Inside Oracle's Cerner acquisition, including issues with Cerner's EHR system, which Oracle says it wasn't aware of, and its rollout at the US Veterans Affairs
Business Insider : X: @amir , @mstrknowitall , @orionds , and @edithhonan . LinkedIn: Vanessa Lipton . Forums: r/cernercorporation X: Amir Efrati / @amir : whoever did Oracle's due diligence for its $30B acquisition of electronic health records firm Cerner in 2022 did bad, bad job. quite a story. https://www.theinformation.com/ ... @dodgeblake @ashannstew [image] @mstrknowitall : Inside Oracle's Deadly Gamble on Cerner and Electronic Health. Cofounder Larry Ellison, the biggest GOP contributor. No bid contract with the VA. Records lost -veterans died- -HEROES DIED- Shame on Trump & Republicans https://www.businessinsider.com/ ... Orion Donovan Smith / @orionds : “Oracle believed it was finally in a position to fulfill Ellison's dream of revolutionizing modern medicine. In reality, it had acquired a high-tech filing system that couldn't even perform the simplest of filing tasks.” https://www.businessinsider.com/ ... Edith Honan / @edithhonan : The rollout of a new computer system has been a deadly disaster for American vets Important reporting by @ashannstew and @dodgeblake https://www.businessinsider.com/ ... LinkedIn: Vanessa Lipton : Great article, but it's a sad and infuriating one. My dad, Charlie, has spent years helping veterans and their families deal with the multitude … Forums: r/cernercorporation : How Oracle's biggest-ever acquisition turned deadly
Context & Ripple Effects
Oracle’s Cerner push was already under strain: VA had delayed deployment of the Oracle Cerner EHR in 2022, while later employee accounts described major customers leaving and innovation being diverted to legacy upgrades. The new reporting puts the acquisition process itself—not just the rollout—at the center of the story.
That matters because Oracle bought Cerner as a major expansion into health data and software. If material EHR failures were not surfaced before the deal, remediation becomes inseparable from the commercial rationale for the acquisition.
First-order effects
- Oracle faces sharper scrutiny over its diligence and its claim that it did not know about Cerner’s system problems before closing the $30B acquisition.
- The VA rollout is further burdened by questions about core system functionality, following the earlier pause in its EHR deployment.
Second-order effects
- Healthcare customers evaluating Oracle Health have more reason to weigh migration and implementation risk; that pressure compounds reports that Oracle Health had lost major clients while focusing on legacy-system upgrades.
- Oracle must direct more attention toward stabilizing and repairing the acquired platform, potentially limiting its ability to position the unit primarily around new product development.
Third-order effects
- The episode underscores that in mission-critical software, acquisition diligence must test real-world workflow performance, not merely revenue, contracts, and technical architecture.
- If public-sector EHR failures continue to draw adverse user feedback—later reflected in a VA employee survey on product quality—large vendors may face more demanding implementation oversight and buyer skepticism.
The trend: Enterprise software acquisitions are being judged increasingly on whether complex legacy systems can perform reliably in live, high-stakes deployments after the deal closes.