Cerner Value Stock - Dividend - Research Selection

Description of the company

Cerner Corporation started doing business as a Missouri corporation in 1980 and was merged into a Delaware corporation in 1986. Unless the context otherwise requires, references in this report to “Cerner,” the “Company,” “we,” “us” or “our” mean Cerner Corporation and its subsidiaries.

Our corporate world headquarters is located in a Company-owned office park in North Kansas City, Missouri, with our principal place of business located at 2800 Rockcreek Parkway, North Kansas City, Missouri 64117. Our telephone number is 816.201.1024. Our Web site, which we use to communicate important business information, can be accessed at: www.cerner.com. We make our annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K and all amendments to those reports available free of charge on or through this Web site as soon as reasonably practicable after such material is electronically filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"). We do not intend for information contained in our website to be part of this annual report on Form 10-K.

Cerner is a leading supplier of health care information technology ("HCIT"). Our mission is to contribute to the improvement of health care delivery and the health of communities. We offer a wide range of intelligent solutions and services that support the clinical, financial and operational needs of organizations of all sizes. We have systems in more than 25,000 facilities worldwide, including hospitals, physician practices, laboratories, ambulatory centers, behavioral health centers, cardiac facilities, radiology clinics, surgery centers, extended care facilities, retail pharmacies, and employer sites.

Cerner solutions are offered on the unified Cerner Millennium® architecture and on the HealtheIntent™ cloud-based platform. Cerner Millennium is a person-centric computing framework, which includes integrated clinical, financial and management information systems. This architecture allows providers to securely access an individual’s electronic health record ("EHR") at the point of care, and it organizes and proactively delivers information to meet the specific needs of physicians, nurses, laboratory technicians, pharmacists, front- and back-office professionals and consumers. Our HealtheIntent platform is a cloud-based platform designed to scale at a population level while facilitating health and care at a person and provider level. On the HealtheIntent platform, we offer EHR-agnostic solutions that help health care systems aggregate, transform and reconcile data across the continuum of care, manage the health of populations they serve, improve outcomes and lower costs.

On February 2, 2015, Cerner acquired Siemens Health Services (now referred to as "Cerner Health Services"). Cerner Health Services offers a portfolio of enterprise-level clinical and financial health care information technology solutions, as well as departmental, connectivity, population health, and care coordination solutions globally.

We offer a broad range of services, including implementation and training, remote hosting, operational management services, revenue cycle services, support and maintenance, health care data analysis, clinical process optimization, transaction processing, employer health centers, employee wellness programs and third party administrator ("TPA") services for employer-based health plans.

In addition to software and services, we offer a wide range of complementary hardware and devices, both directly from Cerner and as a reseller for third parties.

Health care expenditures continue to consume an increasing portion of most economies. In the U.S., health care spending increased 5.5 percent to $3.20 trillion in 2015, growing to 17.8 percent of the U.S.'s Gross Domestic Product ("GDP"). The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services ("CMS") estimates U.S. health care spending in 2016 at $3.35 trillion, or 18.1 percent of GDP, and projects it to be 20.1 percent of GDP by 2025. We believe this trajectory is unsustainable and that health care IT can play an important role in facilitating a shift from a high-cost health care system that incents volume to a proactive system that incents health, quality and efficiency.

For this change to occur, traditional fee-for-service ("FFS") reimbursement models must shift to value-based approaches that are more aligned with quality, outcomes, and efficiency. The largest signal of this shift occurred in January of 2015 when the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services laid out a plan to shift 50 percent of Medicare payments to value-based payment models by the end of 2018, and to tie 90 percent of the remaining traditional FFS payments to quality measures.

A further step towards a value-based model occurred in 2016 with the passage of The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act ("MACRA"), which enacts significant reforms to the payment programs under the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule and consolidated three current value-based programs into one. We believe that MACRA and other government and private models aligning payment with value, quality and outcomes will drive major changes in the way health care is provided in the next decade, and we expect a much greater focus on patient engagement, wellness and prevention. As health care providers become accountable for proactively managing the health of the populations they serve, we expect them to need ongoing investment in sophisticated information technology solutions that will enable them to predict when intervention is needed so they can improve outcomes and lower the cost of providing care.

The increasingly complex and more clinical outcomes-based reimbursement environment is also contributing to a heightened demand for revenue cycle solutions and services and a desire for these solutions and services to be closely aligned with clinical solutions. We believe this trend is positive for Cerner because our Cerner Millennium revenue cycle solutions and services are integrated with our clinical solutions, creating a clinically driven revenue cycle solution that has had significant adoption in recent years.

