Private Equity Healthcare Deals: 2025 in Review

Overview

In light of private equity’s continued interest in healthcare and the risks associated with private equity ownership of healthcare companies, the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) tracks private equity-backed healthcare deals each month and produces an annual summary exploring trends in private equity deal activity. This report looks at the 2025 private equity deals data in review, identifying and analyzing recent investment trends in healthcare.

Click here to view a catalog of our monthly acquisitions tracking for 2025 and previous annual reports.

Jump ahead:

• Summary of data
• Case studies
  • Health IT
  • Dental care
  • Outpatient care
  • Home health and hospice
  • Pharma services
• Joint ventures
• Methodology

Summary of data

• In 2025, PESP tracked 1029 private equity-backed leveraged buyouts (151), add-on acquisitions (664), and growth investments (214), involving 420 platform companies and 708 investment firms.^[1]
  • For explanations of leveraged buyouts, add-on acquisitions, and growth investments, click here.
• Globally, private equity dealmaking in healthcare saw a resurgence and record growth in 2025, according to research from Bain & Company. Deal value was the highest on record, and deal volume was the second highest on record. In North America, deal volume was essentially even between 2024 and 2025, a finding reflected in the U.S. specific data that PESP tracked.^[2] Even in the current higher interest rate and high tariff environment, private equity dealmaking is remaining steady in the U.S..
• Health IT (151 deals), dental care (149), outpatient care (148), medtech (117), and behavioral health (56) were the busiest subsectors among those PESP tracked.
• In addition to buyouts, add-on acquisitions, and growth investments, private equity firms are increasingly using joint ventures with nonprofit health systems as a growth strategy that can provide them with trusted brands and access to geographic markets they might otherwise not readily access.
• In light of continued investor interest in healthcare and the risks associated with private equity ownership of healthcare companies, including “stealth consolidation” that can lead to higher prices, state and federal policymakers should update laws and regulations to increase oversight of healthcare mergers and acquisitions.

Explore the following tables and graphs for an overview of private equity healthcare dealmaking in 2025.

Case studies

The following case studies explore the three busiest categories PESP tracked (Health IT, dental care, and outpatient care) and two other categories PESP has chosen to highlight: home health/hospice and pharma services. PESP periodically covers various health subsectors in greater depth in our monthly acquisitions blog posts and in long-form reports. To read more about categories that are not covered here, you can visit an archive of our past work or our acquisitions landing page.

Health IT

Health Information Technology (IT) was the busiest healthcare category in terms of private equity deal activity in 2025 that PESP tracked (151 deals), and the second busiest category tracked in 2024 (140 deals). This broad category encompasses a variety of information technology companies, including practice management software, electronic health record (EHR) software, and revenue cycle management companies.

Recentresearch from the Center for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR) argues that federal laws (like the 2009 HITECH Act) and other regulations that intended to modernize healthcare infrastructure and control costs have had the unintended consequences of fueling the growth of a massive Health IT industry. This industry has become increasingly financialized and has failed to increase efficiencies across the U.S. health system in any meaningful way.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which does not require patient consent to sell their deidentified healthcare data, and the HITECH ACT, which mandates the collection of many types of patient data, have helped cultivate a multibillion dollar industry of buying and selling patient data. The entrance of generative artificial intelligence (AI) to the scene is also fueling growth in this industry; AI requires massive amounts of data for training, making data more valuable, and AI can also help companies make use of enormous datasets that were previously difficult to monetize without time-intensive analysis.

Private equity firms and other for-profit groups have capitalized on the Health IT industry, especially within revenue cycle management (RCM). According to CEPR, “As of July 2024, 199 RCM companies were PE- or VC-owned or formerly owned, including 104 current PE-backed companies.” In December 2024, PESP identified 113 private equity-backed RCM companies.

PESP tracked 47 private equity deals involving RCM companies in 2025, including the following:

• InTandem Capital’s January equity investment in HealthFuse
• I.G. Capital’s April acquisition of GetIx Health
• Advent International’s August acquisition of PatientPoint

To read more about private equity’s investments in revenue cycle management and the associated risk and impacts, you can view PESP’s 2024 report, “Private equity’s revenue cycle: creating and collecting U.S. medical debt” here.

Dental Care

Dental care has consistently been one of the busiest categories that PESP has tracked since 2023. In 2025, dental care had the second highest deal activity at 149 deals, and 95% of these deals were add-on acquisitions made by PE-owned platform companies. Ten of the 18 platform companies in 2025 with the most deals are dental care companies.

