Cerner delivers measurable performance and resource gains to healthcare clients with Microsoft Edge

Better, lighter, faster—Cerner is always looking for the best solutions to bring to its clients. Cerner is a global leader in electronic health records and technology solutions. It supplies enterprise software, services, and hardware to healthcare clients, including more than 2,400 hospitals globally and 12,500 ambulatory medical offices in the United States. Daily, more than 3 million doctors, nurses, and other end users access patient data stored in Cerner’s healthcare solutions. As a tech company, Cerner understands that healthcare providers need to access patient information quickly, and it continually investigates innovations to enable caregivers to work faster and smarter. 

“Innovation is important because healthcare, as an industry, needs to take advantage of technology to help improve the health and care of the patients and communities our clients serve,” says Michael Hanska, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Cerner. “When it comes down to it, we’re really delivering services that are going to help caregivers improve the patient experience, whether patients are seen in a hospital, clinic, or even through a virtual visit.” 

Assessing the right modern browser to help Cerner clients boost performance

Cerner’s internal tech validation team, which is tasked with evaluating the company’s technology and maintaining a high quality bar for clients’ technology experiences, took a close look at the browser embedded within Cerner’s healthcare products. At the time, the company built its products on Internet Explorer because of the flexibility to create custom web applications. Now, Cerner wanted a modern browser to handle voice, video, and API integrations, with an end goal of boosting efficiencies and improving performance for clients and users. 

It was time to move to a modern browser that would improve performance for Cerner’s users. 

“The big challenge was providing some of the latest capabilities that we couldn’t do within Internet Explorer, and we didn’t want to develop that on our own,” says Misty Collins, Director of Platform Product Management at Cerner. 

For Cerner, Microsoft Edge had it all: world-class performance, speed, and productivity features; user control over client data; and advanced, built-in security. In addition, the team saw that Microsoft Edge would integrate well into the company’s ecosystem because Cerner had long used Microsoft offerings like Microsoft 365, Windows, Microsoft Intune, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud as the foundation for its healthcare solutions. 

To thoroughly evaluate Microsoft Edge, Cerner began working with some of its clients to pilot Microsoft Edge and see if it was compatible.

Pilot accelerates organization-wide deployment, thanks to outstanding performance with no tradeoffs

The first pilot with a Cerner client to test Microsoft Edge quickly led to deployment for the client’s entire organization. “We did a pilot with a client who saw great improvement in performance as well as usability, including an improvement in render times,” says Collins. “The client initially had a small group of test users, and after seeing the results, they asked to quickly turn on Microsoft Edge for additional users.” 

With the shift to Microsoft Edge, doctors, nurses, and other end users were excited by the performance improvements seen in Cerner’s healthcare products, which were further validated by tests run by the tech validation team. In side-by-side recordings of Cerner’s solutions with Microsoft Edge versus Internet Explorer, the rendering time was down 85 percent, CPU utilization down 33 percent, and memory utilization down 32 percent.

The workflow and user experience remained consistent across the two browsers, but everything loaded much faster with Microsoft Edge.

“On the back end, we’re getting much better CPU utilization and less memory usage. You don’t ever get the trifecta of faster response times, less memory, and less CPU,” says Hanska. “It’s always a tradeoff. You’re either using more memory to get faster response times or you’re using more CPU, but we actually saw a decrease in all of them.”

Collins adds more perspective on the results seen during the client pilot. “Our page views were two-and-a-half times faster, and our component renders—depending on which one it was—were anywhere from 2 to 15 times faster,” she says.

Getting a better client experience into the hands of caregivers quickly

Hanska is thrilled to raise the bar on the client experience. “The responsiveness of the system itself will bring client satisfaction,” says Hanska. “It will bring client satisfaction just because the caregivers will be able to get the information they need to do their jobs faster. It’s exciting to think about.”

The next goal for the team is to deliver innovation as quickly as possible into the hands of as many caregivers as possible. The Cerner team chose Microsoft Edge over other Chromium options because of its ease of delivery and deployment. “Microsoft Edge gives us a delivery and deployment option that helps us get the change out more broadly to our clients than we could have done on our own,” says Hanska. “It’s just really easy to deliver Microsoft Edge compared to other solutions.”

Seamless experience between platform and partner apps

Modern medicine requires teamwork, even when it comes to technology. Cerner’s choice of browser also needs to be compatible with the solutions of other healthcare technology providers, who build custom applications on top of Cerner’s healthcare platform. Some of the modern smart applications that these partners built would not run inside the Internet Explorer browser, creating workflows where clinicians would have to switch to a different context to access certain apps.

“Business partners needed the Microsoft Edge browser to actually execute inside the workflow,” says Hanska. “With Microsoft Edge, they can embed applications inside the workflow instead of having them run outside the workflow. The value of keeping the same context for a clinician is critical when they’re delivering care.”

Identifying system resource savings for Cerner

Improving the performance of Cerner’s healthcare solutions with Microsoft Edge can not only increase client satisfaction, improve user experience, and support better patient care—but it also has system resource savings for Cerner.

Hanska says that he’s looking forward to seeing what the Microsoft Edge deployment does at scale, once the rollout to all clients is complete, because there are tens of thousands of concurrent users on the systems. “It should equate to a lot of savings across the board in terms of resources used,” says Hanska. “It will be amazing for us to be able to tune differently because of this change.”

Another internal group at Cerner has also been satisfied with the shift to Microsoft Edge—Cerner’s engineers. “They don’t have to go learn all the ins and outs of Internet Explorer, the different layers of troubleshooting, and why the application is crashing,” Hanska says. “It is a cleaner runtime environment for us, which actually makes the overall experience better. Our code will be less complex, and we don’t have to code specifically for device.”

Looking to the future

What’s ahead, now that Cerner has completed a successful pilot with measurable performance improvements? Collins says that Cerner will continue to deploy Microsoft Edge to all its client environments around the globe, with plans to provide general availability in the next several months. With Microsoft Edge newly integrated, Cerner plans to continue to offer new modern capabilities for its clients, giving it a distinct competitive advantage. 

And for other companies considering making a move to Microsoft Edge, Hanska offers resounding encouragement. 

“Our experience has been good, and the teamwork with Microsoft has been outstanding. We really appreciate the collaboration because this Microsoft Edge deployment is going to be a big deal for us,” says Hanska. “We’re moving fast to get this out because of the value to our clients.” 

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