Last week, the LevinPro HC team ventured to the upper east side of Manhattan to attend the 16th Annual ACG New York Healthcare Conference. It’s usually a short (but productive) evening of networking and honest conversations around the healthcare M&A market and private equity, and this year was no different.
The keynote speaker was Jonathon Bush, Founder and CEO of Zus Health, a digital health platform offering care-coordination programs and analytics for providers. If Mr. Bush’s name rings a bell, he was the co-founder of athenahealth, another eHealth company offering a suite of electronic health record and patient engagement services.
Moderated by Andrew Colbert, Senior Managing Director at Ziegler Healthcare Investment Banking, the conversation with Mr. Bush focused on some of the struggles he’s been seeing in the industry, such as inefficiency in the healthcare space, and how some emerging technologies could remedy those issues. Naturally, Mr. Bush focused on the surge of telemedicine and telehealth, and how that could revolutionize healthcare delivery.
“Raise your hand if you went to a physical bank in the last year,” Mr. Bush asked the audience. “That’s the future of healthcare delivery—from primary care checkups to diagnostic visits. I don’t think people realize how important virtual care is to the U.S. healthcare industry in the next 20 years.”
The conversation also highlighted the efforts (and failures) of multinational corporations like CVS Health and Walmart to push into the healthcare industry. In a room of healthcare M&A advisors and private equity partners, there seemed to be little surprise in their withdrawal from the industry.
“I like Amazon and Jeff Bezos, but honestly, health care isn’t a side hustle,” Mr. Bush said. “It is difficult to break into this very complicated industry.”
The next panel dove into healthcare M&A specifically. It featured Brandon Cohen, Partner, Healthcare, HIG Capital, David Kereiakes, Managing Director at Windham Venture Partners, Joe Kadlec, Partner at Troutman Pepper, Don Ritucci, Managing Director and Head of Healthcare M&A at Oppenheimer and was moderated by Jerry Luebbers, Partner at Plante Moran
The conversation drifted around some of the headwinds of the industry, such as high interest rates, but much of the talk highlighted the regulatory environment and scrutiny on private equity transactions.
“This FTC has become very aggressive when it comes to private equity in healthcare,” one of the panelists said. “Deals are taking longer because we have to consider every anti-trust argument against it. There is activity, but right now, we’re all in the weeds.”
It wasn’t all doom and gloom from the panel though.
“The industry is ripe for innovation,” another panelist member said. “Whether it’s AI, new medicines or new reimbursement models, we think there is a lot of change on the horizon that’s going to open the floodgates, both for the investors and companies and for the patient.”
