At Cerner, peer review of code is an important job. We have found it to greatly improve the quality of code and improve a team’s knowledge of the codebase. Through code review discussions, newer engineers are able to learn on valuable areas to question or challenge when something is being changed. W...

On March 8th and 9th, 17 teams of Cerner associates competed for the Golden Keyboard during our 11th ShipIt Day. During this 24-hour hackathon, associates were challenged to create something innovative, usable, and value-adding. This was the fourth ShipIt held at our new Innovations Campus, leveragi...

At Cerner, we manage our own infrastructure and a big part of that is managing F5 load balancers. If you are a Ruby developer or a network engineer and regularly work with F5s, then I have good news! I’ve created a gem that abstracts iControl’s REST API. It makes working with the API easy to underst...

One year ago this month, Cerner development associates in Kansas City moved into a new place to call home for their workdays, Innovations Campus. The first two towers that stand on this campus provide 805,000 square feet of workspace for more than 3,000 associates. Eventually, the campus will grow l...

On December 14th and 15th, 18 teams of Cerner associates competed for the Golden Trophy during our tenth ShipIt Day. Being this was our tenth, it was fun to reflect back on how this event started and how much it has grown. It has been great to see ShipIt Days start from small hackathons organically ...

At Cerner, we often make use of many open source projects in our infrastructure. I work on a team responsible for Cerner’s Ingestion Platform, a critical piece of infrastructure that takes in TBs of data and over a billion messages per day. The platform’s responsibility is then to make this data ava...

Cerner has a very compelling story that many want to learn from. Cerner’s Agile Champions are regular presenters at local, national, and global conferences. We routinely host calls and site visits for interested companies around the world who want to figure out how we were able to adopt Agile so qui...

Presentation Abstract by Jody Butts, Sr. User Experience Designer Given on August 11, 2017 at the UX Australia Conference in Sydney Full presentation audio and slides are available here: http://www.uxaustralia.com.au/conferences/uxaustralia-2017/presentation/bad-design-is-bad-for-your-health-why-dat...

The Competition Part of Cerner’s engineering culture is to celebrate technology. This past fall, we had our annual celebration for Programmers’ Day. We celebrated the day with great food (taco bar and ice cream) and an evening of trivia. Topping off Programmers' Day with a taco bar and trivia night ...

We’re excited to open source Bunsen, a library to make analyzing FHIR data with Apache Spark simple and scalable. Bunsen encodes FHIR resources directly into Apache Spark’s native data structures. This lets users leverage well-defined FHIR data models directly within Spark SQL. Here’s a simple query...

World Usability Day is celebrated worldwide on the second Thursday in November every year. Across the globe, organizations host events and use this day to provide education on how to make products easier to use and simpler to access, as well as to celebrate progress in this pursuit. The World Usabil...

In 2010, a group of designers from Columbus, Ohio set out to create a grassroots, cross-discipline, and creative conference. Since that first event, Midwest UX has been an ongoing tradition that attracts innovative ideas and provides an opportunity for regional professions to engage in discussion wi...

Introducing Jwala, a Resource Manager for the Apache Community Apache Tomcat and Apache httpd are hardened, scalable, and reliable open-source solutions. Widely adopted, these solutions are commonly used to host and load-balance Java applications. Configuring and managing a small set of elements is ...

In a previous post, we discussed the need to provide education around our ecosystem and implementation of the FHIRⓇ and SMARTⓇ standards for developers and how we did so at our annual Cerner Health Conference. That same week, we were also a part of FHIR DevDays, which included a track entitled “Apps...

There is no better way to end summer than with ShipIt Day! We kicked off our ninth ShipIt Day on August 10th, with more than 75 Cerner associates signed up. Nineteen different teams worked for 24 hours straight to complete their projects. For those unfamiliar with the event, ShipIt Day is a 24 hour ...

Last fall our team (Mike Tweten, Trevin Teacutter, and Zameer Sura) started working on the problem of automating DC/OS deployments in a way that wouldn’t require multiple teams to duplicate effort and tie themselves directly to DC/OS APIs. While DC/OS certainly makes the act of deploying an applicat...

Background In order to manage the health of populations, Cerner builds data-driven solutions built on top of its HealtheIntent℠ platform. The platform transforms and standardizes data across disparate health systems. The data is then used in algorithms that aid healthcare providers and hospitals in ...

When we first were given access to Splunk we were excited about all the functionality it could provide our team to help us monitor and debug our applications. We created alerts to email us if our applications are logging errors, dashboards to show health or metrics of our services, and field extract...

Last October, I had the privilege to speak at Grace Hopper, the world’s largest gathering of women technologists. It was impressive to see 15,000 fellow female technologists gather together to share their experiences and technical expertise. To look into the audience, and see a room full of other fe...

ShipIt Day VIII was held on April 20 and 21st. Seventeen teams made up of internal associates had just 24 hours to create something innovative, usable, and value-adding. This quarter’s ShipIt Day was held at our new Innovations Campus in the Link Conference Center. We were excited to get to utilize ...

Outside of work, married couple Denisse Osorio de Large, a Cerner Director in Population Health Development, and Steven Large, a Cerner Senior Director in IP Development, are passionate about creating a younger generation that is passionate about technology and introducing them to the vast world of ...

Cuando no están trabajando, Denisse Osorio de Large, Directora de Cerner en Desarrollo de Salud Poblacional y Steven Large, Director sénior de Desarrollo de IP, quienes están casados, tienen como pasión crear una generación joven motivada por la tecnología y mostrarle a la misma el amplio mundo de o...

One Cerner Style Icons (OCS Icons) are foundational UI elements required to produce a cohesive and consistent User Experience for Cerner Solutions. OCS Icons consist of a comprehensive icon library of platform agnostic assets which can be easily consumed by development teams. Why? The primary goal o...

At Cerner, we use Chef. In fact, we’re heavily ingrained with Chef in our configuration management practices. We deploy services from Tomcat to Kafka with Chef. Even the first open source project we announced was a tool for Chef! With all of this integration with Chef, we need a simple way to manage...

Over the past few years, Cerner has been developing a standards-based platform on top of our Cerner Millennium® EHR. Rather than roll our own API, we’ve been using the HL7® FHIR® standard. For app integration, we’ve been using the SMART® on FHIR specification. If you’re not immediately familiar with...

Background: Micah is currently a software architect in Population Health Development in Healthe Intent Development at Cerner. In 2013, Micah Whitacre received committer status on the Apache Crunch project, and is now a Project Management Committee (PMC) member of the project. How has Cerner been bee...

It’s likely not a surprise that Cerner would use Apache Kafka as we have used a number of related technologies like Apache Hadoop along with its Map/Reduce, HDFS and even Apache HBase. Our team first started using Apache Kafka in 2014 when Kafka 0.8 first came out. Since then we’ve expanded to using...

Beadledom is a framework for building Java based web services. It bundles several open sourced components required for building JAX-RS services. Why? HealtheIntent, Cerner’s population health management platform, started 3.5 years ago. We went through the process of investigating different technolog...

Cerner’s 7th ShipIt Day took place on December 8th and 9th. ShipIt is a 24-hour hackathon with the goal of building something awesome, usable, and value-adding within a single day. The event was hosted at our DevCenter in the Realization Campus, a large open space that hosts our DevAcademy (to learn...

Meet Alan and Grace. These lighthearted, 8-bit characters were nominated in early 2014 to become the iconic mascots of Engineering at Cerner. Have you ever wondered who these 80’s video gaming inspired characters on our Engineering t-shirts are? Why were they chosen as mascots? What do they represen...