Option Care Health is sticking to what it knows best when it comes to acquisitions, following its failed $3.6 billion bid to buy home health giant Amedisys last spring.
After losing out to UnitedHealth Group’s $3.3 billion all-cash offer for Amedisys, President and CEO John Rademacher said the home infusion company will use capital to buy companies more closely aligned with Option Care Health’s core business.
“We will look at opportunities that either increase our market presence or increase the enablement of us providing care to patients in the home or one of our infusion suites,” Rademacher said. “There is no timeline. We will look at a lot of different things in the marketplace and evaluate them from both a strategic and economic positioning value.”
Option Care Health is the nation’s largest independent provider, by revenue, of home and alternate site infusion services. In early May, it announced a deal to buy Amedisys. But a little more than a month later UnitedHealth Group swooped in with a counteroffer that Amedisys accepted. Amedisys paid Option Care a breakup fee of $106 million.
Rademacher called Amedisys a “unique asset” and said the attempted acquisition would have helped Option Care provide more coordinated care to patients. But with that deal in the rear view mirror, Rademacher said his company is looking for other ways to provide more care to patients.
It wants to increase the number of alternate site infusion suites beyond the current 160 locations. The company began growing that part of the business when the pandemic exacerbated the nursing shortage. A single nurse at an infusion suite can serve multiple patients at a time and those sites could offer opportunities to provide other services, he said.
“Is there additional data we can capture around assessments and surveys that can be provided back to physicians,” Rademacher said. “We can also look at whether there are ways patients can effectively manage activities of daily living that could improve their comprehensive care plan.”
Had Option Care acquired Amedisys, it would have moved closer to becoming a more vertically integrated healthcare company, a trend sweeping the healthcare industry. But Rademacher said he does not think the company needs to become that type of provider to be successful.
“I don’t feel that we have to go deep on vertical integration,” Rademacher said. “I do think we have to be thinking about how we are evolving our model and how we continue to innovate around the patient and being good at what we do.”
Last week, Option Care reported third-quarter net income of $56.3 million, or 31 cents per share, a 45% increase from last year's third quarter. Quarterly revenue increased 7%, to $1.09 billion.
