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https://www.cerner.com/


https://www.forbes.com/sites/saibala/2023/12/21/oracle-health-cerner-and-the-long-term-potential-to-disrupt-healthcare/?sh=7f23085b6914


Oracle announced its quarterly results last week, posting a Q2 total revenue of nearly $12.9 billion, indicating a year-over-year increase of nearly 5%. The company impressed investors across numerous lines of business, most notably in cloud revenue, up nearly 25%.
One key area that investors and Wall Street have been keeping a close eye on is the technology giant’s work with Cerner, which was acquired by Oracle in 2021 for nearly $28 billion. Since then, the company has continued to invest significant resources into Oracle Health, offering customers a variety of tools that can help optimize clinical workflows, better manage healthcare data infrastructure, and generate data-driven insights, among others. At its core, Cerner is one of the most widely used electronic health records (EHR) systems; now, backed by Oracle’s much wider scope and technology, there are many potential ways to scale this technology.On this front, Oracle is certainly playing the long game. Notably, the Cerner business has faced continued headwinds; earlier this year, Oracle enforced a cost reduction effort across multiple lines of business including Cerner, resulting in layoffs. In September’s earnings announcement, Chief Executive Officer of Oracle, Safra Catz, explained that the transition of Cerner to the cloud and the movement of customers from licensed purchases to cloud subscriptions has resulted in head-winds to the business. However, both Catz and Oracle Chairman, Founder, and CTO, Larry Ellison, expressed their satisfaction with how the transition was progressing.In last week’s call, the executives offered a similar sentiment, expressing their generally bullish outlook on Cerner’s growth and its potential to create significant market impact. Notably, the company continues to expand in its technology; Ellison thoughtfully explained in the call that the organization is “doing a lot of things that Cerner never did in what is now called Oracle Health.” Among the examples he cited was a telecommunication module that swiftly summarizes an encounter between a physician and a patient and automatically pens the note, leveraging large language models (LLMs) to empower accuracy and speed.
And true to Ellison’s word, on the larger scope of Oracle Health, there has been significant growth, ranging from enabling more robust diagnostics (e.g., obtaining better insights from pathology images) to tools like Cerner HealtheIntent—a robust health and data intelligence platform for population-scale public health management.
Undoubtedly, the company is facing stiff competition. Many large technology giants and cloud providers have invested deeply into the healthcare data space, given that it is a trillion dollar market opportunity. Companies are also ramping up their own offerings to ease the day-to-day practice of medicine; for example, Microsoft’s acquisition of and work with Nuance aims to solve the very tangible burden of clinical documentation for physicians. Nuance works to listen to physician-patient encounters and automatically transcribe notes using LLMs, and has had tremendous market success already. Google Cloud’s latest announcement of its medical large language model, Med-PaLM 2, has also inspired significant excitement, given its diverse potential use-cases and results.Nevertheless, regardless of other industry giants, Oracle has carved out its own niche, akin to the growth of its cloud business over the last decade, despite other hyper-competitive market forces. While the company is still ironing out the transition of Cerner to the cloud and continues to build out use-cases, the reality is that Oracle has already built out valuable products for the entire healthcare ecosystem, including services that can benefit payers, providers, governments and even health service companies.This progress is what inspired Ellison to confidently exclaim on the earnings call—“we expect Cerner to be a growth story.” Assuredly, Oracle’s growth over the last 20 years has lived up to this challenge—continued gains in market share, thoughtful innovation, and timely disruption. Though the next chapter is still unwritten, given the company’s illustrious past, the road ahead is promising.