Category Archives: Venture Capital

1,250 healthcare deals have been announced, completed this year

Posted on by • Posted in Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Long Term Care, Medical Group, Mergers & Acquisitions, Pharmaceutical Industry, Physician, Private Equity, Retail Healthcare, Retail Pharmacy, Venture Capital • Leave a comment

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/hospital-transactions-and-valuation/1-250-healthcare-deals-have-been-announced-completed-this-year.html?origin=cfoe&utm_source=cfoe

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The healthcare industry saw 1,250 deals announced or completed through October of this year, according to Bloomberg Law. 

The healthcare deal volume in 2019 is significantly higher than the same period last year, which had 900 deals announced or closed.

Merger and acquisition activity for long-term care, physician services, health IT and pharmaceutical companies are on pace to exceed the deal volume hit in 2018.

Walgreens is one company that is driving deal activity in the healthcare sector. The retail pharmacy giant recently announced it would close 157 in-store healthcare clinics it operated by the end of the year.

TriHealth announced it would buy seven of the Walgreens clinics in the Cincinnati area, and the deal is likely to be replicated elsewhere, Gary Herschman, a member of law firm Epstein Becker Green, told Bloomberg Law. 

However, the hospital and health system sector will likely end 2019 with fewer deals than in 2018, according to the report.

There were only 12 transactions in the hospital and health system sector in October, according to Nicholas Davis, a senior analyst at healthcare consultancy ECG Management Partners.

 

The Role of Private Equity in Driving Up Health Care Prices

Posted on by • Posted in Freestanding Emergency Care, Health Policy, Out of Pocket Expenses, Physician, Physician Practice Management, Private Equity, Surprise Bills, Venture Capital • Leave a comment

https://hbr.org/2019/10/the-role-of-private-equity-in-driving-up-health-care-prices

Private investment in U.S. health care has grown significantly over the past decade thanks to investors who have been keen on getting into a large, rapidly growing, and recession-proof market with historically high returns. Private equity and venture capital firms are investing in everything from health technology startups to addiction treatment facilities to physician practices. In 2018, the number of private equity deals alone reached  almost 800, which had a total value of more than $100 billion.

While private capital is bringing innovation to health care through new delivery models, technologies, and operational efficiencies, there is another side to investors entering health care. Their common business model of buying, growing through acquisition or “roll-up,” and selling for above-average returns is cause for concern.

Take the phenomenon of surprise bills: medical invoices that a patient unexpectedly receives because he or she was treated by an out-of-network provider at an in-network facility. These have been getting a lot of attention lately and are driven, at least in part, by investor-backed companies that remain out of network (without contracts with insurers) and can therefore charge high fees for services that are urgently or unexpectedly required by patients. Private equity firms have been buying and growing the specialties that generate a disproportionate share of surprise bills: emergency room physicians, hospitalists, anesthesiologists, and radiologists.

In other sectors of the economy, consumers can find out the price of a good or service and then choose not to buy it if they don’t believe it to be worth the cost. In surprise bill cases, they can’t. Patients are often unaware that they need these particular services in advance and have little choice of physician when they use them.

To blunt growing bi-partisan political support for protecting patients from surprise bills, various groups have lobbied against legislation that would limit the practice. They include Doctor Patient Unity, which has spent more than $28 million on ads and is primarily funded by large private-equity-backed companies that own physician practices and staff emergency rooms around the country. Their work seems to be having an impact: efforts to pass protections have stalled in Congress.

Physician practices have been a popular investment for private equity firms for years. According to an analysis published in Bloomberg Law, 45 physician practice transactions were announced or closed in the first quarter of 2019. At the current pace, the number of deals to buy physician and dental practices will surpass 250 this year, far exceeding 2018 totals. Yes, these investments can provide independent physicians and small practices with an alternative to selling themselves to hospitals and can help them deal with administrative overhead that takes them away from the job they were trained to perform: providing care. But, at least in some cases, the investors’ strategy appears to be to increase revenues by price-gouging patients when they are most vulnerable.

