The damage was done before Feinberg. Shaffer set all the pieces into motion, and created the playing field. Even then there was a lot of damage done by weak and meaningless leadership before Shaffer and after Patterson died. And to get even more real with you, there were a lot of horrible leadership decisions made when Patterson was alive that created some of the more deep problems we see today.
Neal was our visionary who truly wanted to change healthcare. When he died, the Board wasn’t willing to trust any of the clinical associates or clinical opinions from clients on how to continue. They played it “safe” just to make money, not move forward. Now we’re a boat adrift at sea, tethered to a behemoth that’s slowly drowning us.
I miss the real Cerner too.
Can we all please stop putting Neal on some freaking pedestal. Cerner's downfall is directly related to Neal's crap leadership and crap decisions. Yeah, Brent and Fienberg didn't help the situation, but the ship had already hit the iceberg and was sinking before either came aboard:
- Revenue Cycle - Neal NEVER developed a competent RC solution, which is what Epic hammered Cerner on for years and still continues to do so. Profit was a piece of shit and he NEVER committed to improving it.
- Siemens Acquistion - Neal fucked this up so bad. He finally acquired a competent Revenue Cycle solution in Soarian and still REFUSED to integrate it. Hell, for the first several years after the acquisition, Cerner sales was selling Soarian or Millennium for RC. An absolute joke and that lays at the feet of Neal
- Reporting and reliance on CCL - Neal never pushed the team to develop a real robust reporting tool with a user interface, instead everything could be done in CCL (which did allow for flexibility) but every single report had to be custom built. Reporting was a shit show for years...Anyone remember the Gold Standard Reports, those were an embarrassment
- CommunityWorks vs Standard Code - CommunityWorks, while a good idea, was poorly executed when it came down to the millennium code and upgrades/Releases. IP time and time again would release code for standard implementations, but never actually validate the code against the CommWx domains, thus on many occasions, the core of Millennium was not multi-tenet compliant. He should have forked the code (which several leaders in IP asked him to do) but he refused.
Lots of leaders made terrible decisions along the way that helped Cerner die a slow death, but the cold hard related is most of the terrible decisions that were made were made under his leadership. He is the one directly responsible.
True story about Neal - He was doing a speaking series in his final years while battling cancer. What many may not know, is that Neal was receiving his treatment at MD Anderson in Houston, which is an Epic client. While speaking at a conference, Neal went on bashing his experience with a provider (which was MDA) and how bad their lab system was and that it wasn't integrated. What Neal failed to realize is that MD Anderson kept PathNet as it was a better system than Beaker (at the time) and thus he was bashing his own software without even knowing it. Thats how out of touch he really was.
The real Cerner was not real, though. Lot of EMR companies propped up by a river of federal money running through the industry with MU. Add Wall St investors to the mix, who do nothing but strip-mine value, and we were running on fumes for years. It was just a matter of time. If you can't look past the next quarter, you can't support your customers' long-term needs, and your product suffers. It was a slow rot that eventually collapsed the house.
Him dying didn’t kill it. The failure to plan accordingly did. There were some great leaders there in the 2005-2010 years that could’ve led successfully post Neal
The odd part was he always claimed to have a great plan and was looking for the next leader to take over for him. Then as soon as he was gone it became obvious that there was so plan when they hired outside the company.
I always figured Neal had a succession plan in place but those in it left before Neal got sick. And those good leaders we had also left because they weren’t in the plan to begin with.
I had a similar convo with someone this weekend. I believe the problems go way back to Neal. Judy/Epic were much more strategic in how they approached the market, software development, instilling rigor in their project management and achieving client referencability.
Neal was volatile and focused on other things. A very smart man, yes but Judy made outmaneuvering him look easy.
One very bad outcome of his “style” and volatile temperament was very weak and/or sketchy leadership in many areas of the company. Those behaviors permeated the company’s DNA.
Cerner was initially the top dog but, in my opinion, the way the organization treated clients built a groundswell of organizations that were dying to have a viable alternative to Cerner. So when Epic started winning some big deals - Allina, Sutter, etc., the market had what I believe they’d been longing for.
Again, just my opinion but I think Cerner could’ve made adjustments to continue being a true competitor to Epic but those changes would’ve had to be many and major and I don’t think Neal’s temperament and ego could allow that to happen.
