Consolidating the German outpatient rehabilitation market
Gimv-owned rehaneo has just completed its seventh acquisition in 18 months. What are the attractions of the German outpatient rehabilitation market?
Click here to read more about rehaneo, here to see a list of the largest rehab groups in Germany and here to read our cross-national report on the sector in HBI Intelligence.
Gimv’s Philipp von Hammerstein says the German outpatient rehabilitation market is only around €900m or just under a tenth of the entire rehabilitation market by revenue or 15% of all patients. Set up in 2020, rehaneo is building a network of big ambulatory centres across Germany. Its latest acquisition Reha Vita in Cottbus has developed from a small physiotherapy practice into a rehabilitation centre with more than 140 employees. In total, rehaneo group today has more than 600 employees that care for a total of around 30,000 patients and customers a year and support them on their path to a rapid recovery.
Von Hammerstein said “Outpatient is much lower cost and, of course, you only get paid five days a week whilst residential is seven.” Normal rehabilitation for say a hip or knee replacement involves spending 3-4 weeks in a slightly rundown hotel in a town ending in Bad. Von Hammerstein says younger fitter Germans are expressing a marked preference for outpatient. “That way they can stay at home and go on working.”
He says this is borne out in demand. “We didn’t have a Covid dip when the rest of the sector was left reeling,” he claims. He estimates that outpatient is growing in the high single digit percentages.
So why has rehabilitation been so slow to move to outpatient? Rehabilitation is paid for not by the sickness funds but by the big pension funds. He says that Deutsche Rentenversicherung (German pension insurance, a not-for-profit and the main payor for rehabilitation is conservative and markedly slow to approve a move to outpatient – perhaps because it also owns 90 inpatient rehabilitation facilities itself. “It is the regulator too and has been slow to register new outpatient players.” He says the revenue of the Deutsche Rentenversicherung network of clinics has probably now been surpassed by Median, the largest for-profit player.
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