An August 2024 study published in Health Affairs found that private equity affiliation with dental practices nearly doubled for the period 2015-2021, from 6.6% in 2015 to 12.8% in 2021. The study also found the highest growth among dental specialties such as endodontists and oral surgeons, which more than doubled during the period.

In November 2024, KFF and CBS published an exposé detailing a growing trend of dentists pulling out “healthy” teeth in order to profit from implants.  At dental practices around the country, patients have been reportedly encouraged to get dental implants, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars, instead of keeping their teeth and getting treatments like root canals. The article highlighted how multiple private equity-owned dental care chains may be contributing to this trend. The article reported that a patient’s lawsuit alleged that one company, ClearChoice, which is owned by Ares Management, American Securities and Leonard Green & Partners, used salespersons, or “patient education consultants,” to meet with patients about options like dental implants before the patient had even seen a dentist.

Top subsectors in dental care by deal type

PESP’s 2021 report on private equity in the dental care industry highlights the risks to patients in private equity-owned dental practices, including overtreatment, misleading advertising, and Medicaid fraud. The risks to quality of care may be driven by profit-driven practices in order to create returns for investors.

Outpatient Care

PESP tracked 148 deals involving outpatient care providers in 2024, consisting of 119 add-on acquisitions, 7 leveraged buyouts, and 22 growth/expansion investments.

Top outpatient care subsectors by deal count

Dermatology and eye care were the busiest specialties and pediatrics saw the largest growth compared to 2024: private equity investors made at least nine investments in pediatric outpatient care in 2025, three times more than what PESP tracked in 2024.

As private equity investments in pediatric care increase, little is known about its impacts aside from what can be extrapolated from its expansion into other sectors of the health system. In an October 2025 commentary for Becker’s Hospital Review, Thomas Kayal, an administrator at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center warned, “…pediatrics remains a blind spot in the private equity debate. Children are the most vulnerable patients we have, and if profit driven models expand here without careful guardrails, the consequences could be severe. Pediatrics cannot remain an afterthought in this debate, and leaders must act now before capital accelerates further.”

A 2023 systematic review found that private equity acquisition of providers was associated with higher costs for patients and payers; recent individual studies have shown price or cost impacts in ophthalmology, dermatology, gastroenterology, and primary care. Private equity’s rapid consolidation of outpatient specialty care and the associated higher costs, is drawing scrutiny from state lawmakers. In 2025, both Oregon and California passed legislation to limit investor influence in physician practices.

Pharma services

PESP tracked 42 deals involving pharmaceutical services companies. These included contract research organizations, including clinical trial sites and recruitment companies.

Pharma services include contract and outsourced services for the pharmaceuticals industry throughout the drug development and commercialization process, including drug discovery, development, clinical trials, and marketing. This area of healthcare has seen rapid growth in recent years; according to a June 2024 PitchBook report, “over the past two years, pharma services has become the hottest area of PE healthcare investing.”

Investors are attracted to the sector for several reasons: the growth of the overall global market driven by tailwinds in the pharmaceuticals and biotech markets; the complexity of the growing specialty drugs market which has incentivized pharmaceutical companies to turn to specialized outsourced services to reduce costs; the highly fragmented pharma services ecosystem, providing opportunities for consolidation; and broader macro tailwinds in the healthcare sector, such as an aging population and higher incidence of chronic diseases.

In the second of the year, alone, there were 21 deals involving clinical trials, including three in September

• In April 2025, Baypine announced its acquisition of CenExcel Clinical Research, a clinical trials operator with 17 sites across CA, CO, FL, GA, MD, NJ, and UT.
• In August 2025, Thomas H. Lee Partners announced an agreement to acquire Headlands Research from KKR. As of January 2026, Headlands Research operates 23 clinical trial sites across the U.S. and Canada.
• In December 2025, ObjectiveHealth, a company specialized in bringing “clinical trials into local physician practices,” acquiredPiedmont Research Partners, a private research site that is currently enrolling patients in studies of chronic kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, high triglycerides, osteoarthritis, dyslipidemia, and gout. ObjectiveHealth is backed by private equity firm Vitruvian Partners.

Private equity’s expansion into the clinical trial industry, in particular, is accelerating and may reshape how medical studies are conducted and overseen. The growing consolidation of research sites and ethics review boards raises concerns about trial safety, the long-term impacts on patients, and the cost of care.

Analysts have noted that clinical trial sites are now among the most sought-after segments of the pharmaceutical services industry. Firms that once focused on physician practice management acquisitions have pivoted to life sciences due to the promise of strong returns. Recent deals illustrate the momentum in the clinical trial sector, particularly in add-on acquisitions that consolidate individual clinical trial sites under a single platform brand.

