Dive Brief:
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Greenville, N.C.-based Vidant Health and East Carolina University announced they will integrate their organizations in a $462.5 million agreement.
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The deal will merge the 80 Vidant and ECU medical practices in Eastern North Carolina. The new organization is expected to launch next year.
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The two organizations said the deal will increase patient access to new therapies and technologies.
Dive Insight:
Vidant Health is a nonprofit health system with eight hospitals and a total of 1,447 beds. It also operates the Vidant Medical Group, which includes 420 providers across more than 80 sites.
This new deal will merge Vidant and EDU medical practices into a single entity. The new entity, which will be called VECU Medical Group, is the latest M&A activity as healthcare organizations search for ways to contain costs, cut redundancies and improve patient care, satisfaction and access to services.
There have been other recent deals involving university physicians. RWJBarnabas Health and Rutgers University announced an intent to partner last week, which would create New Jersey’s largest academic healthcare system.
In addition to partnerships like VECU Medical Group, other healthcare organizations are buying groups and gaining larger market share as they search for scale. PwC recently reported that the values of healthcare deals are up this year. PwC said 10 megadeals in the second quarter valued at a total of $43.3 billion. In comparison, there has been an average of four megadeals per quarter since 2015.