Cerner/Siemens And The Future Of EHRs

Q&A: John Glaser, CEO of Siemens Health Services

As the dust settles from this past week's mammoth $1.3 billion merger, Siemens Health Services CEO John Glaser tells Healthcare IT News what led up to the Cerner deal, how his experience as a health system CIO could help smooth integration challenges and what to expect – from the two companies specifically and electronic health records in general – over the months and years to come.

Q: What were the factors -- both within your respective companies, and across the healthcare landscape -- that made this the right deal for Siemens and the right deal for Cerner?

A: The basic strategic rationale was that if you look at the pressures that providers are facing, both in the U.S. and also oversees -- reimbursement pressures, quality pressures, being asked to create systems of care and manage populations -- you look at all that stuff and you realize that if you really want to be a very effective enterprise health IT supplier to them, you've got to have substantial resources. Development resources, services resources with the capability to be doing cloud, technical resources to deal with personal devices, all kinds of stuff....