EHR Vendor Cerner Announces Employee COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate

EHR vendor Cerner has announced a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for its US employees, according to reporting from The Kansas City Star.  

US employees are required to be fully vaccinated by December 8. This means that workers must receive both doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, or the single dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, by November 24.

“Although no vaccine prevents all infections, the COVID-19 vaccines have been proven safe and highly effective,” Cerner’s COVID-19 task force wrote to employees. “Vaccination remains the most effective way of reducing the incidence and severity of the virus.”

The EHR vendor may make exceptions for religious beliefs or medical reasons. However, employees who are excluded from the mandate will face weekly COVID-19 testing.

Previously, a Cerner official told the news outlet that the EHR vendor had decided against COVID-19 vaccine mandates among staff, unless they were working in client healthcare facilities with vaccine requirements in place.

However, a federal mandate announced by President Joe Biden on September 9 directed all large employers require COVID-19 vaccines or implement weekly testing of workers. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is establishing the specifics on enforcement.

The EHR vendor also announced that employees would not return to offices until January 10 of 2022, which is much later than officials originally anticipated.

In June, Cerner officials announced that the company would conduct business through a hybrid workforce model that allows most associates to work in-office or from home. At the time of the announcement, the EHR vendor anticipated that its hybrid workforce environment on US campuses would be in full swing by fall of 2021.

A Cerner official told The Kansas City Star that this delay is due to moderate to high levels of the Delta variant in different regions across the country.

These announcements came the same day David Feinberg began his role as the new CEO of the health IT company.

Feinberg, an industry alum of 25 years, joins Cerner after serving as Google Health’s vice president since 2019. He led Google’s worldwide health efforts, bringing together stakeholders to leverage artificial intelligence (AI), product expertise, and hardware in order to tackle some of healthcare’s biggest challenges through health IT.

“I join Cerner this week after having built my early career around helping children and families, which then led to opportunities at UCLA, Geisinger and Google – opportunities that enabled me to impact healthcare and improve more people’s lives around the world,” Feinberg wrote in a blog post.

“But the greatest impact I can have on healthcare quality and accessibility is at a company where every day we wake up thinking about how to use technology to improve people’s lives,” he continued.