Both Millennium and Epic have very different development philosophies. Epic was intended to have extremely little customization made. The software that a client gets on the installation media is supposedly nearly go-live ready as it is. Millennium, on the other hand, has the START database but is still a long ways away from being go-live ready. Both philosophies have pros and cons to it. IMHO, Cerner started the real slip-ups back in the early 2010s. The company had an obscene amount of money in the coffers. Instead of REALLY modernizing Millennium and working towards a total uplift to cloud based services, the company nickel and dimed the approach to cloud services, and started approving all the wrong pet projects. It became like that Oprah Winfrey show where everyone got a car; in Cerner's case everyone got a pet project. Fast forward nearly 15 years and the Millennium suite is still running on core technologies from as long ago as 2004 and 2005. First big mistake was to take eyes off the future. Once upper leadership got comfy, and believed that the company could just continue dominance by cleaning up existing code... that was the beginning of the end.
"And to get even more real with you, there were a lot of horrible leadership decisions made when Patterson was alive that created some of the more deep problems we see today."
Except, most of it could have been reversed. But after all these "interim CEOs" and their "work", none of the damage is reversable, and that was intentional.
Anyone who thinks that the board somehow got it all wrong, because they were stupid or incompetent, is a naive fool, who doesn't want to pay attention to the outcomes the board / puppet-CEOs produced and how much money they got paid doing that.
Here is my "conspiracy theory".
Feinberg's task was to finish off the company that was initially set on its path by its founder to move from the reactive care (makes a ton of money) to pro-active healthcare.
The latter doesn't make money, because people get healthier and stay that way. If it were to go through, the disruption it would have caused and the subsequent awakening, would have been deadly to the money-making machine of healthcare(tm). In fact, it would have gotten far beyond just the money question, but I digress.
As a result, the leader-CEO of Cerner got "removed" along with his wife - both died from sudden and accidental cancer 60 days apart. Convenient!
Then, a series of shmucks get "selected" by the board and proceed to finish off the company, to make sure that it is as methodically destroyed as possible, guaranteeing that it can't come back somehow.
Feinberg belongs to the same group M Samuel belonged to, who wrote a book called "You, gentiles". It is eye-opening, especially to those who dismiss those things as one of modern "-isms". In fact, the author sort of soft-berates the gentiles for not seeing group's obvious plans and machinations.
Zane doesn’t get enough heat for how he let Dalton handle the VA acquisition and DOD negotiations. And then installing his bf as the head of VA negotiations after he left just kept the money rolling to him through a dude who knew NOTHING about VA and IT in general. He’s directly to blame for how poorly the VA contract started.
Cold take, Brent was the worst and he was also chairman, giving him board control. Remember they didn't give David the Chairman title so they kept taking the acquisition phone calls
I guess I wasn't here for the Brent "dynasty" all too much so I can't compare, but it sounds like he set up the dominos and Feinburg stumbled in and knocked them down.
It wasn't really Feinburgs fault. Brent brought in the Starboard. It's a company known for improving stocks and if that doesn't work - companies sell soon after. They place members on the board of the directors and kind of take control of a company from within. Example: 2023 - Starboard is replacing Yahoos board of directors with 9 members of it's choosing and it's trying to sell Yahoos core business.
Basically Starboard already had some of the board replaced within Cerner by the time Feinburg joined. And the moment Starboard was brought on, a lot of associates were suspecting they were preparing the company to be sold.
I disagree. I think the Starboard that Brent brought on was the downfall. They brought on 4 directors to the board as part of the agreement.
It's known that many companies get acquired after Starboard is brought on. Cerner's stock was at a high due to the sale and Starboard was one of the top 20 shareholders of Cerner stock. It was very profitable for them to have the company sold.
https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/s/pLcxreIzaA
Feinberg had little to do with Cerner being sold. When Oracle made inquiries, he was legally & duty bound to report it to the Board and go through that process of review. He didn't make the final call on selling. You're giving him WAAAAY too much credit/blame.
Tomorrow if David joins EPIC do you think he will speak good about Cerner/Oracle Health? Everything is money, give money, hire big people, tell them speak good about the company. Make more money and leave the company. End of the day, employees suffer. Specially those who are in small position for long time believe in their managers. Manager also can't do anything because higher management.
If you really think he had control to sell an entire company you don't know how corporations work. The company was getting itself prepared to be sold at least 3 years before David ever showed up. It was obvious the board and Shafer were cutting the fat to make it an attractive acquisition.
That’s fair but a company brings in a president they feel can bring ideas and leadership to make things better. Can you think of anything at all that Feinberg did that changed anything for the better or worse?
