Tech giant Oracle acquires Cerner

AUSTIN, Tex. and KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Oracle Corporation and Cerner Corporation announced an agreement for Oracle to acquire Cerner through an all-cash tender offer for approximately $28.3 billion in equity value. Cerner is a leading provider of digital information systems used within hospitals and health systems to enable medical professionals to deliver better healthcare to individual patients and communities.

“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,” said Larry Ellison (pictured), chairman and chief technology officer, Oracle.

“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.”

The transaction is expected to close in calendar year 2022. For its part, Oracle brings significant experience helping power the largest industries. Oracle also brings best in class cloud infrastructure to drive digital modernization, substantially lowering the total cost of IT in these critical industry sectors.

“Healthcare is the largest and most important vertical market in the world – $3.8 trillion last year in the United States alone,” said Safra Catz, chief executive officer, Oracle. “Oracle’s revenue growth rate has already been increasing this year, and Cerner will be a huge additional revenue growth engine for years to come as we expand its business into many more countries throughout the world.”

“Cerner has been a leader in helping digitize medical care and now it’s time to realize the real promise of that work with the care delivery tools that get information to the right caregivers at the right time,” said David Feinberg, president and chief executive officer, Cerner. “Joining Oracle as a dedicated Industry Business Unit provides an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate our work modernizing electronic health records (EHR), improving the caregiver experience, and enabling more connected, high-quality and efficient patient care. We are also very excited that Oracle is committed to maintaining and growing our community presence, including in the Kansas City area.”

“Oracle’s Autonomous Database, low-code development tools, and Voice Digital Assistant user interface enables us to rapidly modernize Cerner’s systems and move them to our Gen2 Cloud,” said Mike Sicilia, executive vice president, Vertical Industries, Oracle. “This can be done very quickly because Cerner’s largest business and most important clinical system already runs on the Oracle Database. No change required there. What will change is the user interface. We will make Cerner’s systems much easier to learn and use by making Oracle’s hands-free Voice Digital Assistant the primary interface to Cerner’s clinical systems. This will allow medical professionals to spend less time typing on computer keyboards and more time caring for patients.”

According to a recent study by the Mayo Clinic, physicians spend 1 to 2 hours on EHRs and desk work for every hour spent in face-to-face contact with patients, as well as an additional 1 to 2 hours of personal time on EHR related activities.

Together, Oracle and Cerner will protect customer investments and transform healthcare, the companies said.

Customer investments in Cerner are also protected with this combination and will grow in value over time as more modern and connected technologies are made available.

Cerner systems running on the Oracle Gen2 Cloud will be available 24 by 7 by 365. The goal is to deliver zero unplanned downtime in the medical environment.

With Cerner systems running on the Oracle database, only specifically authorized medical professionals can access patient data. IT professionals running the systems are unable to look at patient data.

Oracle and Cerner are committed to continued and enhanced stewardship of health information, which will be bolstered by Oracle’s global operational infrastructure.

Cerner will be Oracle’s anchor asset to expand into healthcare and together will improve medical care for individuals and communities around the world.