Oracle Reports Booming Growth, Signaling That its $28 Billion Purchase of Cerner Is Paying Off

In its quarterly earnings release earlier this month, Oracle Corporation reported its 2023 Q2 results, indicating that “revenues were up 18% year-over-year in USD and up 25% in constant currency to $12.3 billion.” This is an astounding accomplishment, especially in the context and background of economic uncertainty and recession headwinds. Notably, Cerner contributed $1.5 billion to the total revenue, denoting it as a significant source of sustainable profit.

Cerner is a leading electronic health records (EHR) company, with a wide variety of offerings and services in the healthcare management and data space. Late last year, Oracle purchased Cerner for nearly $28 billion dollars, an amount which was both celebrated and cautiously praised. For many, the sticker price was incredibly high. But co-founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, was clear in his vision for the purchase: “Working together, Cerner and Oracle have the capacity to transform healthcare delivery by providing medical professionals with better information—enabling them to make better treatment decisions resulting in better patient outcomes.”

In this month’s press release, Ellison was equally emphatic about his goals and vision for Cerner and for Oracle’s overall progress in healthcare. He explained: “Since the acquisition, Cerner has contributed to Oracle’s growth—and Oracle has helped Cerner improve its technology […] But we are just beginning our mission to modernize healthcare information systems. In the wake of the COVID pandemic, there is a worldwide sense of urgency to transform and improve national healthcare systems. Our goals are ambitious: fully automate clinical trials to shorten the time it takes to deliver lifesaving new drugs to patients, enable doctors to easily access better information leading to better patient outcomes, and provide public health professionals with an early warning system that locates and identifies new pathogens in time to prevent the next pandemic. The scale of this opportunity is unprecedented—and so is the responsibility that goes along with it.”

The entire technology industry wants a piece of the digital health and healthcare information landscape, as healthcare is increasingly turning to innovation to solve some of its hardest problems. Bedrock technology companies like Cerner provide robust value—not only in terms of advanced data and information handling to enable better clinical care, but also in their capacity to constantly innovate.

Other technology giants, similar to Oracle, have started to embrace this opportunity. Take for example Google, which continues to put forth an incredibly diverse suite of technology solutions for healthcare. The company’s latest initiative with the Google Cloud Healthcare Data Engine is poised to become one of the strongest forces in healthcare data management, and will undoubtedly be a game-changer.

Notably, smaller organizations are also working on innovating in this space, from startups to boutique analytics shops. These organizations are leveraging data and unique insights to enable better clinical outcomes. Take for example Komodo Health. The company has leveraged its technology to create its Healthcare Map software, which provides a survey of “330 million patients, 15 million new clinical encounters daily, and 150 million payer-complete profiles.” This entails “75% overlap with 350 hospitals and a 96% overlap across 11 billion lab records [which] offer unparalleled insight into the patient journey.”

Another notable company is Flatiron Health, which has created a robust array of services and technology focused on oncology, life sciences, and hospital systems. The company has grown tremendously over the last few years, drawing on insights from “More than 3 million patient records available,” of which “75% are from community practices, [and] 25% are from academic cancer centers.”

Therefore, it is evident that this space is rapidly becoming one of the most sought-after opportunities for technology companies and organizations worldwide. The next decade will certainly see many more companies investing and innovating in this arena. Technology pundits and healthcare organizations will be challenged to embrace this innovation in order to not only stay relevant, but also to best serve their communities.