PHILADELPHIA – Cerner Corp. of Kansas City said Monday that it has completed its $1.3 billion purchase of Siemens Health Services, joining two rivals in the rapidly changing field of health-information technology.
Cerner offered jobs to all but a few of the roughly 2,800 Siemens employees in Malvern, a small town outside Philadelphia, with 95 percent to 97 percent of them accepting the offer, said Dick Flanigan, a senior vice president at Cerner.
“We wanted to maintain and build upon much of the work that’s been done by the Malvern team,” said Flanigan, adding that the deal included Siemens’s corporate campus. “We’ve got a strong physical presence that will be maintained in Malvern.”
The Philadelphia-area operations have their roots in the former Shared Medical Systems Inc., an early developer of computer and software systems of hospitals. Siemens bought Shared Medical in 2000 for $2.1 billion, after the company hit a rough patch and fended off a hostile takeover attempt.
The Siemens business remains heavily anchored in its legacy products that allow hospitals to get paid by billing patients and insurance companies. Flanigan said that Cerner hopes to sell some of its new products to those long-term Siemens customers.
Cerner offers a much broader range of products, Flanigan said. A bigger part of its business involves what is called the electronic medical record, which, for example, enables and helps keeps track of medicals tests and other treatments.
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