It has hardly been a year since cloud company, Oracle, acquired Cerner, the electronic healthcare records firm, and already 3,000 employees have been laid off from the latter. Employees in the engineering, accounting, marketing, product and legal departments have been impacted.
Oracle has reportedly imposed a pause on increments and promotions too. In fact, Insider reports that employees at the company were told that they shouldn’t expect any promotions or hikes this year.
Oracle had acquired Cerner with the aim of trying to replace the time spent by clinicians in performing administrative tasks with more detailed interactions with patients, so that the quality of care can be immensely improved.
The objective was to use the power of data to create a collaborative ecosystem that allowed patients, healthcare providers and other stakeholders to securely access data —clinical, operational and financial — on the cloud.
At the time of acquisition of Cerner in 2022, leaders of Oracle had enthusiastically talked about the Oracle-Cerner collaboration transforming the delivery of healthcare by offering a whole new generation of contemporary and secure healthcare information systems.
Cerner, being one of the oldest firms to develop electronic medical records and offer systems capable of handling the data storage activities for doctors’ offices, clinics and hospitals, its acquisition by Oracle had grabbed headlines last year. The acquisition deal had cost Oracle about $28.4 billion.
