Oracle → Cerner
Oracle paid $28.3bn in cash for Cerner, the Kansas City maker of hospital electronic health records, on the argument that a database and cloud company could modernise clinical software — and inherited the US veterans' health-record overhaul, which the government delayed within weeks and paused within a year.
An all-cash tender at $95 a share for the electronic health records vendor, Oracle's largest acquisition.
- Value
- $28.3B
- Announced
- December 2021
- Completed
- June 2022
- Sector
- Healthcare
- Deal type
- acquisition
- Acquirer
- Oracle (United States)
- Target
- Cerner (United States)
Why it mattered
Cerner, founded in 1979, sold hospitals the Millennium health-record platform, and its largest clinical system already ran on Oracle's database. Oracle presented healthcare as "the largest and most important vertical market in the world" — $3.8 trillion of spending in the United States alone — and compared the opportunity to its earlier purchase of NetSuite, only larger. The plan, set out by Mike Sicilia, Oracle's head of industry businesses, was to move Cerner's systems to Oracle's cloud and make a hands-free voice assistant their main interface, so that clinicians would spend less time typing.
The agreement was announced on 20 December 2021: a tender offer at $95 a share, which Oracle said would add to its non-GAAP earnings in the first full year. Cerner had just hired David Feinberg from Google Health as chief executive. On 1 June 2022 Oracle announced that all antitrust approvals, including the European Commission's, had been obtained. About 66% of the shares were tendered, and the deal closed on 8 June, financed partly with $15.7bn borrowed that day under a term loan. Cerner became Oracle Health.
What it left behind
Cerner added $5.9bn to Oracle's revenue in the year to May 2023. The Department of Veterans Affairs' new health record, built on Cerner's system, had gone live at only five medical centres when the VA, after delaying new sites from July 2022 over performance problems, paused roll-outs altogether in April 2023; the department updated its contracts "to better hold Oracle Health accountable". Deployments resumed with four Michigan hospitals on 11 April 2026; eleven centres had gone live by August, and the VA plans to reach all 170 by November 2031. In early 2025 attackers breached legacy Cerner servers holding patient records. Sicilia, who had pitched the modernisation, became one of Oracle's two chief executives in September 2025. A buyer whose target carries a government programme under congressional scrutiny is buying that programme's timetable, and its politics, along with the code.