Oracle Cerner's North Kansas City World Headquarters and its Realizations campus will close November 30 and are for sale.

According to a report by KMBC News, all in-office employees will now be located at Oracle's Innovations campus in South Kansas City, and no layoffs were announced as part of the decision to close more Cerner campuses.

"They're not losing employment, which is the real concern. If they were to lose jobs, then that lowers the amount of investment in the region; that lowers the amount of spending by workers in the region," Frank Lenk, director of research services for the Mid-America Regional Council, told KMBC News.

Oracle acquired Cerner in June. 

This past year, Cerner implemented a hybrid workforce policy, allowing associates to work from home and use offices for group collaboration, team building and meetings. 

The company also began selling off its Kansas City, Kansas, properties in 2021 to reduce its physical footprint. Locally, there has been concern over the initial public investment into Cerner campuses in Kansas that were supposed to bring thousands of jobs to the region through buildout in 2025. 

More than $170 million in sales tax and revenue bonds were issued to help build Cerner offices and a new soccer stadium in 2010 that sales taxes would ultimately fund, according to a report last year by Flatland, a publication of PBS Kansas City.

The former Cerner WHQ and Realizations campus will close November 30, according to a KCUR,org, NPR in Kansas City, report.

As part of one of the biggest-ever deals in the electronic health record space, physicians using Cerner EHR get voice-enabled AI tools like Voice Digital Assistant to improve their workflows.

The combined companies would also create a national health records database, and the hope that advanced cloud infrastructure would make interoperability in the clinical space a reality. 

But healthcare is not a space Oracle is accustomed to, and what the Cerner acquisition means for health IT has been wait-and-see for most industry analysts.

Oracle has been laying off employees across several business units over the last few months and has been considering $1 billion in cuts since the Cerner acquisition, which added 28,000 employees, according to CRN.com in July.

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.