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Software giant Oracle Corp. is acquiring medical records company Cerner Corp. for $28.3 billion amid a huge surge of mergers and acquisitions this year.
The deal is Oracle’s largest to date – exceeding its $10.3 billion acquisition of PeopleSoft in 2004 – and it strengthens its foothold in the healthcare sector, the Austin, Texas-based company said Monday.
Cerner shareholders will receive $95 in cash for each of their shares, representing a 5.8 percent premium to the company’s closing price of $90 on Friday.
Cerner will help Oracle shift its business towards the cloud, which it has been slow to embrace, The Wall Street Journal reported
.
The deal is expected to close in 2022. Cerner’s shares were up less than 1 percent to $90.64 while Oracle’s were down about 4.5 percent to $92.26.
During the pandemic, demand for cloud-based solutions in healthcare has increased, including telehealth services as as automation of health records. In 2013, Cerner’s database helped to identify and track down a nurse serial killer, as The Post reported.
Oracle said it expects Cerner to be “a huge additional revenue growth engine for years to come.”
“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,” Larry Ellison, Oracle’s billionaire chairman and chief technology officer, said in a statement.
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