Investors Competing For Health IT Opportunities

A new study has concluded that investors are hungry for health IT investment opportunities, in some cases battling competitors for particularly attractive companies. The report concluded that investment firms see health IT as a lower-risk way to get a cut of the healthcare market than other possible targets.

The analysis by Bain & Company, which looks at 2017 numbers, said that the number of health IT investment deals completed last year rose to 32 from 23 in 2016.

The value of disclosed deals fell from $15.5 billion in 2016 to $1.9 billion in 2017. This is not a sign of weakness in the sector, however. The 2016 deals volume was pumped up by two megadeals (acquisitions of MultiPlan and Press Ganey), which were valued collectively at $9.9 billion. Meanwhile, in 2017 only one deal exceeded $800 million.

Deal counts and volume aside, there’s no question that investors are still very interested in acquiring or taking a stake in health IT companies, Bain reports. According to its study, there are many good reasons for their excitement.

“Investors find HCIT target attractive not only because HCIT companies play a vital role in promoting technology adoption in healthcare but also because they bear less of the direct reimbursement and regulatory risk that affect other healthcare sectors,” the report says. “With a limited set of scale assets on the market and corporate buyers willing to pay premiums for those that do become available, valuations remain high and competition intense.”

The report notes that most of the health IT buyouts in 2017 involved biopharma investments, particularly among companies using IT solutions and advanced analytics to streamline development a testing of drugs. Such deals include the buyout of Certara, which offers decision support technology for optimizing drug development, and Bracket, which sells technology for managing clinical trials.

However, investors were also interested in EMR and practice management vendors. Given that just a handful of big vendors block of the market for hospital IT, they looked elsewhere.

In particular, investment firms were interested in consolidating some of the many vendors selling ambulatory care EMRs platforms supporting specialties like gastroenterology. For example, investors picked up a $230 million stake in Modernizing Medicine, which offers EMR and practice management systems for specialties such as dermatology and ophthalmology, Bain said.

In the future, investors will gain interest in revenue cycle management software. In addition to investing in or acquiring RCM tools for providers, investors may target RCM software helping patients pay their bills. For example, private equity firm Frontier Capital bought a majority stake in medical card company AccessOne last year.

Bain also predicts that Investors will pay growing attention to clinical decision support platforms, driven in part by legislation requiring doctors to use clinical decision support tools before ordering complex diagnostic imaging of Medicare patients.

In addition, investment firms are keeping their eye on population health management software vendors. It’s not clear yet which companies will dominate the sector, and how these platforms will evolve, so dealmakers are hanging back. Still, within a few years they may well begin to throw money at PHM companies.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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