Cerner Corporation (NASDAQ:CERN) has been recently selected by Illinois Rural Community Care Organization (IRCCO) to deploy Cerner HealtheIntent, the company’s big data platform across IRCCO’s accountable care organization (ACO). 
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Notably, IRCCO is a state-wide accountable care organization, functioning through 24 critical access and small rural hospitals.
The development is likely to manage population health to ensure proper medical care for 20,000 Medicare patients throughout the state of Illinois. Further, the population health management approach will provide both the organisations an opportunity to exemplify improved healthcare.
Per management, this move will ensure usable health data at the fingertips of clinicians to support improved patient care and coordination. Furthermore, member hospitals and providers will be able to use Cerner HealtheIntent to identify gaps in care, analyze population and enterprise data, as well as improve clinical decision making.
Analysts believe that these developments will provide cushion to Cerner’s stock that has declined 3.5% in a year’s time against its industry’s gain of 8%.
Cerner HealtheIntent: A Pivotal Ground
Cerner HealtheIntent is a real-time, flagship population health management platform of Cerner that enables health care systems to aggregate and analyze data, thereby creating a health record for individual members of the population.
In this regard, it can be noted that in the fourth quarter, HealtheIntent had played a significant role in adding to Cerner’s earnings. The company ended the year with 144 HealtheIntent clients. Resultantly, population health bookings grew 42% and revenues surged 20%.
Furthermore, Cerner signed its first commercial health plan, according to which HealtheIntent will be the medium of serving more than 300,000 Medicaid and Medicare patients.
Market Prospects
Per a research by MarketsandMarkets, the healthcare analytics market is expected to reach $29.84 billion by 2022 from $8.92 billion in 2017, at a CAGR of 27.3%. The growth of the market is attributed to increasing government initiatives to increase EHR (Electronic Health Record) adoption and growing pressure to curb healthcare costs.
Zacks Rank & Key Picks
Cerner carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).
A few better-ranked stocks in the broader medical sector are athenahealth, Inc. (NASDAQ:ATHN) , Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. (NYSE:BIO) and Centene Corporation (NYSE:CNC) , each sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.
athenahealth has an expected long-term growth rate of 17.7% and earnings per share growth rate of 21.5%.
Bio-Rad has a projected long-term growth rate of 20% and earnings per share growth rate of 20%.
Centene has an expected long-term growth rate of 14.4% and earnings per share growth rate of 14.4%.
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Cerner Corporation (CERN): Free Stock Analysis Report
athenahealth, Inc. (ATHN): Free Stock Analysis Report
Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. (BIO): Free Stock Analysis Report
Centene Corporation (CNC): Free Stock Analysis Report
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