Throughout his 25-year career in healthcare, Cerner CEO and President David Feinberg, MD, has made health equity a priority.
Dr. Feinberg took the helm of the global healthcare company in October 2021 after previous leadership positions at Google Health, Danville, Pa.-based Geisinger and Los Angeles-based UCLA Health. A child psychiatrist, Dr. Feinberg has seen inequities through his clinical years and times in leadership.
Question: What started your quest to improve healthcare?
Dr. David Feinberg: Healthcare is not a given for all. If the pandemic taught us anything, it's that we still have a long way to go to improve healthcare access. I learned early in my career that, often, it's difficult for patients to understand the complexities of what their doctor is telling them, which can make their healthcare journey even more confusing and stressful than it already was.
I remember two specific adolescent patients who taught me lessons early in my career. First, a young man diagnosed with schizophrenia whose father didn't understand the clinical mumbo jumbo I was using to describe his care plan. That was a failure on my part: I neglected to understand the patient's — and in this case, the caregiver's — point of view. Second, I saw a young girl who expressed suicidal thoughts. The only way she was able to get professional help was because her family "knew" the right people within the right health system. Both examples are unfortunately still happening in doctors' offices and hospitals around the world.
I may have a better understanding of patients' needs now, but I'm still asking similar questions: How do we deliver digestible information that patients and their families can understand and use? And how do we ensure that patients get timely care when they need it most?
The answer falls on all of us in healthcare. My career path may have changed over the years, but my mission hasn't. I'm still trying to help those two patients.
Q: How does the industry improve?
DF: One of the biggest shortcomings of the healthcare industry is that we've allowed for high costs and access to care to prevent us from seeing more people. That exclusivity is unfair. Plus, we've put burdensome technology measures in place for doctors and nurses while overlooking population data that can help tell the full story of the needs of a patient, or even entire communities.
At Cerner, our competition isn't other healthcare technology companies. Our competition is heart disease. It's preventable illnesses. It's the opioid epidemic and the spread of COVID-19. If your family member is admitted to the hospital, you don't really care what sort of technology your doctor or nurse is using. You just want it to work.
Moving forward, our primary responsibility at Cerner is to provide reliable, usable technology that gets data back to caregivers in a way that makes care more accessible, affordable and equitable. Someone recently asked me what my dream software would be for patient care and providers. To me, there is no silver bullet — just a solid, reliable platform tailored to a patient's wants and needs. Some just want to be able to send their health information to their daughter. Others want to dig into pages and pages of their health data. Some people want to use a health app on their smart phone. Others want to visit in person with their regular primary-care physician, or chat on telehealth platforms, or even stop by the drugstore on the corner.
Regardless of the patient's preferences, we must join in normalizing data — no matter the source — and securely share important info back to our healthcare providers, including those doctors and nurses who've been fighting on the frontlines for nearly two years now. They're the ones who will be helping us deal with the ramifications of all that COVID-19 has brought on, including increased health inequities, untreated chronic conditions and a worsening mental health crisis.
In the years to come, I want Cerner to be seen as the foundation of data that helps doctors, nurses and families make more informed healthcare decisions. Ultimately, I hope that leads to a system that is more convenient, cost-effective, dignified and, perhaps most important, equitable.
Q: How else has the pandemic changed health equity?
DF: This pandemic has taught us a couple of lessons. First, it showed the world how inequitable our health systems are — and shame on us. We all must make equity our top priority.
Second, the pandemic also changed the way we think about community health data. Shortly after the pandemic began, Cerner was able to open up a set of data to researchers — more than 88 million deidentified patient records — to help support epidemiologists and clinical researchers looking to treat COVID-19. Those data sets revealed racial inequities in the diagnosis and treatment of chronic conditions including diabetes, sickle cell disease and opioid abuse. More importantly, caregivers could access this data to provide more specialized, preventative care to a set of patients at most risk, which can help prevent hospitalizations and death.
What data platforms, including Cerner, can do is help providers identify disparities, address mental health needs — especially during this pandemic crisis — and suggest community resources within the patient's care plan. The true promise of healthcare technology is to identify ways we can improve care — both preventative and reactive — that otherwise might be missed.
As we weather the storm of COVID-19, I hope we can see more industry partners coming together to the same table to collaborate on how to provide the best care possible for individual patients and entire communities.