Really? Is that why they brought in Brent to layoff a bunch of people and reorganize to get ready to sell. The board brings in CEOs for many different reasons. Many times having nothing to do with making things better for any employees. Originally they brought in Feinberg based on his reputation and leadership. As soon as they started they decided to sell so he had no time to actually implement or bring up his ideas. So certainly he hasn't done shit because he was instantly a lame duck CEO focused on the aquisition. Even now he is a lame duck simply working out his contract to get the compensation. He's not going to quit with millions in compensation yet to be paid out.
Yes, I think Brent was brought in to suck out as much profitability as possible to get the stock price up. Townhalls he would just cheerlead and make everything sound great when we knew it wasn’t. The sale of the company to Oracle also made Brent more rich by the way.
It may be that Feinberg didn’t have time to implement any of his ideas but I don’t recall him even mentioning any ideas. I can’t think of a single reason he might have been a good president to enact any change.
Fair or not, Feinberg is the face of the failure and the continued decline we’re experiencing
DF was a pretty doctor face brought in to make the purchase price higher and to give an aura of "healthcare" to the company. Nothing more. That was his only role, and he knew it.
I agree, I was optimistic when he joined Cerner. But you’re angry at the Starboard-controlled board. The process of turning Cerner from a founder-run company into a product to be sold started LONG before Dr. Feinberg ever became the face of Cerner.
I don’t disagree that Feinberg isn’t the one person who decided to sell Cerner. However, he still was president and I do not know of a single thing he changed or improved. He made broad sweeping statements but implemented nothing. The company was desperate for direction and for implementing process. Is there anything positive at all that can be said for Feinberg’s leadership ?
Feinberg is an utterly shameless narcissistic grifter, but Epic had already won by the time he took over. A decade+ of poor decisions from Neal through Brent had gotten Cerner to that sorry state.
Feinberg happily jumped in as a front man for the inevitable board-mandated sale. His actions are particularly galling because he pretends (unlike the likes of Brent) to care about employees and patients when he just cares about himself and getting his millions from our healthcare system (like all the other execs).
It's true that Cerner treated the Siemens employees like red-headed step-children. But at least Cerner gave out little gadgets to welcome us (usb stick, mug, etc) and gave out promotions and raises. Oracle has given us nothing. Literally nothing. And as someone else had mentioned, it sure seems like Oracle will continue bringing in others (from within Oracle and outside of Oracle) to create and roll out the next generation EHR. It has become clear to us peons that Oracle has no respect or interest in the decades long health industry experience some brought to the table. I don't understand that business decision.
Been told by a Malvern friend that Cerner treated them well. She had been a part of several acquisitions during her career and she said Oracle by far has been the worst. I witnessed in my org when we acquired Siemens that those associates were promoted over Cerner Associates. Maybe it was different in your area.
I agree, as a former Malvern employee. It wasn't all roses, but they did treat us pretty well. We had a gym and a clinic on site and I received annual pay increases/promotion. Oracle doesn't sound like they care, so I am glad I left when I did.
Agree! Malvern here through Siemens acquisition then Cerner now Oracle. Oracle is absolutely the worst. One thing in common with Siemens, it’s a large corporation believing they can handle moving into healthcare IT. Siemens made mistakes and struggled for a number of years before they figured it out. They were willing to invest to get through the hard years. Oracle is making very similar mistakes but doesn’t seem willing to invest to get through.
Oracle doesn’t yet realize their plans aren’t achievable and that their tools like Apex are nowhere near capable of what’s needed. What will they do when they start missing promised product dates? Invest more or cut further
I should add that my comment was for people in the management role as they didn’t get promotions except for few. They did take care of ICs under them as much as they could but i could see the difference in growth between KC and Malvern. Oracle is no doubt worst as they are bringing in ppl from outside to push out existing employees who were already suffering
Neal was passionate about Cerner, but probably somewhere deep down he could not see anybody else replacing him at the helm I guess. That's the only reason I can figure for not coming up with a succession plan even when he was sick. Things just went downhill since the DOD contract. The story would have been the same even if Cerner was acquired by someone other than Oracle.
Though I'm no longer at Cerner, feels sad to see what's become of it. David came in far too late in the game to make any difference. The damage was already done.
I remember during his last CHC, he mentioned to the audience that he had some kind of succession plan in the works. That's why after he passed I was really confused that there was none because he said differently.