Surprise billing from investor-backed physician practices isn’t the only problem. Private-equity-owned freestanding emerging rooms (ERs) are garnering scrutiny because of their proliferation and high rates. The majority of freestanding ER visits are for non-emergency care, and their treatment can be 22 times more expensive than at a physician’s office.

However lucrative in the short run, private investor-backed companies that hurt consumers are not likely to perform well financially in the long term. Unlike many other markets, health care is both highly regulated and highly sensitive to the reality or appearance of victimizing the sick and vulnerable. Consumer outrage leads quickly to government intervention.

Investors will benefit most by solving the health care system’s legion of problems and by adding true value to our health system — delivering high-quality services at affordable prices and eliminating waste. Those that try to maximize their short-term profits by pushing up prices without adding real healthcare benefits are likely to find that those strategies are unsustainable. Lawmakers and regulators won’t let them get away with such practices for long.

 

 

 

Kaiser Permanente, American Cancer Society join blood test startup’s $160M funding round

Posted on by • Posted in Biotech, Cancer, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Life Sciences, Venture Capital • Leave a comment

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/kaiser-permanente-american-cancer-society-join-blood-test-startup-s-160m-funding-round.html?oly_enc_id=2893H2397267F7G

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South San Francisco-based biotech company Freenome announced the close of a $160 million funding round, with participation from Kaiser Permanente Ventures, the American Cancer Society’s BrightEdge Ventures and Alphabet’s GV and Verily Life Sciences.

The Series B financing will be used to further develop Freenome’s blood test for early cancer detection. The startup uses an artificial intelligence-powered multiomics platform to analyze routine blood draws for often-missed biomarkers of early-stage cancer. Development of the platform has so far centered on use in detecting colorectal cancer.

Beyond further refinement of the platform, Freenome will also conduct a validation study to be submitted to the FDA and CMS for review and, eventually, expand the test to detect other forms of cancer and disease, according to CEO Gabe Otte.

 

Mixing medicine and money: Why the rise of health system VCs is raising ethical concerns

Posted on by • Posted in Bioethics, Conflicts of Interest, ECRI Institute, Ethical Pitfalls, Ethics, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Health Policy, Health System, Hospital, Private Equity, Venture Capital • Leave a comment

https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/mixing-medicine-money-hospital-vc-funding-device-ethical-concerns/549392/

Industry-leading nonprofit health systems like Ascension, Providence St. Joseph and Cedars-Sinai have launched affiliated venture capital firms with increasingly more cash to fund start-ups. But the mixture of medicine and financial investment presents the potential for ethical pitfalls.

Deals involving at least one healthcare provider-linked corporate VC fund totaled roughly $1.3 billion last year, a record high nearly triple the amount recorded five years prior, according to data provided to Healthcare Dive by PitchBook, a financial data firm.

Health systems defend their corporate VCs, noting a separation of clinical and investment decisions along with general policies designed to prevent improper influence. Yet the potential for conflicts of interest looms, ethicists said in interviews — particularly when a health system’s hospitals adopt products from companies staked with funds via the affiliated VC.

“If you have a venture program that is really gearing up with some serious investments and they are going to use those devices in their own institution, I would say that’s a matter of concern,” said Jeffrey Flier, dean of Harvard Medical School from 2007 to 2016, in an interview.

“That doesn’t mean it would be done dishonestly, it just means that maybe they should promote doing it elsewhere, not in their own institution.”

A mixture of medicine and finance

The case of Gauss Surgical, a private medical device startup, illustrates how some of these questions can play out in practice.

Corporate VCs affiliated with nine hospital systems have invested in the company since its founding in 2011. A majority of those VC funds were launched in the past five years. A tenth system, Memorial Hermann Health System, invested directly in Gauss. All 10 systems also use — to varying extent — Gauss’ flagship Triton device in clinical practice.

A software platform designed to process images, Triton is used to quantify blood loss, typically during childbirth. Studies have shown standard practices, such as visually estimating or weighing bloody materials, to be inaccurate, leaving an opening for an improvement.

Between the 10 health systems invested in Gauss, 16 of their hospitals use Triton, according to Gauss. Overall, more than 50 U.S. hospitals use the device today, the Los Altos, California-based startup said.

