Cerner's acquisition of Siemens Healthcare IT creates highly positive buzz for clients and employees, reveals Black Book survey

Black Book polled the information technology leadership from current Cerner and Siemens inpatient EHR and HIT clients, as well as employees, to ascertain insider sentiments and a crowdsourced outlook into the culture of the merging platforms. Stakeholders are profoundly confident that the united forces will drive industry advancements in clinical decision support, population health innovation, and the exchange of secure health data records.

Black Book Rankings, the recognized source for neutral and precise customer satisfaction analysis in the healthcare IT industry, surveyed the current clients of Cerner Corporation and Siemens Healthcare’s IT division, as well as employees of both organizations, to gain crowdsourced insider perceptions on the merging companies.

The Black Book Cerner-Siemens poll was conducted as a focused follow up to the sweeping Black Book electronic health record vendor-client loyalty study releasing in early October.

Cerner has placed first for inpatient EHR client experience among hospitals ranging from 101 to 299 beds in Black Book key performance indicators, for the past four consecutive years. In 2014, Cerner over-ranked all EHR competitors in 12 of 18 indicators including Trust, Accountability and Transparency, Deployment, Reliability, Customer Care, Brand Image, and Corporate Viability. Siemens ranked second in 2014 behind Cerner, earning top satisfaction scores in 3 of 18 indicators including Data Security, Integration and Interfaces, and Breadth of Offerings.

249 total electronic health record clients, 159 Cerner and 90 Siemens users, responded to the Black Book poll conducted since the acquisition was announced last month. 123 Cerner employees and 174 Siemens employees additionally participated in a separate organizational cultural survey.

The surveys were designed to identify insider perceptions, employee insights and client experiences are forming as the acquisition progresses. Black Book’s charge was to collect client and employee feedback on the opportunities to improve patient care via technology synergies from the merger of the corporations.

“Siemens and Cerner clients separately and collectively share a strong outlook for increasing Cerner market share, cementing corporate loyalties, and leading the industry in post-EHR era population health innovation through effective use of combined health care information technologies,” said Doug Brown, Managing Partner of Black Book. “Specifically, health information exchanges, diagnostic and therapeutic decision support tools, marketing, revenue cycle management, quality reporting, health analytics, workflow and care coordination, and patient engagement software systems, according to current stakeholders.”

Key findings include:

93% of Cerner customers anticipate little to no change in responsiveness or satisfaction levels in client service . Several of Siemens' academic medical center clients anticipate the change in vendor ownership could negatively impact the well-regarded Siemens service levels to large hospitals.

100% of Cerner clients foresee accelerated innovation and technological advances by the acquisition as a highly positive outcome. 22% of Siemens large hospital clients are skeptical that the interfacing of medical device and diagnostic technologies with hospital EHR systems would continue at the same meteoric trajectory as was anticipated before the acquisition..

More than half,of all Siemens clients foresee shifting to Cerner technologies, post acquisition. 60% of Siemens’ client hospital chains, systems and IDNs, as well as hospitals under 250 beds report already making organizational pre-plans to transition from Siemens to Cerner products in the coming five years.

33% of Siemen’s large hospital and academic medical center clients waver on shifting from Siemens to Cerner. Allscripts, GE Healthcare and Epic Systems are the most mentioned competitors in the Black Book survey.

Post-acquisition, nearly 80% of collective Cerner and Siemens clients believe the collaboration will produce best of breed technologies in Population Health, Clinical Decision Support and Quality Reporting. 84% of Siemens clients anticipate major improvements in HIE/Interoperability, Revenue Cycle Management, and EHR from Cerner.

From the employee surveys conducted after Siemens layoffs in July, Siemens staffers retained are optimistic of the job opportunities with Cerner Corporation. 100% of surveyed Clinicians and nearly 9 in 10 Marketing/Sales employees foresee huge upsides for personal career growth and achievement with Cerner.

The statistical summary of the surveys, released today, can be downloaded at http://blackbookrankings.com/pdf/2014-BB-CERNER-ACQUISITION-OF-SIEMENS-HC-IT About Black Book™

Black Book Rankings, a division of Black Book Market Research LLC, provides healthcare IT users, media, investors, analysts, quality minded vendors, and prospective software system buyers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and other interested sectors of the financial and clinical technology industries with comprehensive comparison data of the industry's top respected and competitively performing technology, services and outsourcing vendors.

The largest user opinion poll of its kind in healthcare IT and managed services, Black Book™ collects over 400,000 viewpoints on information technology and outsourced services vendor performance annually. For methodology, auditing, resources, comprehensive research and ranking data see http://www.blackbookrankings.com.

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