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Business Models and Strategy

 

Hungary: high risk, high reward

The Hungarian hospital market is growing at 10% per year nominally, with some of the biggest players outstripping this. With such rapid growth and growing demand the potential reward for investors is great – but with this also comes big risks.

Fico returns in Slovakia – should investors be worried?

Just in time for Halloween, Robert Fico is back. The former Slovakian prime minister who tried to renationalise insurer Dôvera has led his populist centre-left party to win the most seats in Slovakia’s 2023 elections. But a Slovak operator source tells HBI the private sector need not worry as even if Fico forms a government, it is unlikely to be the horror show some fear.

KKR set to buy Eugin for €500m

US-based global investment company KKR looks set to buy Eugin, the Spain-based fertility group owned by Germany-based conglomerate Fresenius, with which it is reportedly in exclusive talks. The deal values Eugin at around €500m.

Cinven goes ahead with Synlab take-private

UK PE group Cinven is pushing ahead with its €10-per-share acquisition of multinational labs group Synlab by launching a public acquisition offer to all shareholders. This comes after several months of slience after Cinven made an initial non-binding offer to take the group private back in March. 

Controversial care cuts in the Netherlands on hold following fall of government

Elderly care in the Netherlands has been stuck in a state of limbo for a while now. Political upheaval over the summer and the collapse of a four-party coalition government after 18 months in power has only made the future of care - and the implementation of planned budget cuts - harder to predict. HBI chats to a consultant to find out more.

Why it pays to do the basics when building a patient pathway

A German outpatient operator tells HBI how providers are attracting and keeping patients within their businesses throughout the patient pathway, with as many as 50% of complex ophthalmology referrals coming from internal sources. HBI hears it pays to do basic (less profitable) work and even consider retail early in the patient journey so when they really do need help, they already have a provider of choice.

Hungary’s health care sector boosted by new state-of-the-art TritonLife lab

TritonLife, Hungary’s largest private hospital group, has significantly boosted the country’s diagnostic testing capacity by opening a new state-of-the-art laboratory in Budapest. The group tells HBI it will eventually have the capacity to process 10 million tests per year, including many which previously had to be sent abroad to be processed. As well as providing an in-house diagnostics service to the group’s own patients, TritonLife has agreed to provide testing services to more than 20 other private health care providers in the country.

Interview: Michal Tzuchman Katz, CEO and founder of Kahun

The possibilities of AI in medicine are seemingly boundless, with many talking about its labour saving potential. Yet concerns persist, particularly with Chat GPT, and its black box LLM (large language model) system which is designed to mimic conversation but is not always factually accurate nor able to spot signs of acuity. By their nature, black box systems also cannot explain the conclusions they reach.

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