Those running the funds invested in Gauss acknowledge the need for full disclosure to avoid any real or perceived conflicts of interest, particularly when their hospitals are using the device.

“It’s fair to ask why nonprofit systems have venture funds,” said Darren Dworkin, managing director of Summation Health Ventures, a joint VC arm for Cedars-Sinai and MemorialCare that launched in 2014 and has invested in Gauss.

Still, Dworkin, also Cedars’ chief information officer, argued the fund helps fill an investment gap for businesses like Gauss with promising ideas that might not otherwise have received financial backing.

“If there was perfect liquidity in the capital markets for all great ideas, maybe the case can be made that focus can be in other areas,” the exec said in an interview.

Timeline of investments in Gauss

Along with adoption — some hospitals routinely use the device in newborn delivery — has come controversy, however.

At one of those hospitals, St. Joseph Hospital in Orange County, California, an investment by the parent system’s VC fund led to objections from some healthcare staff over the adoption of Triton. The hospital is owned by Providence St. Joseph, which invested in Gauss through its VC arm, Providence Ventures.

Last April, 10 physicians working at the hospital signed onto a letter sent to Scott Rusk, the hospital’s chief medical officer, airing doubts over whether Triton improved patient outcomes, and questioning if its use was influenced by the chain’s financial investment in Gauss.

“We suspect that their use has been mandated by the health system due to investments made by the Providence Venture Capital Fund, and that the insistence that they be used has more to do with ensuring a return on investments than with improving patient care,” the doctors wrote, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Healthcare Dive.

In a statement to Healthcare Dive, Providence St. Joseph said clinical adoption decisions are made exclusively by clinical and operational leadership review, and are not influenced by Providence Ventures. After that review, hospitals in the system decide on their own whether or not to use such products.

“There was no directive from PSJH or Providence Ventures to use the device,” the chain stated on the Orange County hospital. “The decision was made to fund and adopt the Gauss solution at the local hospital level.”

Only three of the system’s 51 hospitals use Triton today, the organization said, and the Orange County hospital made the decision to start using the device before the merger creating Providence St. Joseph completed in July 2016.

But the fund isn’t entirely walled off from the rest of the system, as its leader also serves as a C-suite executive for the health system. Aaron Martin is the managing general partner at Providence Ventures as well as an executive vice president and chief digital officer for the broader PSJH system.

In response to the letter, Gauss stated it is “statistically impossible for a single practitioner or small group of practitioners to personally observe the impact of a monitoring device on patient outcomes across an entire population,” noting hemorrhage is a low-volume, high-risk event.

Testing Triton

The Food and Drug Administration cleared the device in 2014 as an adjunct to blood loss estimation techniques based on two clinical studies, respectively testing 46 patients and 50 patients, as well as a series of non-clinical studies.

Still, several doctors and one nonprofit group question Triton’s proven clinical value.

“It’s in its infancy,” said Abdulla Al-Khan, a doctor at New Jersey’s Hackensack University Medical Center, which has been testing the device since 2015. “Is it 100% reliable? I don’t think so. Is it perhaps better than a physician’s guesstimation of blood loss? Yes, probably.”

Al-Khan, who is the hospital’s director for its Division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine & Surgery and the Center for Abnormal Placentation, said earlier Triton studies “clearly had their limitations,” and plans to soon begin a study comparing all methods of blood loss estimation.

Daniel Katz, director of obstetric anesthesiology research at Mount Sinai, said in an interview arranged by Gauss that Triton’s clinical value has been well-demonstrated, giving healthcare providers a standard way to measure and keep track of blood loss. While Mount Sinai has an equity investment in Gauss through its corporate VC arm, Katz said he has not received any compensation from Gauss.

In a statement, Gauss said it “believes Triton has proven clinical value,” supported by “robust accuracy data,” particularly highlighting research done following its 2014 FDA clearance.

“Subsequent studies, published in peer-reviewed, academic journals, have demonstrated superiority compared with alternative means to measure blood loss and significantly improved clinical outcomes following adoption of Triton,” the company stated.

