KANSAS CITY, Mo., Aug. 23, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Cerner, a global leader in health care technology, collaborated with Duke Clinical Research Institute to develop an atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) Risk Calculator app, designed as a tool to increase communication between the person and their doctor about ways to live a healthier life and risk factors for heart disease and stroke.
The app helps health care providers estimate 10-year and lifetime ASCVD risk for patients based on information like age, race, sex, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, smoking status and diabetes status. If untreated, ASCVD can lead to heart attack and sudden cardiac arrest, as well as fatal and nonfatal stroke. To facilitate shared decision-making between the person and their doctor to guide treatment decisions, the app was designed to factor in a person’s willingness to take action to improve their health and the risks and benefits of potential therapies.
“Guidelines from the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association now emphasize using the 10-year calculator to identify adults for statin therapy,” said Dr. Pierre Elias, cardiology fellow at Columbia University and former medical student at Duke University School of Medicine. “We wanted an app that would make it easier for clinicians to calculate risk at the point of care. Whether it’s the primary care clinic or a cardiologist’s office, I can’t tell you the number of times this can get missed when there are so many other problems to manage. Making it faster and easier to get news you can use leads to better patient care.”
Cerner and Duke Clinical Research Institute worked together to develop the software through the Cerner Open Developer Experience (code) that encourages innovators to build apps that advance the health care industry. Through Cerner’s open source code, doctors from Duke Clinical Research Institute provided clinical direction to create an app that could be embedded within Cerner’s electronic health record (EHR) for each patient. Cerner wrote, maintains and hosts the ASCVD Risk Calculator under an open source license.
“This collaboration demonstrates how the health care industry can come together to develop and continually improve an app that has the ability to save lives by the power of SMART on FHIR® open source standards,” said Kevin Shekleton, vice president and distinguished engineer at Cerner. “We developed this Risk Calculator for our client hospitals and health systems, but open source lets any health care organization leverage the technology to help people live healthier lives.”
“We developed the app to be able to pull important patient health data across multiple EHR suppliers at different venues of care in order to get a full picture of how to improve that patient’s health,” said Dr. Ann Marie Navar, assistant professor of Medicine (Cardiology) at Duke University School of Medicine and member of the Duke Clinical Research Institute who led the collaboration. “Cerner’s open platform encourages collaboration, which will help advance the way care is delivered regardless of the specific platform people are using.”
The ASCVD Risk Calculator app is available to providers in the SMART App Gallery and the Cerner Open Developer Experience (code) App Gallery.
About Cerner
Cerner’s health technologies connect people and information systems at more than 27,000 contracted provider facilities worldwide dedicated to creating smarter and better care for individuals and communities. Recognized globally for innovation, Cerner assists clinicians in making care decisions and assists organizations in managing the health of their populations. The company also offers an integrated clinical and financial system to help manage day-to-day revenue functions, as well as a wide range of services to support clinical, financial and operational needs, focused on people. For more information, visit Cerner.com, The Cerner Blog or connect on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter or The Cerner Podcast. Nasdaq: CERN. Smarter Care. Better Outcomes. Healthier You.
Media Contacts:
Cerner
Austin Cozzolino, Public Relations, (816) 786-2154, austin.cozzolino@cerner.com
