Probably the biggest story in health IT this year and so far this decade has been Oracle’s enormous outlay in buying the world’s largest EMR vendor, Cerner, for 28 billion dollarydoos. Exactly what Oracle hopes to achieve with the acquisition has been a bit of a mystery, beyond the fact that Cerner is a very profitable company, with revenues of $US5.5 billion a year and net earnings of about half a billion.

Cerner also has a huge amount of future earnings on its books, with the enormous US Veterans Affairs EHR project, worth eleventy billion dollars, still rolling out and a footprint in most developed countries that far outstrips its nearest rival in Epic. But beyond the obvious financial benefits, what if anything Oracle hopes to achieve with the purchase has so far remained unclear.