Oracle will acquire electronic medical records company Cerner for $28.3B, or $95 per share, in an all-cash deal, its biggest acquisition yet
part of an ecosystem collecting, buying, and selling data on hundreds of millions of people, on the open market, with virtually no regulation. This is highly concerning news for our privacy: https://twitter.com/... Larry Dignan / @ldignan : Oracle's $28.3 billion purchase of Cerner is going to be a big challenge for Epic in healthcare. It'll be quite the healthcare stack. More than 650K physician users and 2.2 million non-physician users for Cerner. https://www.g2.com/... https://www.techmeme.com/... Daniel Newman / @danielnewmanuv : I love @Oracle's ambition to buy Cerner Corporation. Vertical clouds are going to be a massive growth opportunity and this will instantaneously make $ORCL one of the biggest, if not the biggest player in Healthcare Cloud. (1/2) #Healthcare #ERM #Cloud https://www.cnbc.com/... Gerrit De Vynck / @gerritd : healthcare tech is wild because I've spent 10 years hearing that electronic medical records is completely broken but there are still $30 billion EMR companies out there I've never heard of https://www.cnbc.com/... Brandon Weaver / @keystonelemur : Oracle buys Cerner, and one of the only things I can think about is how much Cerner took advantage of their engineers and paid relatively bad wages. It's a shame none of them will likely see any of that money seeing as they don't give out any stock either. @riptari : Super data broker, Oracle - aka a ‘privacy deathstar’ (https://www.ft.com/...) - is splashing $28BN+ to buy Cerner, a massive US healthtech provider of electronic medical records.... What could *possibly* go wrong!?! https://www.prnewswire.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The agreement follows reports that Oracle was pursuing Cerner and marks a much larger healthcare-software move than Oracle's earlier $9.3B NetSuite acquisition. It positions an enterprise software vendor around Cerner's clinical-records footprint, while the related coverage identifies Epic as the principal competitive pressure point.
The purchase also brings privacy concerns about patient-data collection and sale into the strategic case for the deal, making data stewardship part of the competitive stakes alongside healthcare cloud scale.
First-order effects
- Oracle commits to its largest acquisition and gains a route into healthcare cloud through Cerner's physician and non-physician user base, subject to closing.
- Cerner's clinical-records business becomes part of Oracle's enterprise software portfolio, shifting responsibility for its health-data strategy toward Oracle.
Second-order effects
- Epic faces a newly scaled challenger combining electronic medical records with Oracle's cloud ambitions, increasing pressure in healthcare technology purchasing decisions.
- Privacy scrutiny shifts toward how Oracle handles the patient-data assets associated with Cerner, rather than focusing solely on the medical-records vendor.
Third-order effects
- If large enterprise vendors continue buying healthcare-data platforms, healthcare cloud competition will increasingly turn on control of clinical-records systems and the data attached to them.
- The deal is a further instance of capital concentration: established software companies using large acquisitions to enter regulated, data-intensive verticals.
The trend: Enterprise cloud vendors are seeking durable positions in healthcare by acquiring the systems that organize clinical data and user workflows.