After putting offers for a complete of 27 urgent-care facilities over the previous yr, the leaders of Ardent Well being Companions Inc. are planning different types of ambulatory enlargement whereas retaining an eye fixed out for system acquisitions.
Nashville-based Ardent, which went public final summer time, earlier this month introduced the acquisition of 18 urgent-care websites—six in New Mexico, a dozen in Oklahoma—from NextCare Pressing Look after an undisclosed sum. That deal got here after the acquisition final yr of 9 clinics in East Texas and Kansas that additionally served to broaden Ardent’s community in these markets.
Talking on the latest forty third Annual JPMorgan Healthcare Convention, President and CEO Marty Bonick mentioned his workforce needs to maintain increasing in its eight mid-sized markets—the place it runs 30 hospitals and greater than 200 different websites of care—in addition to develop into new ones. The corporate has about $850 million in liquidity to place to work towards that aim and ambulatory enlargement is excessive on the precedence checklist because it has a share of solely 3 % of ambulatory revenues in its markets versus 21 % of hospital revenues.
“The following focus that we anticipate to see is round ambulatory surgical procedure middle development,” Bonick mentioned on the JPMorgan convention. “We all know there’s alternative for added facilities. These are more likely to be extra on the de novo aspect […] given the present buying and selling multiples of these property. However we do know that we’ve received doctor curiosity and demand in addition to the affected person development to assist that.”
Extra urgent-care development is also within the playing cards and Bonick mentioned that might come within the type of different acquisitions or de novo growth. He additionally talked about that freestanding imaging facilities and emergency departments in addition to microhospitals are avenues for community development.
Bonick and his workforce will look to emulate the success of Ardent’s urgent-care push in East Texas by way of rising its affected person base. Bonick instructed the JPMorgan convention that 45 % of the individuals in final yr’s acquisition have been new to Ardent. Inside 30 days of the deal, he added, 15% of the sufferers of these clinics had scheduled follow-up care with different Ardent suppliers.
“We had about 150,000 admissions [last year] however handled over 1.2 million individuals,” Bonick mentioned. “That’s key to our shopper technique by way of how can we develop the numerator […] via no matter modality works for them—whether or not that’s in-person care in a hospital, outpatient care in a facility or a virtual-care atmosphere.”
Shares of Ardent (Ticker: ARDT) have been altering palms at $14.06 in noon buying and selling Jan. 21, down from their latest ranges of roughly $16, the value at which they went public. Traders offered off the inventory after Bonick and CFO Alfred Lumsdaine famous, amongst different issues, within the runup to the JPMorgan gathering that doctor companies price will increase have persevered longer than beforehand anticipated. With the inventory at roughly $14, Ardent’s market capitalization is true round $2 billion.