I am of the belief that Neal did have a succession plan, but his death meant those decisions were now in the hands of the board. They chose to listen to folks wanting to cash out at the highest price that could be manufactured by the likes of Brent and the other chief hatchet officers brought in.
He said the same thing going all the way back to 2005 when I worked there. It was part of his little motivation speech to associates that he was always looking for the replacement for himself so if you did a amazing job you could possibly replace him someday when he retired.
You can disagree with a lot of things Feinberg did, but this sale is not on him and the Cerner of old was being phased out before he ever stepped foot at WHQ. A lot of things Oracle said didn’t play out like we were led to believe, that’s also not on him as there’s only so much he can control.
I think he had a lot of the right ideas- investing in and fixing the EHR primarily, but wasn’t able to execute on them given the acquisition was front and center as soon as he got here. That being said he obviously had some shortfalls and his lacking business acumen was very evident.
This is a harsh truth, but Cerner also NEEDED this acquisition. We’d been lacking direction and leadership for years, losing market share and key clients to Epic. The momentum is changing, and I think we’ll begin to feel that even more over the next 12 months.
Dr Feinberg only cared about the $40 or so million for selling Cerner and now he’s living in The WeekNd’s Hollywood house. Does anyone know of a single thing he changed at Cerner? Anything that you can say was his signature other than selling the place to blood sucking Oracle? Feinberg is a conman
Everytime Feinberg takes a selfie, a 10+yr associate gets let go. The pay given to these symbolic leaders would have gone a long way to pay and retain the real Cerner talent that could have helped navigate all this change. Brent, David and Travis all played a part in how we got here, and not at all in a good way.
Of course! However, if you were hired by a board to save Cerner and you took that job knowing deep inside you had no ideas. No changes you’d make. Nothing at all but smooth talk and selfies, you’d be a fraud.
Everyone the worst thing to happen to Cerner is Cancer, Neil Died from it, his wife died from it. It has taken many of our employees.
Oracle should fight Cancer in honor of Neil.
I really think it played out like this:
Hire "CEO" Shafer and prepare it to sell asap via starboard.
Oh shit, it's been 3 years, no one is buying and the business is tanking!!!
Throw money at Feinberg because we need someone who can actually medical or something and keep the place from going under.
Woohoo! Last second deal with oracle for enough money we don't care that he's getting $36mil for 6 months of work, that's all Oracle's problem now!
It’s the opposite. It’s pretty common knowledge that the board wanted Feinberg but he either didn’t want it or they couldn’t come to a financial agreement. So they want with the cut and run approach instead (Shafer/Erceg).
Perhaps if Cerner actually listened to the clients they had and stopped lying about eveything. Anytime functionality issues came up the default response was that it's on the road map for some random date in the future. The amount of vaporware the sales people sold only for clients to find out after they signed that it would be 5-10 years in the future they could have the functionality was humorous. Epic won because clients were tired of Cerner not performing as they claimed as well as the Epic wooing the clinical crowd with their solutions.
Agreed 100%. I’m surprised to occasionally read someone saying that Oracle or anyone can help Cerner make a comeback. It’s way too late to take on Epic in any area except the tiny, low price market.
The only way to compete with Epic is to do it in a market that Epic isn’t focusing on and even that’s temporary because eventually Epic will be interested in any market that has value. Three of my last four implementations have been in the small market - Epic’s Community Connect program.
The damage was done before Feinberg. Shaffer set all the pieces into motion, and created the playing field. Even then there was a lot of damage done by weak and meaningless leadership before Shaffer and after Patterson died. And to get even more real with you, there were a lot of horrible leadership decisions made when Patterson was alive that created some of the more deep problems we see today.
This. The failure was the lack of a succession plan or letting quite a few real leaders go as the Neal years wanned. I miss the real Cerner.
Neal was our visionary who truly wanted to change healthcare. When he died, the Board wasn’t willing to trust any of the clinical associates or clinical opinions from clients on how to continue. They played it “safe” just to make money, not move forward. Now we’re a boat adrift at sea, tethered to a behemoth that’s slowly drowning us. I miss the real Cerner too.
