New CEO of Kansas City’s Cerner Corp. announces employee layoffs following Reddit post

New Cerner CEO David Feinberg acknowledged a round of upcoming layoffs for the Kansas City healthcare IT firm following an anonymous post on Reddit.

In an email to staff on Thursday evening, Feinberg said he noticed a comment on Reddit the previous day.

“You will always get transparency from me,” he wrote. “Although I would have liked to be the first to inform you, I can confirm, in early November, approximately 150 positions will be eliminated from their roles at Cerner. These actions are never easy.

“It is my commitment that all impacted associates are treated with the greatest respect and support. I ask you to do the same.”

A Cerner spokesperson said those cuts would impact U.S. workers, though it’s unclear how many will come from the company’s Kansas City area workforce. Cerner is the largest private employer in the metro area, where it has several campuses and its global headquarters.

Cerner has made several rounds of job cuts since 2019 as executives have sought to reposition the company for the future. Cerner originally pioneered the work of digitizing the nation’s paper medical records.

Feinberg just took the helm on Oct. 1, the same day Cerner announced a vaccine mandate for all U.S. employees. A former Google executive and a medical doctor, Feinberg replaced former chief executive Brent Shafer.

In recent weeks, he has sought to strike a more casual tone with employees than his predecessors. He’s documented his first days on the job on Twitter. And he jumped into a Cerner Reddit forum, where employees routinely discuss work culture and company happenings.

On Wednesday, an employee described as a project manager wrote about being notified of an upcoming layoff.

“My boss called me in to tell me I’m going to be laid off first week of November,” the employee wrote. “He told me this is part of a large layoff and that he can’t do anything about it. I’m so screwed.”