Gauss also noted a hospital pays a fee per annual subscription for the software as a service, no matter how often the product is used. It said adoption of the product is independent and goes through the hospital’s regular procurement process in instances where the health system has invested in the company.

The company did not make its CEO Siddarth Satish available for a phone interview.

However, the ECRI Institute, an independent organization that analyzes new technologies for providers, payers and government agencies, reviewed at Healthcare Dive’s request the body of evidence supporting Triton and concluded the device’s clinical value was far from established.

Diane Robertson, the institute’s director of health technology assessment, said the studies done have been small and low quality, noting limitations on trial design for controls, blinding and randomization.

“There isn’t any moderate quality or higher quality evidence on clinical outcomes improvement in patients with how this device is used,” she said.

In response to ECRI’s assessment, Gauss stated that a randomized, controlled trial would be “ineffective, impractical and potentially unethical.” The company further defended Triton’s studies, saying they showed it was more accurate than other estimation methods and is widely supported by leading physicians and experts.

A broader issue

Triton’s adoption spurs broader questions for nonprofit systems that have established VC arms.

About a decade ago, deals involving hospital-affiliated VCs were few, mustering less than $50 million in total value in 2008 and 2009 combined, according to PitchBook. Activity has steadily risen, surpassing $500 million in annual value in 2014 and reaching nearly $1.3 billion in 2018.

Little analysis has come with that money. Several ethicists told Healthcare Dive they were unaware of any published or ongoing studies examining hospital-affiliated VCs and the unique questions such funds pose for medical technology adoption.

“That is an issue of institutional conflicts of interest, which is, frankly, completely unsolved in general in healthcare,” said Steven Joffe, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania. “We don’t have clear-cut mechanisms to make sure institutional conflicts of interest are navigated well.”

Most of the hospital systems invested in Gauss via corporate VCs said they take conflicts of interest seriously and have policies in place to prevent such influence.

For instance, Mount Sinai, which launched its VC back in 2008, has a board of people not affiliated with the health system to analyze the investments and clinical use, a spokesperson said.

According to ethics experts, such an independent review is a critical step to mitigate the potential for decisions to be made, which could compromise a hospital’s patient-driven mission.

But even the appearance of conflict can bring risks to an organization. In the case of St. Joseph in Orange County, uncertainty over the relationship between the hospital’s use of Triton and Providence St. Joseph’s investment in Gauss through its venture arm was enough to motivate physicians to speak out.

“One has to be very careful not to mix a medical practice with financial gain of an industry,” said Al-Khan, the doctor at Hackensack, which does not have such a VC arm.

The funds, though, appear to be here to stay.

In early 2019, Providence Ventures, which backed Gauss, literally doubled down, announcing its fund will expand from $150 million to $300 million. The fund targets companies just like Gauss: early-stage healthcare companies specializing in IT, medical devices and technology-enabled services.

 

Private equity sees ripe opportunity in healthcare this year

Posted on by • Posted in Health Policy, Horizontal Integration, Market Consolidation, Market Power, Mergers & Acquisitions, Private Equity, Undercapitalized, Venture Capital, Vertical Integration • Leave a comment

https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/private-equity-sees-ripe-opportunity-in-healthcare-this-year/548831/

Private equity investment in healthcare has ballooned over the past decade, and experts say 2019 is poised to be another robust year, with potential ripe targets in orthopaedics and mental health and addiction treatment.

Private equity deals in healthcare in the U.S. more than doubled over the past 10 years, according to financial data firm Pitchbook. In 2008 there were 325 deals (including buyers and sellers) and in 2018 that number swelled to 788, a record number of deals representing more than $100 billion in total value.

One of the largest recent deals was private-equity firm KKR’s nearly $10 billion purchase of Envision Healthcare last year, according to Preqin. Envision provides physician services to hospitals and operates hundreds of surgery centers across the country. Another big deal was the public-to-private takeover of athenahealth by Evergreen Coast Capital and Veritas Capital for $5.7 billion in 2018.

“It looks as though 2018 was a record year for the industry, and overall the trend in deal-making has been one of strong growth — this would suggest that 2019 could be another record year unless we see a change in the underlying conditions,” Preqin spokesman William Clarke told Healthcare Dive.

