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From a park bench to the rarified air of international finance, the Northland’s Cerner Corp. has a come a long way.

Roughly three decades after being conceived by three men over lunch at Loose Park, the health care information technology company recently replaced Sun Microsystems on a trio of elite stock indexes by Nasdaq Stock Market, the world’s largest stock exchange.

The move marks Cerner’s graduation into the major league of big business, but comes as no surprise for a company that’s seen explosive growth, even during the current economic recession.

Cerner executives at the company’s North Kansas City headquarters released their financial report for the second quarter of 2009 on July 29. In the heart of a global downturn, the company still managed to gather net earnings of $43.7 million, a 24 percent increase from the same period last year.

“In what continued to be a challenging environment, we delivered solid results in the quarter,” Chief Financial Officer Marc Naughton said during a conference call.

The new earnings report came just about two weeks after Nasdaq officials announced that Cerner would be listed on the Nasdaq-100, Nasdaq-100 Equal Weighted and Nasdaq-100 Technology Sector indexes.

The Nasdaq-100 index was launched in 1985 and “is one of the most widely followed benchmarks in the world,” according to a Nasdaq press release.

Cerner’s historic growth has been driven by a push to bring digital information technologies into hospitals and clinics, according to the company’s Web site. Since 1979, it has become “the leading U.S. supplier of healthcare information technology solutions that optimize clinical and financial outcomes.”

Cerner has developed a huge footprint in the regional economy. It employs 4,800 people in Kansas City and generated $1.68 billion in revenue last year. In addition, it does a number of things to help the local community, including the Cerner Scholars program to provide career education for students from Winnetonka High School.

The company has been able to capitalize even more since health care reform started to gain traction among politicians and policy makers in the 1990s. A $10,000 investment in Cerner stock made in 1999 would be worth roughly $80,000 today.

Now, with President Barack Obama reigniting the health care reform debate, Cerner co-founder and chief executive officer Neal Patterson is making a major pitch that the kinds of information technology offered by his company can lead to greater efficiency for providers and cost savings for patients.

In a brief released earlier this year, Patterson predicted digital health care information systems could save $500 billion annually across the industry.

“This would relieve pressure on the overall United States economy while also making healthcare provision more streamlined, coordinated, accurate, predictive, proactive and affordable for healthcare providers and the people they serve,” Patterson wrote. “Rather than the baby boomers ‘busting’ the system, they could leave behind a modern, frictionless healthcare system for generations to come.”

In their quarterly report, Cerner executives made clear they expect even more profits for the company as existing customers continue to upgrade their information technology and untapped markets come online, particularly in rural communities.

Cerner is already in business relationships with hospitals and clinics with access to approximately $8 billion from the federal economic stimulus package and health care reform incentives, according to company officials.

“We are very well positioned to benefit as the world economy improves and details around the stimulus and health care reform become clear,” Executive Vice President Michael Valentine said.

Staff writer Ray Weikal can be reached at 389-6637 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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