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An unspecified number of Oracle employees reportedly received layoff letters on September 2, including many who came to the company with its 2021 acquisition of Cerner.
WHY IT MATTERS
A number of Oracle employees based in the company's offices in Kansas City, where Cerner was based, received layoff notices on Tuesday, local station KMBC 9 reported. At least two sources with knowledge of the company’s actions confirmed the layoffs, according to the story.
We have reached out to Oracle for a statement and will update this story if one is provided.
This past month, employees on social media sites discussed reports that layoffs had hit cloud Oracle's infrastructure and IT support. The Silicon Valley Business Journal also reported that 300 Oracle employees were let go in California.
A recent study from KLAS Research explored how Oracle Health customers have been faring three years since the Cerner deal. Many providers expressed frustration with customer service, and several large health systems have since opted to sign with other vendors.
The company "inherited a dissatisfied customer base," said KLAS researchers. "Oracle Health has made big promises, but has not enhanced the customer experience."
Oracle "has lost 57 unique acute care customers in the past three years, 12 of which are health systems with over 1,000 beds," researchers noted.
Others who responded to KLAS report, Oracle Health 2025, however, reported optimism about the EHR's new artificial intelligence features.
They said they are encouraged by the company's Clinical AI Agent as the first among promised EHR enhancements.
In the first quarter of this year, study participants said that their opinion of Oracle Health’s long-term vision noticeably improved, with KLAS researchers finding "optimism reaching a three-year high" for the vendor.
"Nearly all respondents live with Oracle Health’s Clinical AI Agent are highly satisfied with the [tool], describing it as meaningful technology that is applicable across clinical settings," said KLAS researchers. "These early adopters highlight its potential to streamline workflows and provide relevant real-time insights, and several are excited to expand their use."
Respondents not only cited delivery of promised AI, but also improved code quality in more recent releases.
THE LARGER TREND
After Oracle purchased Cerner for $28 billion, adding 28,000 employees once the deal finalized in 2022, the cloud services giant closed several office locations – two in Kansas City – and then reduced staffing in the city by 5,000 jobs.
While a larger shift to greater use of AI technologies, such as its new AI-powered EHR engineered to drive efficiency, improve clinical care and reduce health system costs, is rumored to be a partial cause, a notoriously troubled and expensive federal contract could still be an element triggering more layoffs.
Hundreds of employees at Oracle's Health had already been impacted by issues with the beleaguered U.S. Veterans Affairs EHR Modernization Program since the government implemented financial consequences in 2023.
"Life cycle cost estimates range from VA's $16.1 billion to an independent estimate of $49.8 billion," the Government Accountability Office said in a February report.
According to Oracle, the VA must accelerate EHR deployments to help contain costs, and told lawmakers that month about achieving major milestones during the long pause on system rollouts initiated in 2023, which ended this year.
AI was also cited as a technology to save the VA EHR project. Seema Verma, Oracle Health and Oracle Life Sciences executive vice president, said Oracle was investing in automation to shorten the new EHR testing phase by reducing manual testing efforts, user onboarding and training.
"Automation ensures that each deployment is thoroughly tested in less time, enabling us to support a higher volume of simultaneous deployments without compromising quality," she had said.
ON THE RECORD
"Oracle Health has done several restructurings and has lost talent," one healthcare chief information officer told KLAS in the new 2025 report. "It seems like they have lost a lot of their skilled implementation resources. We have had to re-explain a lot of things, and they have made a lot of suggestions that haven’t worked. Things have been difficult because of the talent that has been brought to the table."
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