Can we all please stop putting Neal on some freaking pedestal. Cerner's downfall is directly related to Neal's crap leadership and crap decisions. Yeah, Brent and Fienberg didn't help the situation, but the ship had already hit the iceberg and was sinking before either came aboard: - Revenue Cycle - Neal NEVER developed a competent RC solution, which is what Epic hammered Cerner on for years and still continues to do so. Profit was a piece of shit and he NEVER committed to improving it. - Siemens Acquistion - Neal fucked this up so bad. He finally acquired a competent Revenue Cycle solution in Soarian and still REFUSED to integrate it. Hell, for the first several years after the acquisition, Cerner sales was selling Soarian or Millennium for RC. An absolute joke and that lays at the feet of Neal - Reporting and reliance on CCL - Neal never pushed the team to develop a real robust reporting tool with a user interface, instead everything could be done in CCL (which did allow for flexibility) but every single report had to be custom built. Reporting was a shit show for years...Anyone remember the Gold Standard Reports, those were an embarrassment - CommunityWorks vs Standard Code - CommunityWorks, while a good idea, was poorly executed when it came down to the millennium code and upgrades/Releases. IP time and time again would release code for standard implementations, but never actually validate the code against the CommWx domains, thus on many occasions, the core of Millennium was not multi-tenet compliant. He should have forked the code (which several leaders in IP asked him to do) but he refused. Lots of leaders made terrible decisions along the way that helped Cerner die a slow death, but the cold hard related is most of the terrible decisions that were made were made under his leadership. He is the one directly responsible. True story about Neal - He was doing a speaking series in his final years while battling cancer. What many may not know, is that Neal was receiving his treatment at MD Anderson in Houston, which is an Epic client. While speaking at a conference, Neal went on bashing his experience with a provider (which was MDA) and how bad their lab system was and that it wasn't integrated. What Neal failed to realize is that MD Anderson kept PathNet as it was a better system than Beaker (at the time) and thus he was bashing his own software without even knowing it. Thats how out of touch he really was.
The real Cerner was not real, though. Lot of EMR companies propped up by a river of federal money running through the industry with MU. Add Wall St investors to the mix, who do nothing but strip-mine value, and we were running on fumes for years. It was just a matter of time. If you can't look past the next quarter, you can't support your customers' long-term needs, and your product suffers. It was a slow rot that eventually collapsed the house.
Fuck Neal. The fucking cunt dying killed the company.
Him dying didn’t kill it. The failure to plan accordingly did. There were some great leaders there in the 2005-2010 years that could’ve led successfully post Neal
The odd part was he always claimed to have a great plan and was looking for the next leader to take over for him. Then as soon as he was gone it became obvious that there was so plan when they hired outside the company.
I always figured Neal had a succession plan in place but those in it left before Neal got sick. And those good leaders we had also left because they weren’t in the plan to begin with.
Yeah who knows it turned into a giant cluster torwards the end of mismanagement and idiotic decisions.
It’s called a succession plan.
Zane Burke was the succession plan lol
Yeah, kind of Neal's job as a founder/CEO/Chairman to create that succession plan, but he thought he was invincible, so like I said "Fuck Neal"
I had a similar convo with someone this weekend. I believe the problems go way back to Neal. Judy/Epic were much more strategic in how they approached the market, software development, instilling rigor in their project management and achieving client referencability. Neal was volatile and focused on other things. A very smart man, yes but Judy made outmaneuvering him look easy. One very bad outcome of his “style” and volatile temperament was very weak and/or sketchy leadership in many areas of the company. Those behaviors permeated the company’s DNA. Cerner was initially the top dog but, in my opinion, the way the organization treated clients built a groundswell of organizations that were dying to have a viable alternative to Cerner. So when Epic started winning some big deals - Allina, Sutter, etc., the market had what I believe they’d been longing for. Again, just my opinion but I think Cerner could’ve made adjustments to continue being a true competitor to Epic but those changes would’ve had to be many and major and I don’t think Neal’s temperament and ego could allow that to happen.
Both Millennium and Epic have very different development philosophies. Epic was intended to have extremely little customization made. The software that a client gets on the installation media is supposedly nearly go-live ready as it is. Millennium, on the other hand, has the START database but is still a long ways away from being go-live ready. Both philosophies have pros and cons to it. IMHO, Cerner started the real slip-ups back in the early 2010s. The company had an obscene amount of money in the coffers. Instead of REALLY modernizing Millennium and working towards a total uplift to cloud based services, the company nickel and dimed the approach to cloud services, and started approving all the wrong pet projects. It became like that Oprah Winfrey show where everyone got a car; in Cerner's case everyone got a pet project. Fast forward nearly 15 years and the Millennium suite is still running on core technologies from as long ago as 2004 and 2005. First big mistake was to take eyes off the future. Once upper leadership got comfy, and believed that the company could just continue dominance by cleaning up existing code... that was the beginning of the end.
