2012 Healthcare IT M&A: The Dog that Didn’t Bark

We also saw Emdeon (#10) acquire payment integrity vendor TC3 Health, while emergency department vendor T-System (#61) was busy acquiring Practice Management Associates, Clinical Coding Solutions, and Marina Medical Billing.

Another departmental vendor Mediware (#75) was extremely active, not only making four small tuck-in acquisitions of its own, but was being itself acquired in a $195-million take-private transaction by private equity investor Thoma Bravo (which, incidentally, also acquired physician practice vendor SRS Software). The Advisory Board Company (#39) added to its portfolio by acquiring ActiveStrategy and 360Fresh, while divesting OptiLink to time and attendance vendor Kronos (#41). In the meantime, Kronos’ arch rival, API Healthcare (#67), acquired staffing and scheduling vendor Concerro.

Come the second half of this year, we expect to see some re-emergence of larger deals, but, as of this writing, athenahealth’s acquisition of Epocrates remains one of the larger bets. How it plays out and what else occurs will be a topic for next year’s M&A Roundup.

Ben Rooks (ben@st-advisors.com) spent 15 years on Wall Street as both an equity research analyst and investment banker focusing on HCIT. He is the founder of ST Advisors, an HCIT-focused advisory firm serving both companies and their investors and serves on the editorial board of Healthcare Informatics.  Since last year’s article, ST Advisors provided M&A coaching to Defran Systems and has also worked with Emdeon on some interesting strategic issues.