Earlier this month, Cerner announced it will acquire Siemens' health IT division for $1.3 billion.
With the acquisition, Cerner is buying Siemens' Soarian EHR platform and taking on its EHR customers. However, the Siemens' platform has been declining in popularity among U.S. hospitals recently, according to KLAS Research. Providers saw Siemens as too slow in completing implementations, issuing upgrades or big fixes and upgrading their portfolio. According to KLAS, 12 of 16 hospitals that have recently left Siemens have gone to Cerner's main rival, Epic.
Epic currently leads the hospital EHR market, and for the past several years has bested Cerner in number of new clients signed, according to KLAS. The Siemens acquisition will add a modest number of hospital customers to Cerner's roster, though the real boost to Cerner's market share is likely to come from Cerner's plan to use the companies' respective strengths — Cerner's EHR and general health IT expertise and Siemens' medical device and advanced imaging capabilities — to develop new products and end-to-end solutions.
The two companies currently have a combined annual R&D investment of about $650 million, and each company will invest up to $50 million more toward jointly developing new products to enhance the value of providers' EHRs. "The EHR is still going to be the heavy transaction system as you move forward," Cerner President Zane Burke told InformationWeek. "It's going to be the plumbing, the foundation — but you're going to have a layer of smarts on top of that."
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