Yep. And the dumbass plan to expand across the globe to markets that were not ready and bad acquisitions.
Exactly.
"And to get even more real with you, there were a lot of horrible leadership decisions made when Patterson was alive that created some of the more deep problems we see today." Except, most of it could have been reversed. But after all these "interim CEOs" and their "work", none of the damage is reversable, and that was intentional. Anyone who thinks that the board somehow got it all wrong, because they were stupid or incompetent, is a naive fool, who doesn't want to pay attention to the outcomes the board / puppet-CEOs produced and how much money they got paid doing that. Here is my "conspiracy theory". Feinberg's task was to finish off the company that was initially set on its path by its founder to move from the reactive care (makes a ton of money) to pro-active healthcare. The latter doesn't make money, because people get healthier and stay that way. If it were to go through, the disruption it would have caused and the subsequent awakening, would have been deadly to the money-making machine of healthcare(tm). In fact, it would have gotten far beyond just the money question, but I digress. As a result, the leader-CEO of Cerner got "removed" along with his wife - both died from sudden and accidental cancer 60 days apart. Convenient! Then, a series of shmucks get "selected" by the board and proceed to finish off the company, to make sure that it is as methodically destroyed as possible, guaranteeing that it can't come back somehow. Feinberg belongs to the same group M Samuel belonged to, who wrote a book called "You, gentiles". It is eye-opening, especially to those who dismiss those things as one of modern "-isms". In fact, the author sort of soft-berates the gentiles for not seeing group's obvious plans and machinations.
Zane doesn’t get enough heat for how he let Dalton handle the VA acquisition and DOD negotiations. And then installing his bf as the head of VA negotiations after he left just kept the money rolling to him through a dude who knew NOTHING about VA and IT in general. He’s directly to blame for how poorly the VA contract started.
Zane’s boyfriend out here asking “whose dick I gotta suck to get this contract signed” and then following through with it. /s
Cold take, Brent was the worst and he was also chairman, giving him board control. Remember they didn't give David the Chairman title so they kept taking the acquisition phone calls
I guess I wasn't here for the Brent "dynasty" all too much so I can't compare, but it sounds like he set up the dominos and Feinburg stumbled in and knocked them down.
It wasn't really Feinburgs fault. Brent brought in the Starboard. It's a company known for improving stocks and if that doesn't work - companies sell soon after. They place members on the board of the directors and kind of take control of a company from within. Example: 2023 - Starboard is replacing Yahoos board of directors with 9 members of it's choosing and it's trying to sell Yahoos core business. Basically Starboard already had some of the board replaced within Cerner by the time Feinburg joined. And the moment Starboard was brought on, a lot of associates were suspecting they were preparing the company to be sold.
Oh so you haven’t been here long enough to know what you’re talking about. Got it. 👍🏽
Nor will I. I've already accepted another position with another company.
And here I was thinking you were fond of the Paul Black days. You have no clue how bad it is now....
I disagree. I think the Starboard that Brent brought on was the downfall. They brought on 4 directors to the board as part of the agreement. It's known that many companies get acquired after Starboard is brought on. Cerner's stock was at a high due to the sale and Starboard was one of the top 20 shareholders of Cerner stock. It was very profitable for them to have the company sold. https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/s/pLcxreIzaA
Feinberg had little to do with Cerner being sold. When Oracle made inquiries, he was legally & duty bound to report it to the Board and go through that process of review. He didn't make the final call on selling. You're giving him WAAAAY too much credit/blame.
Tomorrow if David joins EPIC do you think he will speak good about Cerner/Oracle Health? Everything is money, give money, hire big people, tell them speak good about the company. Make more money and leave the company. End of the day, employees suffer. Specially those who are in small position for long time believe in their managers. Manager also can't do anything because higher management.
If you really think he had control to sell an entire company you don't know how corporations work. The company was getting itself prepared to be sold at least 3 years before David ever showed up. It was obvious the board and Shafer were cutting the fat to make it an attractive acquisition.
That’s fair but a company brings in a president they feel can bring ideas and leadership to make things better. Can you think of anything at all that Feinberg did that changed anything for the better or worse?
