The deal is expected to close in the calendar year 2022, and it would be Oracle’s largest purchase after its 2004 acquisition of PeopleSoft.
Oracle said on Monday it has agreed to buy Cerner Corporation, an electronic medical records firm, in an all-cash transaction valued at about $28.3 billion.
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The acquisition of Cerner, which has over four decades of experience in the healthcare IT industry, will help Oracle to expand into healthcare.
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“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,” Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison, said in a statement.
Cerner, a leader in helping digitise medical care, provides digital information systems that are used within hospitals and health systems. The duo aims to provide 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.
Cerner’s largest business and most vital clinical system already run on the Oracle database. And, Oracle’s technologies such as cloud, AI, ML will enable the modernisation of Cerner’s systems.
The deal is expected to close in the calendar year 2022, and it would be Oracle’s largest purchase after its 2004 acquisition of PeopleSoft. Cerner will be organised as a dedicated Industry Business Unit within Oracle after the transaction is closed.
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“Healthcare is the largest and most important vertical market in the world—$3.8 trillion last year in the United States alone,” Oracle CEO Safra Catz, said in a statement. “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.”
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cloud has aided the growth of organisations across different sectors, including healthcare, where it is used for telehealth services, electronic medical records, online patient portals, and automation, among others. It has also resulted in larger software firms showing more interest in acquiring companies in the healthcare industry, like Microsoft and Nuance’s $19.7 billion deal.
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