Cerner’s business now consolidated under Oracle Health

The internal memo doesn’t say so but doesn’t really have to. The sunsetting of the Cerner brand (logo left) has begun. HISTalk this evening reported on Friday 15 July’s Cerner internal announcement posted on Reddit, vetted by the Kansas City Business Journal (paywalled), and it’s not all that surprising:

• The business unit is now called Oracle Health Global Industry Unit (GIU) or Oracle Health
• The chairman of Oracle Health will be David Feinberg, MD, late CEO of Cerner and previously of UCLA Health, Geisinger Health, and Google’s last effort at Health. 
• Travis Dalton is being promoted to run the Oracle Health GIU as General Manager from running Cerner Government Services as Client Services Officer
• Cerner’s engineering and product executives will be reporting to Oracle’s Don Johnson who runs all Oracle engineering for all applications and platform services. This includes former CTO Jerome Labat who received a stay deal along with Dr. Feinberg [TTA 21 Jan, 26 Jan]. Mr. Labat has at least 11 million good reasons (and Dr. Feinberg 22 million) to stay for the next year and a day from the closing on 8 June.
• Cerner’s corporate functions, such as IT, finance, legal, and HR, will move into Oracle’s centralized, global teams, which typically means that pink slips will be the order of the day if they haven’t already been received
• More disclosed to employees at a town hall on that Friday 
• No external announcement has been made as of 1845 19 July (Eastern Time)

Our Readers who have been following the acquisition and personally been through acquisitions know the stage was set by Larry Ellison’s Big Pronouncements on Healthcare Transformation at the closing [TTA 14 June]. It was all about what Oracle would be doing in building a national health record database and more, with nary a mention of Cerner. The eventual elimination of the Cerner name should thus be no surprise to industry observers. Cerner was a pearl bought at a great price ($28 billion) to make Oracle the Visionary Leader In Healthcare and provide Mr. Ellison with a Grand Finale.

How this will be received by health system and provider customers–including DOD and the ever-troublesome VA–is anyone’s guess. This Editor has previously speculated that health systems with Cerner EHRs were not going to be enthusiastic about replacing Cerner’s current third-party vendors with Oracle services and technology, especially if they worked well or if Oracle costs more. If the move to OCI–Oracle Cloud Infrastructure–doesn’t go as smooth as brand new glass, another black mark in the copybook. The other would be resentment of Oracle’s announced and completely expected hard sell on other services to make up the cost of the pearl. [TTA 15 June]

Almost an ideal scenario for Epic to sell against, one would think. As for the VA, Oracle needs to fix the Cerner Millenium rollout now under heavy scrutiny–fast and right.