#2 Vendor in HI's 2007's Top 100 List: Cerner

Wow, what a ride: from recording a mere $50M in Healthcare Informatics "Top 25" vendor list in 1989, Cerner has grown to an astounding $1.5 Billion in the magazine's 2007 list! This meteoric rise has earned them 2nd place in HI's 2007 "Top 100" vendor ranking by annual revenue, ahead of such rivals in the "high-end" vendor space as Siemens, GE (nee IDX), Epic and Eclipsys. Back in the 80's, Cerner started as an LIS specialist, butting heads with Sunquest for large hospital Lab systems, until they created "PowerChart" in the early 90s and entered the brave new world of EMRs and CPOE. They have since added apps for almost every hospital department, now offering as total an HIS as any vendor in the market. What's more, they did it almost entirely through internal development, with only a few acquisitions like MegaSource's RX and Citation's LIS, which they supported while trying to "upgrade" clients to replacement Cerner modules. Their Millennium HNA (Health Network Architecture) suite runs on Oracle's industry-leading data base, and their client base is in the hundreds with many large, prestigious hospitals. If you were wise enough to buy their stock way back then, congrats! If not, wait and read about someof the "up and comers" further down in HI's Top 100 list in future posts...