healthy muse healthcare news.
- This week in healthcare: LifePoint acquires Kindred’s post-acute facilities, Pear Therapeutics set to SPAC at $1.6 billion valuation, Warby Parker goes public, Biden’s slimmed down infrastructure plan, Amazon’s digital health incubator, and everything you wished you knew about FHIR.
LifePoint Health acquires Kindred’s Facilities Service Lines.
Post-Acute Plays: Private, for-profit acute care hospital operator LifePoint Health is buying Kindred’s facility-based post acute business (AKA, long-term care hospitals, inpatient rehabilitation facilities, and skilled nursing facilities). The deal was announced on June 21, but unfortunately no financial terms were disclosed. (Link)
- Why you should care: Hospital operators seem to be snatching up post-acute assets. Avid Healthy Muse readers will remember back in our March 1 edition that HCA purchased Brookdale’s home health and hospice business.
- Although the deal is focused on facility based care, LifePoint’s acquisition seems to be similar strategically from an alignment perspective and also provides LifePoint with huge scale – they’ll now operate in over 200 facility-based settings.
- Antitrust: Since this deal is so large and involves hospitals, it’s very possible that the FTC challenges the transaction.
Remember: Once this transaction clears, all of Kindred’s service lines will have changed hands, and it looks like that trend will continue – Humana indicated on its earnings call that it plans to sell off the Kindred hospice segment for a juicy valuation multiple. (Link)
- In fact, Home health and hospice multiples are the highest in all of healthcare, and really have been for quite some time. (Link)
Pear Therapeutics to become Latest SPAC
SPAC me: In the latest SPAC deal, Pear Therapeutics is set to go public at a $1.6 billion valuation. Pear is set to become the first digital therapeutics firm to go public, which is notable because the space’s potential is largely unknown. (Link)
- Digital Therapeutics? For a precursor on the digital therapeutics trend, and what to expect, Nikhil Krishnan put together a nice piece last year on the emerging industry. (Link)
public market update.
Top 3 performers: Oak Street, Talkspace, Clover
Bottom 3 sandbaggers: Uphealth, Agilon, InnovAge
- Full List performance: (Link)
Eyes: Warby Parker filed for an IPO this week. I’m technically including this as healthcare news 🙂 (Link)
Bright Health: Successfully raised just under $1 billion in its IPO after opening up below its IPO price of $18. (Link)
Doximity: the social network for physicians raged over 100% in its market debut. After opening at $24, shares are now trading around $58. (Link)
LifeStance Health: the outpatient mental health biz is valued at over $7 billion after its IPO last week. (Link)
Biz Hits
M&A: A PwC report published this week highlighted just how red-hot all of healthcare is from a deals perspective. (Link)
Behavioral: McKinsey’s infographic on behavioral health utilization was a cool visualization into how things changed during the pandemic. (Link)
Employers: Peloton is now offering a new corporate wellness program for employers, trying to capitalize on the WFH trend. (Link)
Select Medical: The post acute and outpatient therapy operator announced several acquisitions and JVs. Select has been highly acquisitive lately which goes to show how active the post acute space has been over the past year. (Link)
Hims: Telehealth firm Hims & Hers acquired a dermatology telehealth firm called Apostrophe this week in a continued push to diversify its platform. (Link)
RPM: This was a solid overview of the remote patient monitoring world, especially in the context of increasing use-case and A.I. (Link)
VC Bro: Amazon launched digital health accelerator with a focus on virtual care and analytics startups this week. (Link)
Policy Hits
Medicaid: In a blow for Medicaid expansion proponents, a Missouri judge blocked voter-approved Medicaid expansion after the government refused to fund it. (Link)
Infrastructure: Biden’s slimmed down infrastructure package cut out a good chunk of healthcare provisions related to ‘family infrastructure,’ including provisions related to long-term care services, boosted home care worker wagers, and further Medicaid expansion. (Link)
Home Care: Although much of the ‘family’ infrastructure was left out of Biden’s slimmed down infrastructure draft, a group of lawmakers just proposed the Better Care Better Jobs Act – legislation designed to enable home-based care programs in the U.S. (Link)
Ghosted: San Diego is suing three major insurers because those insurers allegedly failed to keep their provider network directories up to date. What a nightmare. (Link)
Other Hits
Watchdog: Nursing home deaths were up 32% in 2020 amid the pandemic. (Link)
Contagion: This was an cool insight into how sanitary measures taken during the pandemic have reduced the spread of other contagious diseases. (Link)
Opinions
MD Mental Health: This was a good read from Vox on physician need for mental health, but not having the support to pursue it. (Link)
Amazon Pharmacy: Geekwire took Amazon Pharmacy to the test to see how the retail giant’s new healthcare service performs in the real world. (Link)
Shortage: Paul Keckley ponders whether the well documented physician shortage might not be as bad as we think. (Link)
Healthy Muse Top Picks
DTC: This piece from Ro’s CEO was a cool insight into how the firm thinks about direct-to-consumer principles. (Link)
FHIR: Brendan Keeler’s write-up on the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources had me rolling. Great read for anyone wanting to learn more about this standard. (Link)