After no updates in the M&A market for more than five years, according to results in our Healthcare Deal Database, Cerner Corporation (NASDAQ: CERN) is back with a new deal. The digital health company announced it is acquiring Kantar Health for $375 million in cash from Kantar Group. Kantar Group is a portfolio company of Bain Capital.
Kantar Health is a data analytics and real-world evidence and commercial research consultancy serving the life science industry. Cerner offers an integrated clinical and financial system to help manage day-to-day revenue functions, as well as a wide range of services to support clinical, financial and operational needs.
Kantar Health’s proprietary syndicated data products including CancerMPact, Claritis, National Health & Wellness Survey, and its broader oncology, rare disease and multi-therapeutic expertise are used today by all of the top 20 life science companies to further their real-world evidence, commercial and clinical research efforts.
Cerner Corporation will use Kantar Health’s platform to improve clinical research across life sciences and pharmaceuticals. The deal bolsters its Learning Health Network client consortium to more directly engage with life sciences for funded research studies.
The combination of Cerner and Kantar Health is expected to enable a two-sided collaboration between providers and the pharmaceutical industry, where researchers can generate insights and use differentiated real-world data assets and expertise to address the most complex clinical research questions. The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2021, but it is not expected to have a material impact on Cerner’s earnings in 2021.
