Whether your healthcare business is buying or selling, you need a team of experts to help you get it right. Our financial accounting due diligence teams work with our commercial, IT, and tax due diligence professionals to provide a holistic approach to M&A transactions.

Using a difference-in-differences design, we analyzed changes in performance on process and patient-experience measures at hospitals acquired by other hospitals or systems. We also compared these data with changes at control hospitals.

Patient Experience

Patient experience is critical in healthcare, from initial interactions with doctors and nurses to the overall patient journey. It’s an essential indicator of quality and can help drive performance. Patients are increasingly aware of quality and are seeking out high-quality care providers.

A person is the same unique human being before disease onset, even after contracting a disease and utilizing medical services. What makes that person’s interaction with healthcare providers different is what they do, how they do it, and how the experience affects them.

Authentic helps healthcare organizations understand patient experience through recorded conversations and data dashboards. These insights can reveal specific issues and uncover opportunities to improve patient experiences and care outcomes. We also provide advisory services in a highly regulated industry, such as mergers and acquisitions. This includes navigating antitrust laws and securities regulations. Our broad resources and multidisciplinary approach enable us to support clients across a broad spectrum of M&A transactions.

Value-Based Care

Value-based care can improve health outcomes and lower costs for patients, Healthcare Transaction Advisory providers, payers, and suppliers. These benefits can be measured through several indicators, including fewer medical errors, increased patient satisfaction, reduced hospitalizations, and a more focused approach to chronic disease management.

Value-based reimbursement rewards healthcare providers for producing higher patient outcomes and can help to reduce the financial risk associated with capitated payments. It also encourages efficiencies and promotes a more holistic team approach to healthcare that benefits the entire population.

However, the implementation of value-based care programs can have some drawbacks. For example, some value-based organizations may seem to be anti-innovation as they are slow to add new drugs to their formulary and tend to prioritize lower-cost therapies. In addition, they can be too price-focused to the point that they need to pay more attention to innovative or novel approaches that would significantly improve patients’ quality of life and alleviate suffering. This can be frustrating for patients trying to manage their chronic conditions and get the best possible results.

Healthcare Quality Measures

Healthcare quality measures can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of healthcare processes, outcomes, or patient perceptions. They are a vital tool to identify opportunities for improvement in areas such as patient communication, cultural competency, and staffing shortages.

Many hospital-specific factors impact these performance measures and must be considered when selecting the right step for a particular situation. As a result, different methodologies are often required to collect data for measuring healthcare process and outcome performance.

Our study’s results indicate that acquisition by a high-quality acquirer facilitates improvement in patient experience and clinical-process measures. In addition, acquired hospitals demonstrate higher patient safety and readmission rates than their non-acquired counterparts. These differences persisted even after adjusting for bed size, teaching status, and urban/rural status. However, the association with financial metrics was attenuated after adjustment for percent Medicare and Medicaid coverage.

Payor Reimbursement Rates

As the pandemic continues to impact the market, healthcare deal volumes remain high. Deal activity has been fueled by innovations in behavioral health and the heightened capacity for at-home care services. In addition, new opportunities for investment in long-term care are creating attractive deals for private equity investors and strategic buyers.

Payers have seized the opportunity presented by the COVID-19 pandemic to realign financial incentives for delivery system transformation. This has included extending loan forgiveness programs and continuing to reimburse providers under alternative payment models (APMs) instead of traditional fee-for-service payments.

However, many of these pandemic-era policies and initiatives are set to expire once the public health emergency ends. Continually achieving meaningful performance improvement beyond the pandemic will require payers to pursue these changes’ sustainability intentionally.