While dealmakers will continue to look for the best emerging trends, the healthcare sector is in much need of specialty or ancillary services with a focus on data and efficiency. And some dealmakers believe that a focus on e-clinical services and data proliferation is where demand will be.
In speaking with Nathan Ray, a partner with the healthcare and life sciences team with West Monroe, it seems that dealmaking attention within the sector lies within digital and vertical integration assets. “Assets like payment integrity or analytics or cost containment or care management. I think that there’s an appetite for acquisitive growth and just large strategics like CVS or Walgreens all of those are active consolidators and actively bringing things into their growing strategies.”
When looking at the broad strokes of the private equity market, Ray notes that there is a good amount of interest in the specialty or ancillary benefit administration. There is a lot of interest in the evolution of both technology and services supporting those services. He additionally notes that private equity has shown interest in interoperability and clinical data from the health system side.
“I think that energy is kind of past the fence line, it is now focusing on things like data commercialization and other areas of E-clinical services and even patient and population identification and marketing,” says Ray.
Ray adds the healthcare industry still has a way to go when it comes to data. “There a lot of change that’s going to be coming down the pipe. As far as how we administer technologies and therapies, how we collect data about the people taking them, about how we understand the efficacy. At some level, cost is going to be taken out of these systems for a number of reasons, including to pay for the additional therapies we all want, and that cost is going to come out through self-care and automation and AI and just more data.”
What are your thoughts on the use of data in the healthcare field? Let me know your thoughts at [email protected].
–Cole Lipsky
