Oracle Acquiring Medical Records Company Cerner in Massive $28.3 Billion Deal

Oracle is shelling out a whopping $28.3 billion for Cerner, a provider of digital information systems used within hospitals and health systems.

The deal includes an all-cash tender offer for $95 per share. The transaction should close in 2022.

Cerner is in the health care IT industry and a complementary business to Oracle. Cerner will be a dedicated industry business unit within Oracle. Oracle wouldn’t provide additional comments on how this will impact its partners.

New Tools for ‘Overworked’ Medical Professionals

Larry Ellison is Oracle’s chairman and CTO. He said Oracle and Cerner have the capacity to transform health care delivery. They’ll do so by providing medical professionals with better information. They can then make better treatment decisions, resulting in better patient outcomes.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison

“With this acquisition, Oracle’s corporate mission expands to assume the responsibility to provide our overworked 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,” Ellison said. “This new generation of medical information systems promises to lower the administrative workload burdening our medical professionals, improve patient privacy and outcomes, and lower overall health care costs.”

Oracle said there’s significant opportunity to help customers use its technologies such as cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and more to make care more accessible, secure, efficient and effective for patients and caregivers.

Cerner systems running on the Oracle Gen2 Cloud will be available after the deal closes. The goal is to deliver zero unplanned downtime in the medical environment.

‘Huge’ Additional Revenue Growth for Oracle

Safra Catz is Oracle’s CEO.

Oracle’s Safra Catz

“Health care is the largest and most important vertical market in the world, $3.8 trillion last year in the United States alone,” she said. “Oracle’s revenue growth rate has already been increasing this year. 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.”

The revenue opportunity is even bigger than Oracle’s acquisition of NetSuite, Catz said.

David Feinberg is Cerner‘s president and CEO.

“Joining Oracle … provides an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate our work modernizing electronic health records (EHR), improving the caregiver experience, and enabling more connected, high-quality and efficient patient care,” he said. “We are also very excited that Oracle is committed to maintaining and growing our community presence, including in the Kansas City area.”