Oracle extends $28.3B offer to acquire electronic health records company Cerner for third time
Cloud giant Oracle on Monday extended the terms of its $28.3 billion offer to acquire Cerner for a third time.
In a press release, the company said it had amended the expiry deadline of its prior all-cash offer of $95 per share for all outstanding shares of common stock in the medical records company until 12 a.m. EST at the end of May 11.
Oracle last month announced that it had extended its offer until 12 a.m. EST at the end of the day on April 13. This followed a previous extension of the offer until the end of the day on March 16.
Both parties are waiting for clearance from U.S. antitrust authorities for the deal to go ahead. So far, regulators in Canada, Germany and Romania have approved the transaction.
Under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice’s anti-trust division typically have 30 days to conduct a preliminary review of the deal. The DOJ has the power either to halt a transaction entirely or require divestitures, and can also seek further extension of a deal waiting period.
If the deal concludes, it will be the biggest ever for Oracle, which has a market value of more than $280 billion.
Cerner’s Millennium platform and its HealtheIntent cloud platform form the backbone of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ electronic health records modernization strategy, which relies on transferring patient data off the VA’s legacy Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA).
The health records platform has attracted scrutiny and criticism from frontline workers and lawmakers following a number of outages and software glitches.
Last Wednesday the Cerner platform went offline for a two-hour period, affecting users across the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Defense and the Coast Guard. A VA spokesperson later that week confirmed that the incident had started with a failure of one of three databases operated by Oracle.
