as trying to find out about that other 95 percent of data that exists in the world today, so a lot of people have smart phones, they have portal information where they enter how much they have walked or weight they have lost. You go to pharmacies over the city picking

up drugs whenever you need them. You go to gyms where you work out or you don’t go to gyms and work out, and all that information is out there in our community.” The Know, Engage, Manage continuum has been set up to highlight to healthcare providers how they can provide the best and the most efficient care for patients. ‘Know’ refers to knowing what is happening and predicting what will happen with the population. ‘Engage’ is about engaging with providers and patients in health and care delivery, and ‘Manage’ is about managing

“Our core belief system is that everything we do should make the patient better” – Michael Pomerance, Managing Director, Cerner Middle East and Africa

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health and improving care. to care for the people living here. “Today’s healthcare is reactive,” “By taking greater care of the says Pomerance. “When we citizens living here they will reduce increase the data we have you the spend,” points out Pomerance. can now look at the population “We believe that all governments you serve and say ‘who are the and communities will soon come people that should be coming to the realisation that healthcare is to us for care but are not?’ Then too expensive and needs to change. as a caregiver you can engage And we will be ready for them. with them in a meaningful way.” “One thing we are excited about is There has been an the fact that now insurance increase in interest in is becoming mandatory population health here in the UAE, and management, it will be in Qatar in particularly with another year, all the declining oil prices private and soon the cutting budgets public healthcare electronic medical and most notably providers need a full records stored in the ever-increasing solution, from the clinical Cerner Millennium cost of healthcare EMR to the billing system. putting a strain on We have a combined governments. Cerner has been system which enables them to also involved in a number of projects. collect insurance, which I think is an One in particular is the National advantage over other competitors Unified Medical Records project that just focus on the clinical side. in the UAE. The aim of this project Now going forward if you don’t have is to aggregate all the information a financial billing system connected from various sources in the UAE to the clinical system you are really into a single record, so that the going to be at a disadvantage.” Ministry of Health has the ability The vision for the next five to 10

37 million +

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years involves evaluating current markets and watching closely as new markets begin to evolve. “When countries such as Oman, Bahrain, Morocco or South Africa become ready for next generation healthcare tools, we will be able to engage with them and help them go through that evolution,” says Pomerance. Moreover, care and community work across the Middle East region is the credo as part of Cerner’s CSR responsibilities. The company is long associated with rehabilitation and other philanthropic and humanitarian causes. It raises funds for medical charities and contributes to endowments for women who deliver premature babies in Africa, cancer patients, and children with other impairments. The company’s long association with the Children’s Cancer Hospital Centre in Egypt is a case in point. It also supports various initiatives and educational programmes in the UAE. “We have a very good outlook for the next few years. Today we have 250 people working in the Middle East; that could be as high as 700 by the year 2022 so we are very excited about it,” Pomerance concludes.

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Cerner Middle East PO Box 500542 3rd Floor Block B, Office Park Bldg. Tecom Zone, Dubai United Arab Emirates

T +971 4 375 4900 F +971 4 434 2113 www.cerner.com