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Cerner acquires Siemens, what does this really mean?
The big announcement this week, Cerner acquires Siemens. Well, not officially until 2015. This wasn’t a big surprise actually. Blogs including HISTalk have been suggesting this since May. Perhaps its the fact that there are only a handful of truly prominent Electronic Health Management vendors out there, and two of the biggest are merging. But the real question is what does this mean for consultants and our clients.
First, nothing is going to happen to Soarian customers. Period. So if you are supporting Siemens Soarian projects, no worries. The real impact would be to clients on an older Siemens system. They’ll obviously be forced into making decisions in the next year to either go with Cerner, or look elsewhere. It’s clear Siemens had no intention of updating its software, as they’ve lost more clients last year then all other vendors combined. In fact Siemens lost over 75 clients last year, followed by Cerner losing 35, and MEDITECH losing 25 (according to recent KLAS release). Notice no mention of Epic. They don’t lose clients.
The good news continues to be that Siemens Legacy support work will continue to grow. Remote help desk support for the next 3-5 years?! Sign me up! What will be interesting to watch is how Epic battles to keep it’s ability to tout that they service 51% of the US population. Cerner will no doubt impact continued growth of it’s client base by now having a jump ahead of the competition with current Siemens customers. What do you think? Good news or bad?
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