Software company Oracle is the latest to join the job layoff bandwagon. Media reports suggest that the company has laid off hundreds of employees, withdrawn job offers and cut back open positions within its health unit.
The laid-off employees will receive severance pay equal to four weeks, plus one additional week for every year of service, and a payout of vacation days.
Reports suggest that Oracle’s $28 billion takeover of electronic medical records firm Cerner last year could have been the trigger for the latest round of layoffs.
The deal, which was Oracle’s biggest ever after its acquisition of PeopleSoft in 2004, aimed to help the software maker bolster the services it provides to healthcare clients, including insurers.
It is to be noted that Cerner is the biggest seller of software used for electronic recording of healthcare data in the United States after Epic Systems Corp.
The US Department of Veterans Affairs had hired Cerner in 2018 — when Donald Trump was the President — to replace its manual medical records with Cerner’s digital technology. The department is charged with providing lifelong healthcare services to eligible military veterans at the 170 VA medical centers and outpatient clinics located throughout the country
However, the $10 billion plan to revamp the medical records system hit a dead end in April this year, amid various privacy and security concerns.
“We’ve heard from Veterans and VA clinicians that the new electronic health record is not meeting expectations – and we’re holding Oracle Cerner and ourselves accountable to get this right,” said Veteran Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough.
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