Following the close of Oracle’s acquisition of Cerner Corp. for $28.3 billion, Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison presented Oracle's views on how the two companies will work together to transform healthcare data management, integration, and sharing during a live web event.
Cerner is a provider of digital information systems used within hospitals and health systems by medical professionals.
“Better information is the key to transforming healthcare,” said Ellison, who explained how problems in healthcare data management impede successful patient outcomes—most notably, problems with data accessibility due to electronic health records (EHRs) being scattered among different healthcare providers’ databases with no easy way for one hospital to get information from another.
Ellison said Oracle and Cerner would work to enable a unified national health records database on top of individual hospital databases with attention to data privacy and anonymization to solve the problem of EHR fragmentation, which hinders individual patient care and limits the sharing of medical information to benefit the global population.
Ellison also highlighted the expansion and modernization of Cerner’s Millenium systems to extend and support better sharing of data from clinical trials through an integrated clinical trial system, improve user interfaces, provide integrated telemedicine via secure video and patient telemetry, and leverage machine learning and connected devices in a variety of ways—as well as the role of Oracle Fusion ERP and HCM to improve administrative tasks across areas as diverse as procurement, supply chain, staffing, billing, and regulatory compliance leveraging technologies such as blockchain, RFID tagging, and automation.
Oracle previously announced on June 1 that all required antitrust approvals had been obtained for its acquisition of Cerner, including European Commission clearance. “Working together, Cerner and Oracle have the capability to transform healthcare delivery by providing medical professionals with a new generation of healthcare information systems,” Ellison said at the time.
In terms of the business impact, Oracle CEO Safra Catz added, “We expect this acquisition to be substantially accretive to Oracle’s earnings on a non-GAAP basis in fiscal year 2023. Healthcare is the world’s largest and most important vertical market—$3.8 trillion last year in the United States alone. We expect Cerner to be a huge growth engine for years to come.”
Oracle shared key elements of the deal in its earlier announcement:
- An all-cash tender offer for $95.00 per share, or approximately $28.3 billion, that is immediately accretive to Oracle’s earnings.
- Substantially accretive to Oracle’s earnings on a non-GAAP basis in fiscal year 2023 and will contribute more to earnings thereafter.
- Cerner will be a huge growth engine for Oracle for years to come as Oracle expands Cerner’s business into many more countries throughout the world.
For more information, go to www.oracle.com.