Over the past few months, Cerner has grown its partnerships with healthcare players including Amazon and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and appointed new executives.
Here are 11 moves the Kansas City, Mo.-based EHR giant has made since June:
1. Cerner laid off 100 employees June 23 as part of its third round of layoffs since September 2019. The company eliminated 386 employee positions collectively in September and November 2019 as part of its ongoing effort to curb costs and increase operating margins. At the time, Cerner said it plans to hire 5,000 new employees by the end of 2020 and workers who were laid off are eligible to apply for the upcoming positions.
2. In July, Cerner announced it will not reopen its company offices until 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and instructed its employees to continue working from home.
3. Cerner has welcomed a handful of new executives over the last few months, including Peter Liebert as Cerner Government Services' new vice president and chief information security officer; William Mintz as Cerner's new chief strategy officer; and Ron Lattomus as the company's new director of federal programs.
4. On July 23, Cerner announced a new agreement to deploy Holon Solutions' point-of-care platform that can extract relevant patient information from Cerner's population health platform and deliver it into the clinician's EHR workflow. Later that month, Cerner also partnered with Nuance to integrate its virtual assistant tech into its Millennium EHR, giving clinicians the ability to navigate the platform using voice commands.
5. Cerner in July launched a new cloud-based EHR offering, dubbed CommunityWorks Foundations, to help rural and critical access hospitals speed up the implementation process and reduce costs.
6. The EHR vendor, during the second quarter of fiscal year 2020, bought an unnamed cybersecurity company for $35 million. On Aug. 3, revenue cycle management services provider R1 announced it finalized its acquisition of Cerner's RevWorks services business.
7. Cerner and investment firm LRVHealth invested $6 million in digital health startup Xealth as part of a new collaboration in August. The partnership between Xealth and Cerner will provide patients their digital data in an effort to improve patient engagement in their treatment plans.
8. In August, Politico reported that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs plans to resume its $16 billion Cerner EHR go-live in October after delays earlier this year. Later that month, the U.S. Coast Guard began deploying the Department of Defense's new Cerner EHR system at four medical facility pilot sites in California. Cerner and the VA also introduced a revised schedule for the project roll out, kicking off go-lives at Midwest VA facilities.
9. Cerner teamed up with Testing for America in August to support efforts to bring rapid and affordable COVID-19 testing to students, faculty and staff at historically Black colleges and universities.
10. Amazon on Aug. 27 launched its new health tracking device Halo, which is integrated into Cerner's EHR solutions to allow device users to opt in to share their health data directly into their EHR and with care teams that use Cerner. San Diego-based Sharp Healthcare was the first Cerner client to participate in the collaboration.
11. Finland officials partnered with Cerner in September to help build a new digital platform that will combine healthcare and social services, providing citizens with access to integrated outpatient and inpatient care, behavioral healthcare and family services.