Epic vs Oracle Health (formerly Cerner)

Not for procurement purposes. Oracle completed the acquisition on 8 June 2022 and the healthcare business is presented as Oracle Health: Oracle's fiscal 2026 annual report lists 'Oracle Health applications' among its cloud application lines, and the federal ONC dataset of certified health IT reported by hospitals names the developer 'Oracle Health'. The Cerner name persists in Oracle's SEC filings when they refer to the acquired legal entity - Oracle's fiscal 2026 10-K still says 'following our acquisition of Cerner Corporation' - and in installed-base shorthand among clinicians. If you are writing an RFP, use Oracle Health and note the former name once.

On the best free federal measure, the 2024 ASTP/ONC quick stat drawn from the Medicare Promoting Interoperability programme, 1,951 of 4,058 reporting non-federal acute care hospitals reported certified health IT from Epic Systems Corporation and 999 reported Oracle Health, with MEDITECH third at 716. ONC states in its own narrative that 48 percent of participants reported at least one Epic product. Three things keep this from being a clean 'market share' number: hospitals may report products from more than one developer, so the figures do not sum to 100 percent; the denominator is hospitals participating in one Medicare programme, not all US hospitals; and counting facilities weights a 25-bed critical access hospital the same as a 1,200-bed academic centre. It is nonetheless a real, citable, free federal figure, which is more than most published share estimates can claim.

This is the wrong shape of question to answer from the data that is publicly available. The 2024 ONC quick stat is a single-year snapshot showing Oracle Health second at 999 hospitals against Epic's 1,951. A snapshot showing a gap is not evidence of movement; you would need at least two years of the same dataset, matched at hospital level, to say whether facilities are switching, and in which direction. What can be said without overreach is that the gap is large, that it existed before the acquisition, and that the underlying dataset is public if you want to build the time series rather than rely on someone else's characterisation. Anyone quoting a switching rate without naming a two-period source is inferring, not measuring.

The publicly verifiable position is that Epic is reported by roughly twice as many acute care hospitals as Oracle Health in the 2024 federal data. Whether that constitutes 'losing' depends on the measure - hospital count, bed count, revenue, or non-US installed base - and the free federal dataset only supports the first. Oracle's own risk disclosure is the most candid public statement on the competitive position: its fiscal 2026 10-K states that following the Cerner acquisition it faces competition from large healthcare IT providers including Epic Systems Corporation. That is a company acknowledging a competitive market in a document it can be sued over, which is a better source than a vendor blog on either side.

A total purchase price of $28.2 billion, per Note 2 of Oracle's Form 10-K for fiscal 2023. The mechanics: a merger agreement signed 20 December 2021; a cash tender offer opened 19 January 2022 at $95.00 per share; completion on 8 June 2022, at which point Cerner became an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle. Oracle recognised $12.0 billion of customer relationship, order backlog, developed technology and trade name intangibles from the transaction, and borrowed $15.7 billion under a bridge credit agreement on the closing date to part-finance it, subsequently refinancing through term loans and $12.3 billion of senior notes.

It belongs on any shortlist that is genuinely open rather than a two-horse race with a rubber stamp. MEDITECH was reported by 716 acute care hospitals in the 2024 federal data - third of 88 developers - and it is the only one of the three that has stayed independent through the sector's consolidation. It is also the only one with historical audited public financials that are still free to read: its last Form 10-K, filed 31 January 2020 for fiscal 2019, reported revenue of $493.8 million, and its filings remain on EDGAR under CIK 0001011452. That gives a diligence baseline Epic cannot offer at all. The trade-off is scale: on hospital count it is a third of Epic's footprint.

No, and treating it as if it does is a common RFP error. The information blocking regime at 45 CFR part 171 - which now contains ten exceptions, not the eight in the original 2020 rule - applies to health care providers, health IT developers of certified health IT, and health information networks. Certified EHR technology requirements attach to the certified product. TEFCA participation is a separate decision about which QHIN you connect through. All three vendors operate under the same federal obligations. What differs, and what is worth scoring in an RFP, is how each vendor operationalises the exceptions in its default configuration, what it charges under the Fees exception, and what its licensing terms do under the Licensing exception.

Weight the things that are contractually specific and financially material over the things that are brand-level. Total cost of ownership across the full contract term, including internal implementation staffing, not licence cost alone. Data portability and exit terms, which are the single hardest thing to renegotiate later. Interface and integration commitments in writing, with acceptance criteria. Roadmap and support continuity commitments, which matter more where a platform has recently changed owner. Reference sites matched to your size, case mix and state regulatory environment rather than to the vendor's best story. Corporate financial transparency is worth a real, small weight rather than a large one: it changes what you can verify independently, which is not nothing on a decade-long commitment.

Yes, which is the point of using it. The ASTP/ONC quick stat 'Hospital Certified Health IT Developers' analyses the public dataset 'Certified Health Information Technology Reported by Hospitals for Promoting Interoperability Performance'. The 2024 edition covers 4,058 non-federal acute care hospitals that reported for the Medicare Promoting Interoperability programme and 88 distinct developers. Because both the quick stat and the underlying dataset are public and free, an analyst in your own organisation can reproduce the counts, restrict them to your state or bed-size band, or extend them across years - none of which is possible with the subscription market-share reports these figures are usually sourced from.