These days I’m reminded of an old baseball line — “you can’t tell the players without a scorecard” — and not just because Major League Baseball’s opening day took place less than two weeks ago.
That turn of phrase was yelled by the salesmen hawking scorecards inside stadiums on game days, before players’ names were on the back of their jerseys.
Related: Kaiser closes Geisinger Health acquisition, forming Risant Health
Today it could also apply to healthcare, as a dizzying number of partnerships, joint ventures, mergers and ownership changes are underway. Who’s who, what name are they operating under and what’s their role in this industry?
Just since MLB’s March 28 openers, Modern Healthcare’s deals blog has catalogued almost a dozen combinations of one form or another, and we’re pretty discriminating about the ones we note. Does anyone have a rarely used synonym for “acquire”? Our newsroom is starting to run out of them.
Then there are the big deals, literally and figuratively. Chief among them was the March 31 closing of Kaiser Permanente’s acquisition of Geisinger Health and the formation of Risant Health, a nonprofit that will combine Geisinger with future health system acquisitions. The stated goal is to create a national network of value-based care.
Also changing hands recently have been individual hospitals, doctors’ groups, post-acute facilities, payers, health tech firms and consultancies.
It’s hard to keep it all straight for those of us sitting on the sidelines, and that confusion pales compared with the sense of the unknown inside organizations for employees, vendors and patients. Growth strategies come with responsibilities, not only to investors, but also to the people who do the work and the customers bulking up that revenue line on a spreadsheet.
So much of what is underway is positive — the expansion of ambulatory facilities, adoption of new and exciting technologies and development of patient-friendly care models. And then there’s the other side — clinician shortages, layoffs and job outsourcing, a constant string of cybersecurity incidents and the closures of facilities in communities that can ill afford to lose them.
It’s worth watching to see who’s warming up in the on-deck circle, with the hope that the next home run is a win for all.