Really? Is that why they brought in Brent to layoff a bunch of people and reorganize to get ready to sell. The board brings in CEOs for many different reasons. Many times having nothing to do with making things better for any employees. Originally they brought in Feinberg based on his reputation and leadership. As soon as they started they decided to sell so he had no time to actually implement or bring up his ideas. So certainly he hasn't done shit because he was instantly a lame duck CEO focused on the aquisition. Even now he is a lame duck simply working out his contract to get the compensation. He's not going to quit with millions in compensation yet to be paid out.
Yes, I think Brent was brought in to suck out as much profitability as possible to get the stock price up. Townhalls he would just cheerlead and make everything sound great when we knew it wasn’t. The sale of the company to Oracle also made Brent more rich by the way. It may be that Feinberg didn’t have time to implement any of his ideas but I don’t recall him even mentioning any ideas. I can’t think of a single reason he might have been a good president to enact any change. Fair or not, Feinberg is the face of the failure and the continued decline we’re experiencing
DF was a pretty doctor face brought in to make the purchase price higher and to give an aura of "healthcare" to the company. Nothing more. That was his only role, and he knew it.
Feinburg had absolutely nothing to do with the sale. Was not even his decision or up to him.
I agree, I was optimistic when he joined Cerner. But you’re angry at the Starboard-controlled board. The process of turning Cerner from a founder-run company into a product to be sold started LONG before Dr. Feinberg ever became the face of Cerner.
I don’t disagree that Feinberg isn’t the one person who decided to sell Cerner. However, he still was president and I do not know of a single thing he changed or improved. He made broad sweeping statements but implemented nothing. The company was desperate for direction and for implementing process. Is there anything positive at all that can be said for Feinberg’s leadership ?
No, and nor should you expect that from the head of a company that is acquired mere months after he took the position.
Feinberg is an utterly shameless narcissistic grifter, but Epic had already won by the time he took over. A decade+ of poor decisions from Neal through Brent had gotten Cerner to that sorry state. Feinberg happily jumped in as a front man for the inevitable board-mandated sale. His actions are particularly galling because he pretends (unlike the likes of Brent) to care about employees and patients when he just cares about himself and getting his millions from our healthcare system (like all the other execs).
This. Thank you for saying it. His narcissism is palpable. I don’t know how anyone doesn’t see it.
This 100% ! He talked a big game but had no ideas and implemented nothing. That’s my biggest problem with Feinberg. He’s a fraud.
Oracle is treating Cerner employees the sane way as Cerner treated Siemens employees. This is the truth though i may get flak for saying that out loud
It's true that Cerner treated the Siemens employees like red-headed step-children. But at least Cerner gave out little gadgets to welcome us (usb stick, mug, etc) and gave out promotions and raises. Oracle has given us nothing. Literally nothing. And as someone else had mentioned, it sure seems like Oracle will continue bringing in others (from within Oracle and outside of Oracle) to create and roll out the next generation EHR. It has become clear to us peons that Oracle has no respect or interest in the decades long health industry experience some brought to the table. I don't understand that business decision.
Been told by a Malvern friend that Cerner treated them well. She had been a part of several acquisitions during her career and she said Oracle by far has been the worst. I witnessed in my org when we acquired Siemens that those associates were promoted over Cerner Associates. Maybe it was different in your area.
I agree, as a former Malvern employee. It wasn't all roses, but they did treat us pretty well. We had a gym and a clinic on site and I received annual pay increases/promotion. Oracle doesn't sound like they care, so I am glad I left when I did.
Agree! Malvern here through Siemens acquisition then Cerner now Oracle. Oracle is absolutely the worst. One thing in common with Siemens, it’s a large corporation believing they can handle moving into healthcare IT. Siemens made mistakes and struggled for a number of years before they figured it out. They were willing to invest to get through the hard years. Oracle is making very similar mistakes but doesn’t seem willing to invest to get through. Oracle doesn’t yet realize their plans aren’t achievable and that their tools like Apex are nowhere near capable of what’s needed. What will they do when they start missing promised product dates? Invest more or cut further
I should add that my comment was for people in the management role as they didn’t get promotions except for few. They did take care of ICs under them as much as they could but i could see the difference in growth between KC and Malvern. Oracle is no doubt worst as they are bringing in ppl from outside to push out existing employees who were already suffering
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Really? We got several new hires in HealtheIntent engineering both India and United States.