Over the past several years, we have also seen a shift in the U.S. marketplace towards a preference for a single platform across inpatient and ambulatory settings. The number of physicians employed by hospitals has increased as hospitals have acquired physician groups, and health systems are recognizing the benefit of having a single patient record at the hospital and the physician office. We are benefiting from this trend due to our unified Cerner Millennium platform, which spans multiple venues, and significant enhancements we have made to our physician solutions in recent years.

While health care providers are showing a preference for a single platform across multiple venues, there is also an increased push for interoperability across disparate systems to address the reality that no patient’s record will only have information from a single health care IT system. We believe health information should be shareable and accessible among primary care physicians, specialists, and hospital physicians.

Health care expenditures continue to consume an increasing portion of most economies. In the U.S., health care spending increased 5.5 percent to $3.20 trillion in 2015, growing to 17.8 percent of the U.S.'s Gross Domestic Product ("GDP"). The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services ("CMS") estimates U.S. health care spending in 2016 at $3.35 trillion, or 18.1 percent of GDP, and projects it to be 20.1 percent of GDP by 2025. We believe this trajectory is unsustainable and that health care IT can play an important role in facilitating a shift from a high-cost health care system that incents volume to a proactive system that incents health, quality and efficiency.

For this change to occur, traditional fee-for-service ("FFS") reimbursement models must shift to value-based approaches that are more aligned with quality, outcomes, and efficiency. The largest signal of this shift occurred in January of 2015 when the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services laid out a plan to shift 50 percent of Medicare payments to value-based payment models by the end of 2018, and to tie 90 percent of the remaining traditional FFS payments to quality measures.

A further step towards a value-based model occurred in 2016 with the passage of The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act ("MACRA"), which enacts significant reforms to the payment programs under the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule and consolidated three current value-based programs into one. We believe that MACRA and other government and private models aligning payment with value, quality and outcomes will drive major changes in the way health care is provided in the next decade, and we expect a much greater focus on patient engagement, wellness and prevention. As health care providers become accountable for proactively managing the health of the populations they serve, we expect them to need ongoing investment in sophisticated information technology solutions that will enable them to predict when intervention is needed so they can improve outcomes and lower the cost of providing care.

The increasingly complex and more clinical outcomes-based reimbursement environment is also contributing to a heightened demand for revenue cycle solutions and services and a desire for these solutions and services to be closely aligned with clinical solutions. We believe this trend is positive for Cerner because our Cerner Millennium revenue cycle solutions and services are integrated with our clinical solutions, creating a clinically driven revenue cycle solution that has had significant adoption in recent years.

Over the past several years, we have also seen a shift in the U.S. marketplace towards a preference for a single platform across inpatient and ambulatory settings. The number of physicians employed by hospitals has increased as hospitals have acquired physician groups, and health systems are recognizing the benefit of having a single patient record at the hospital and the physician office. We are benefiting from this trend due to our unified Cerner Millennium platform, which spans multiple venues, and significant enhancements we have made to our physician solutions in recent years.

While health care providers are showing a preference for a single platform across multiple venues, there is also an increased push for interoperability across disparate systems to address the reality that no patient’s record will only have information from a single health care IT system. We believe health information should be shareable and accessible among primary care physicians, specialists, and hospital physicians.

As a result, Cerner has led or been a key participant in nearly every major industry effort to advance interoperability and system openness. One example is Cerner’s role as a founding member of the CommonWell Health Alliance, an open, not-for-profit industry consortium that brought health care IT firms together for the purpose of enabling safe nationwide interoperability. The vision of CommonWell is for a patient to be able to visit a new doctor, give their consent, and, within moments, have his or her lifetime record available from all the prior places he or she has visited.

CommonWell members represent about 70 percent of the acute care market and about 30 percent of the ambulatory market. CommonWell membership also spans a diverse range of clinical care settings beyond acute and ambulatory, including health IT market leaders in imaging, perinatal, emergency department, laboratory, retail pharmacy, oncology, care management, patient portal, post-acute care, and state and federal government agencies. In 2016, CommonWell and CareQuality, another national interoperability framework, announced an agreement to work together and leverage the respective strengths of each organization to create a level interoperability playing field for all provider organizations that wish to share clinical information using standards-based queries. This agreement is expected to create near-universal connectivity that establishes a baseline query capability for all providers, regardless of their EHR supplier.

Outside the United States, we believe Cerner’s growth opportunities are good, as most countries are also dealing with health care expenditures growing faster than their economies, which is leading to a focus on controlling costs while also improving quality of care.

Source www.sec.gov