The Envision deal was among the biggest leveraged buyouts ever at more than $4 billion in debt, according to Pitchbook. The practice is criticized in several respects, including that many are financed by loading a company up with mounds of debt.​

Globally, healthcare accounts for about 13% of all private equity buy-out deals, according Preqin, an industry research firm.

The deals come amid a frenzy of consolidation, both vertical and horizontal, in the healthcare industry as hospitals and insurers try to scale up to insulate themselves from a number of headwinds and disruptors such as Amazon and Apple.

M&A began to accelerate after the Affordable Care Act, as many hospitals aligned themselves with physician groups, looking for greater reach into a market. But private equity firms “provide an attractive alternative to the traditional hospital-physician alignment models,” according to a recent report from the Investment Funds team at the law firm BakerHostetler.

Private equity investors are increasingly seeking deals in areas that are highly fragmented or areas that still operate in silos and are undercapitalized, Ben Isgur, health research institute leader at PwC, told Healthcare Dive. Fragmented areas provide an opportunity for private equity firms to come in and align a number of practices on the same platform, which increases size and scale to improve leverage in negotiations with payers.

Potential highly fragmented targets include orthopaedic practices, which are likely to see a number of private equity investments over the next few years, as well as gastroenterology and urology, according to BakerHostetler.

For example, “Only 30 orthopaedic practices in the country have more than 20 physicians in a single practice,” the report notes. Private equity firms’ attraction to these practices may have increased last year after CMS changed the rules to allow total knee replacements to be performed in outpatient settings. Previously, the agency only allowed total knee replacements to be performed on Medicare beneficiaries in an inpatient-only setting.

Orthopaedics, gastroenterology and urology also are ripe with lucrative ancillary services such as surgery and imaging centers and have high use thanks to an aging population, the report notes. There are more than 5,700 ambulatory surgery centers across the U.S. that perform more than 20 million surgeries every year, according to the Ambulatory Surgery Center Association. Medicare alone spent $4.3 billion on ASC services in 2016, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.

Investing in healthcare is also enticing for private equity investors as they seek to balance their investments. The healthcare sector is likely more insulated from a recession due to the aging population and demand for services, along with the projected increase in healthcare spending, according to a research report from PwC.

Another area experts are keeping an eye on for potential deals is in mental health, Isgur said.

“There is a huge need for these services and many of the providers are in small practices. The opportunity is to consolidate and capitalize and then build shared services around technology and back-office functions to create more value,” Isgur said.

Private equity investment in healthcare is not new; but like politics, healthcare is still very local, he said.

By 2008, private equity was already active in a number of areas including long-term care facilities, hospice, ambulatory surgery centers, acute care hospitals and clinical labs, according to a previous Health Affairs report.

Buying to sell

Private equity by its nature comes with controversy, with a business model based on buying for the purpose of selling for a one-time windfall profit for wealthy investors and for taking on big debt to finance the deals.

That leaves workers and patients last, critics say, and the sector’s forays into nursing homes brought those fears to the surface.

For years, unions have been critical of private equity firms in general. The American Medical Association, the nation’s prominent doctors group, is probing private equity investments into medical practices and its influence on healthcare. The report will likely be available in June, according to an AMA spokesperson.

The health of nursing home patients was put in jeopardy at facilities run by ManorCare, one of the largest nursing home operators in the country, according to a Washington Post investigation. ManorCare struggled financially when it was helmed by private-equity firm Carlyle Group and ended up filing for bankruptcy last year, nearly a decade after it was acquired by Carlyle Group.

A spate of nursing home acquisitions by private equity firms led to concerns about quality of care issues. Private equity bought up 1,900 nursing homes over the course of a decade, from 1998 to 2008, according to a GAO report from the time.

Isgur noted the controversy, pointing to the proliferation of freestanding emergency rooms in some states.

Some freestanding ERs are backed by private equity firms and may be closer and more convenient for consumers, but that convenience comes at a hefty cost. One insurer, UnitedHealth Group, has warned about that, too.