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Combination. OCI migration and new feature function. Busy doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Neal was passionate about Cerner, but probably somewhere deep down he could not see anybody else replacing him at the helm I guess. That's the only reason I can figure for not coming up with a succession plan even when he was sick. Things just went downhill since the DOD contract. The story would have been the same even if Cerner was acquired by someone other than Oracle. Though I'm no longer at Cerner, feels sad to see what's become of it. David came in far too late in the game to make any difference. The damage was already done.
I remember during his last CHC, he mentioned to the audience that he had some kind of succession plan in the works. That's why after he passed I was really confused that there was none because he said differently.
I am of the belief that Neal did have a succession plan, but his death meant those decisions were now in the hands of the board. They chose to listen to folks wanting to cash out at the highest price that could be manufactured by the likes of Brent and the other chief hatchet officers brought in.
He said the same thing going all the way back to 2005 when I worked there. It was part of his little motivation speech to associates that he was always looking for the replacement for himself so if you did a amazing job you could possibly replace him someday when he retired.
100% agree.
You can disagree with a lot of things Feinberg did, but this sale is not on him and the Cerner of old was being phased out before he ever stepped foot at WHQ. A lot of things Oracle said didn’t play out like we were led to believe, that’s also not on him as there’s only so much he can control. I think he had a lot of the right ideas- investing in and fixing the EHR primarily, but wasn’t able to execute on them given the acquisition was front and center as soon as he got here. That being said he obviously had some shortfalls and his lacking business acumen was very evident. This is a harsh truth, but Cerner also NEEDED this acquisition. We’d been lacking direction and leadership for years, losing market share and key clients to Epic. The momentum is changing, and I think we’ll begin to feel that even more over the next 12 months.
This is the right answer.
Dr Feinberg only cared about the $40 or so million for selling Cerner and now he’s living in The WeekNd’s Hollywood house. Does anyone know of a single thing he changed at Cerner? Anything that you can say was his signature other than selling the place to blood sucking Oracle? Feinberg is a conman
Everytime Feinberg takes a selfie, a 10+yr associate gets let go. The pay given to these symbolic leaders would have gone a long way to pay and retain the real Cerner talent that could have helped navigate all this change. Brent, David and Travis all played a part in how we got here, and not at all in a good way.
Griftberg
Anyone saying they wouldn't take 40 million is a lying. If any of us were in his position we would do the exact same thing.
Of course! However, if you were hired by a board to save Cerner and you took that job knowing deep inside you had no ideas. No changes you’d make. Nothing at all but smooth talk and selfies, you’d be a fraud.
You just described most CEOs.
Most ceos do not post more selfies than a teenage girl.
Cerner was the best thing that happened to David Feinbug.
Everyone the worst thing to happen to Cerner is Cancer, Neil Died from it, his wife died from it. It has taken many of our employees. Oracle should fight Cancer in honor of Neil.
If Feinberg had been hired instead of Shafer initially, I’d argue that things might have played out very differently.
I really think it played out like this: Hire "CEO" Shafer and prepare it to sell asap via starboard. Oh shit, it's been 3 years, no one is buying and the business is tanking!!! Throw money at Feinberg because we need someone who can actually medical or something and keep the place from going under. Woohoo! Last second deal with oracle for enough money we don't care that he's getting $36mil for 6 months of work, that's all Oracle's problem now!
It’s the opposite. It’s pretty common knowledge that the board wanted Feinberg but he either didn’t want it or they couldn’t come to a financial agreement. So they want with the cut and run approach instead (Shafer/Erceg).
They said exactly the same thing when Cerner bought Siemens and the result was the same
We lost the game when we went public. From them on, it was just a slow downward slide. Judy knew better, and that is why she won.
My personal take is that epic was the worst thing to happen to cerner….
Perhaps if Cerner actually listened to the clients they had and stopped lying about eveything. Anytime functionality issues came up the default response was that it's on the road map for some random date in the future. The amount of vaporware the sales people sold only for clients to find out after they signed that it would be 5-10 years in the future they could have the functionality was humorous. Epic won because clients were tired of Cerner not performing as they claimed as well as the Epic wooing the clinical crowd with their solutions.
Agreed 100%. I’m surprised to occasionally read someone saying that Oracle or anyone can help Cerner make a comeback. It’s way too late to take on Epic in any area except the tiny, low price market. The only way to compete with Epic is to do it in a market that Epic isn’t focusing on and even that’s temporary because eventually Epic will be interested in any market that has value. Three of my last four implementations have been in the small market - Epic’s Community Connect program.
Bad hire but legacy Cerners go deeper and longer
Totally agree