How would you describe a for-profit healthcare group which basically takes people away from jobs in the public sector and then hires them back to the same employers in exchange for a fat fee? How about parasitic?
There are multiple ways to value a company. Savvy sellers know this, and will pick the one(s) that paint their asset in the best light, ably assisted and abetted (though not in the criminal sense, of course) by a bevvy of banks beavering away to beautify their business and create a competitive process.
Google is in the middle of a healthcare data grab. Details of its project to handle the data of 50m Americans through hospital group and insurer Ascension were revealed this week, just a couple of weeks after it announced the $2.1bn acquisition of Fitbit - a deal that is essentially also about data. The tech giant is just about reaching a point where its datasets are comprehensive enough to inflict real damage on the service sector.
Nearly a third of all private equity-owned health care businesses in Europe have been held for at least five years, according to the new HBI Deals Pipeline tool. That suggests many private equity houses are struggling to sell on their investments.
There is no lack of demand for unskilled homecare, yet it still struggles to shake off the stigma of its Cinderella status. Will it ever make it to the ball?
This week the market is reacting to the news that Unilabs' CEO Jos Lamers is transitioning away from a full-time role. The managed succession, where senior management will still report to Lamers for long-term strategy purposes, means it will retain a familiar face in a figurehead position. Why is this important? Can one person ever mean so much?
Not paying your rent is usually a bad thing. It leads to threatening letters from expensive lawyers. Litigation. Dispossession. And costs. So can it ever be a sensible tactic? For care home operators facing “unsustainable” rents, the answer is ‘perhaps, time will tell’.
Digital enthusiasts are right to be optimistic, but tech solutions are not a panacea. In the Nordics, countries are refining big data and laying the foundations for large-scale preventive healthcare. In France, online companies are tentatively eliminating healthcare silos and in the UK, apps and Skype calls are filling the gap in provision for mental health services. But the hype for digital solutions can lead providers astray.
What has emerged during our research for HBI Intelligence's imaging report, now live on our site, is how fragmented the sector is compared to other services. It will be utterly revolutionised by regulatory and tariff changes, AI/teleradiology and changing service-supplier dynamics; it's just no one is sure exactly how.
On the face of it little has changed in health care insurance. An antagonistic game continues to play out between insurers and providers with the former disputing prices and the latter grumbling about tariff cuts. Value health has yet to deliver. Insurers are sceptical of its complexity and providers who seek to demonstrate quality tell us that insurers are not interested in paying extra or even recognising them. Consumers continue to have no clear idea of quality.
What you and I and everyone else want is to know how to maximise quality life years, how to stay well as long as possible. And as individuals and as society we are willing to pay a lot for this.
Despite big increases in funding for digital health operators it is still far from clear who will be the winners. Many major players still have revenue of €5-8m.
This week, we heard that a well-known UK NHS Trust is pulling out of Abu Dhabi, UAE, highlighting that exporting healthcare abroad is not for the faint-hearted. Successful or not, HBI thinks that public healthcare operators embarking on such ventures face a moral quandary.
Brazilian health insurance will inevitably get cheaper - it has to. Providers are already feeling the pressure to get their act together and improve service efficiencies, but how will this happen without the entire sector moving toward DRGs?
When a start-up gets valued, it's not so much about what the company is worth today but more about how it is expected to perform over the next few years. High fundraising rounds come with big expectations from investors - will Europe's digital health companies be able to deliver?
In a lot of Western European countries, especially where there is a national health service funded by taxation, for-profit healthcare providers are seen at best as a necessary evil by government. Or at least, that is what they would have you believe.
Finnish elderly care has been making headlines for the wrong reasons recently. Investors were left unimpressed by Attendo's Q2 results last Friday (July 19) which showed it making a loss. Its share price has almost halved since January. But it is not just Attendo feeling the heat - these are troubling times for other large operators in the Finnish elderly care market. The CEO of Esperi Care, Finland's second wealthiest woman Marja Aarnio-Isohanni, resigned earlier this year after the country's healthcare watchdog temporarily shut down one of its facilities. Why are providers struggling in a market in desperate need of capacity?
Integrated healthcare and population health management are the new buzzwords. So two questions. Are they really happening? And what does this mean for for-profit health care?
Rates of growth vary dramatically in the for-profit oncology with mature markets with large outpatient radiotherapy sectors in France and Germany being left standing by growth rates in Emerging Markets such as India according to the latest report from HBI Intelligence. Surprisingly, the UK is also growing at 10%.
There are two types of testing: genetic and genomic. Genome sequencing reads each one of the three billion base pairs crammed into 23 chromosomes and their inter-relationships. Genetic testing doesn't. The two lend themselves to very different markets and produce different results. What does this mean for operators and patients?
Integrating care to better meet patient needs should lead to huge improvements in outcomes. Individual patients can be targeted for prevention and their needs predicted. But this approach, which could also be labelled population health management, calls for sophisticated data sets. The English NHS is trying to implement based on spreadsheets compiled by family doctors. It should learn from Finland and the USA. Internationally, there is a massive skills vacuum that no one is filling.
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