It’s been a slow start to the year for healthcare mergers, but analysts project more transactions in the coming months, Chief Healthcare Executive reports. Critics worry about the prospect of mega-deals.
While a few big hospital mergers have been announced in 2022, the size of the deals doesn’t change the fact that there haven’t been many transactions.
The first three months of 2022 saw only 12 deals, the smallest number of hospital mergers in a first quarter in years, according to the Kaufman Hall consulting firm. Health systems were dealing with record highs in COVID-19 hospitalizations in the beginning of the year, along with serious staffing shortages, and it made sense that deal-making wasn’t at the forefront of executives’ minds.
But the second quarter of 2022 didn’t exactly see a spike in merger activity. There were 13 transactions involving hospitals and health systems from April through June, the smallest number for a second quarter since 2016, according to Kaufman Hall’s July 13 report.
Anu Singh, who leads Kaufman Hall’s mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships practice, thinks there are going to be more deals in the coming months and in 2023. With the pandemic, hospitals have had to focus more on operations, rather than long-term planning. Read more.
