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Oracle Acquires Cerner

December 20, 2021 News 14 Comments

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Oracle will acquire Cerner for $28.3 billion in equity value in an all-cash deal, the companies announced this morning.

Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison said in a statement, “Working together, Cerner and Oracle have the capacity to transform healthcare delivery by providing medical professionals with better information—enabling them to make better treatment decisions resulting in better patient outcomes. With this acquisition, Oracle’s corporate mission expands to assume the responsibility to provide our overworked medical professionals with a new generation of easier-to-use digital tools that enable access to information via a hands-free voice interface to secure cloud applications. This new generation of medical information systems promises to lower the administrative workload burdening our medical professionals, improve patient privacy and outcomes, and lower overall healthcare costs.”

Oracle vertical industries EVP Mike Sicilia said that Oracle will make Cerner’s systems easier to learn by making Oracle’s hands-free Voice Digital Assistant the primary interface to Millennium.

The transaction is expected to close in 2022. Cerner will operate as an industry business unit within Oracle.

The acquisition, at $95 per Cerner share, represents Oracle’s largest acquisition. Oracle says Cerner will be “a huge additional revenue growth engine for years to come” as Oracle expands its business to additional countries.



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Currently there are "14 comments" on this Article:

  1. “ Oracle vertical industries EVP Mike Sicilia said that Oracle will make Cerner’s systems easier to learn by making Oracle’s hands-free Voice Digital Assistant the primary interface to Millennium.”

    Hoo boy. Who wants to take bets on when this will happen? 2031? 2050? Maybe the *next* Millenium?

  2. “hands-free Voice Digital Assistant the primary interface to Millennium’

    Yeah, sure. Has anyone at Oracle ever been at any nursing station at change of shift? Have they ever tried to talk to Siri or Alexa? It will be a thousand times worse than everyone talking on cellphones on an airplane.

  3. Nice windfall for David Feinberg… I would expect he has a change in control provision in his employment agreement.

  4. …and then there was one. Must make Judy happy. In my 40+ years of experience every time a non-healthcare shop buys a HIT firm half or more of the clients bolt. I have no doubt the same will happen here, particularly with that ridiculous VDA assistant strategy. Congrats Judy …you won!

  5. Blah….Blah.. Blah…. How many times have we heard this? It’s like canned M/A speak.

    “Working together, Cerner and Oracle have the capacity to transform healthcare delivery by providing medical professionals with better information—enabling them to make better treatment decisions resulting in better patient outcomes.

  6. The only positive outcome from this would be if it will make Feinberg stop his self-absorbed Facebook posts on LinkedIn…. Mission Accomplished, David!

  7. This is bad news for pretty much everybody.

    Oracle likes to sue everyone.

    So they will likely try suing all their competitors using Cerner’s intellectual property.

    And they will likely start suing Cerner’s customers by twisting the software use agreements.

  8. From the press release: “Cerner will be Oracle’s anchor asset to expand into healthcare”

    Wait…you all know that anchors keep things FROM moving, right?

  9. As one person has already commented, this will be the demise of Cerner and exponential growth of Epic. Will take time but any contracts up for renewal are now at risk. Fixing all of healthcare & worker burnout with VDP is comical and frankly stupid to say.

  10. So let’s break this down, this deal was a foregone conclusion, when Cerner undertook their reorganization and overhaul that started when Brent became the CEO, They have been grooming Cerner to be sold for the last two years.

    With the current trajectory of the DOD and VA contracts Cerner is looking at some serious contractual losses and exposure for legal action, as they have not performed, have not delivered, and continue to have issues that plague the implementation of Millenium and its ability to deliver what was promised almost 4 years ago. So Oracle will provide them with a backstop, as God knows Larry knows a lot about being sued and suing other organizations.

    When they signed the deals with the DOD and VA they lost the war with Epic in North America as they have continued to lose clients and will continue to do so, no matter what wizardry Oracle implements or try to sell out of the back of their wagon will stop that from happening.

    All the funds that have gone into moving Cerner to AWS might as well have been thrown out a window as now it will be moved to Oracles cloud which is considered proprietary and Cerner clients lose access to the vast catalog of AWS partners and will now will only have access to what Oracle wants to sell them at a higher price.

    Cerner’s employees will lose as the sales organization and others will now be expected to walk and talk Oracle, back end services, will be consolidated and development will be commoditized among Oracle internal development groups.

    Clients lose on multiple fronts, Oracle and Cerner will spin this as a great opportunity for them to be part of something bigger, but not something better. They will send David and the company out on the road to share their new vision of what healthcare looks like going forward at the same time they will be looking at how they can use all the data they now have access to to package and sell to the pharma, biotech and other life sciences and insurances communities. Not that hasn’t been happening, but not at the scale they will move it to.

    So who wins, shareholders and executives and Epic here in North America. Globally, I think Cerner will now be shackled with Oracle who at best is considered an infrastructure component player, not an innovator or digital leader or cloud hyperscaler equal to AWS or Azure or even Google. Anyone willing to think what Neal would have thought of this deal, I don’t think he would have been pleased.

    • Neal was asked by Larry multiple times about this deal and he always said no for exactly m my the reasons you state.

  11. As previous posters have said, I don’t think this is good news for anyone on Cerner’s Millennium Platform. I see rising costs in healthcare due to loss of competition in this space.

    Cerner did this to themselves. A ton of Brogrammers (of both sexes) too busy hanging out in racket ball courts and clueless managers running things, always the inevitable layoff around the corner and no culture of promoting talent to the top.

    Most people familiar with HealthCare knew RevCycle was the primary issue with Millennium for probably a decade before Neal passed. I know the focus was warring with Epic and Cerner spun it’s wheels trying to get better in the ambulatory space with PowerChart Touch. which was great, but adoption was slow or non-existent.

    the horror show that was ProFIT (stupid name) was what kept greater adoption of Cerner software from happening. I personally worked for orgs that left Cerner solely because of a poor rev cycle module. The only sites I saw that were pleased with Cerner used 3rd party billing systems that were often custom built on ancient hardware/software systems think DEC VAX or Unisys systems.

    All that said, it’s still sad to see a major software vendor like Cerner go out this way.







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