Cerner will lay off 150 workers next month

Cerner’s new CEO, Dr. David Feinberg, told employees Thursday that a series of layoffs will take place in November, a company spokesman told Modern Healthcare.

Feinberg, who took over Cerner on October 1 after nearly three years of running Google Health, sent an email to his employees Thursday night after spotting a comment on Reddit. Kansas City Starwho first broke the news. A Reddit commenter said they were an employee of a company that recently learned they would be fired.

“You always get transparency from me,” Feinberg wrote in an email, according to the Kansas City Star. “While I would like to be the first to inform you, I can confirm that approximately 150 positions will be removed from their roles at Cerner in early November. These actions are never easy. “

Cerner did not respond to questions about which departments would be affected by the November layoffs or what caused the layoffs.

“Yesterday, our CEO informed his colleagues at Cerner about a small cut coming next month,” the spokesman wrote in an email. “More details will be provided later.”

A Reddit user – who said he is the lead project manager at Cerner – tweeted on Cerner’s subreddit on Wednesday that their boss said they would be fired in the first week of November. The Cerner subreddit is an online community where Reddit users, mostly Cerner employees, post about the company.

A commenter said their boss mentioned outsourcing.

“He told me that this is part of a big layoff and that there is nothing he can do about it,” wrote a Reddit user. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

In another post on Wednesday, an individual Reddit user reported that engineers on their team were transferred to other teams, and their work was transferred overseas.

A Cerner spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the company’s outsourcing plans.

Cerner has had multiple layoffs since 2019 as company executives worked to cut costs and improve the organization’s operating margins. In July, executives told investment analysts that Cerner has taken steps such as eliminating jobs, office space and products to meet those goals.

This included downsizing by about 500 people and eliminating about 300 open positions, which one executive estimated saved about $ 50 million a year.

Cerner is targeting an adjusted operating margin of 20% by 2024.

Cerner’s adjusted operating margin was 21% in the second quarter of 2021, up from 18% a year earlier. Cerner plans to publish its third quarter financial results next week.

Cerner reported second-quarter revenues of $ 1.5 billion in July, up 9.5% from $ 1.3 billion last year – the period that Cerner’s business was hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic. … The company’s operating income was $ 49.6 million, which is 66% less than in the second quarter of 2020 – $ 146.9 million.