In addition to research sites, private equity has also expanded into institutional review boards (IRBs), a critical area of research oversight. These boards are responsible for ensuring that studies involving human participants minimize unnecessary risk and that participants are adequately informed about potential harms. According to a 2023 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, private equity’s shift into IRBs has been accompanied by significant consolidation, driven by private equity investment. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, and Bernie Sanders raised concerns that a for-profit model might create conflicts of interest, potentially incentivizing faster approvals at the expense of thorough ethical review.

Cost-cutting tactics and incorrectly approved trials have real human impacts. Clinical trials help ensure potential new interventions are safe and effective. It is imperative that participant rights are protected and that research is conducted ethically, to protect clinical trial participants from risk and to prevent dangerous interventions from being approved and instituted. The integrity of clinical trials depends on maintaining public trust, protecting participants, and ensuring that science rather than short-term financial returns guides the pursuit of medical innovation.

Read more about private equity expansion into clinical trials, click here.

Home health and hospice

PESP tracked 39 deals involving home health and hospice companies in 2025. An aging

U.S. population with an increasing burden of chronic disease is driving demand in this space, alongside market fragmentation that attracts private equity consolidation strategies. For-profit home healthcare and hospice companies have been linked to lower standards of care compared to their non-profit counterparts. Private equity firms, which often target outsized returns over short time horizons and finance many of their acquisitions with high levels of debt, may exacerbate that divide.

In November 2025, JAMA Health Forum published research showing that of 749 home health agencies identified between for the time period 2006 to 2024, 520 were acquired by middle-market PE firms and 143 by megafund PE firms. While private equity acquisitions of home health agencies peaked in 2021, PESP has tracked consistent activity in this space in recent years, including in 2025.

Notable acquisitions from 2025 include:

• Abound Health, owned by multiple private equity investors, acquired New Jersey-based Star Pediatric Home Care Agency in February 2025.
• Aveanna Healthcare, majority-owned by Bain Capital and J.H. Whitney, announced the acquisition of Thrive Skilled Pediatric Care in April 2025. Thrive previously had backing from private equity firm, Summit Partners. Thrive has operations across seven states, and so this acquisition will grow Aveanna’s already expansive footprint. Aveanna is the largest provider of private duty nursing services in the United States, serving pediatric patients with medically complex diagnoses and disabilities who need high levels of assistance from caregivers.
• In April, Avid Health at Home, owned by Havencrest Capital Management, announced acquisitions of Home Care Angels (IL) and Private Duty Home Healthcare (MI).
• In April 2025, Waud Capital Partners announced the creation of a new home health platform company, Altocare, formed from the acquisition of MedTec Healthcare (IL) and its merger with Senior Helpers.

Many of these acquisitions involved private duty nursing companies, including ones that provide pediatric care. Private duty nursing involves more individualized and continuous skilled nursing care than other types of home healthcare, and is a form of care that helps children and adults with complex medical needs and technology-dependence remain in the home. Private duty nursing agencies face ongoing challenges from persistent labor shortages and low Medicaid reimbursement rates in many states. Even within this context, private equity’s investments illustrate that investors see opportunity to make money in private duty nursing.

The private equity business model, which uses high levels of debt with the goal of generating outsized returns for investors, can lead to harmful cost cutting practices that can exacerbate the already demanding and low-wage environment for private duty nurses. This in turn can have impacts on patients and their families. Aveanna has followed the private equity playbook that involves high levels of debt, and in the four fiscal years prior to 2025 it paid approximately $484 million in debt and interest payments despite operating at a net loss.

Much of home health care, including private duty nursing for pediatric patients, is paid for by Medicaid. Private equity’s debt based strategies can divert some of these Medicaid funds to debt payments instead of patient care. Without guardrails in place, investor-owned and other for-profit home healthcare agencies can continually to legally siphon Medicaid dollars away from patient care, a serious issue but especially so now in light of reduced medicaid funding.

Hospice

Hospice care, a subsector within home health, has also been a popular investment target for private equity because the industry is fragmented and because of various legal loopholes in Medicare reimbursement that can be gamed for profit extraction, typically at the expense of patient care.

A damning study published in December 2025 examining private equity-owned hospices showed that private equity-owned agencies reported the highest profits and lowest patient care spending compared to other for-profit ownership models. Read more about private equity’s growth in the hospice industry here.

Overall, the home health sector is incredibly demanding work with pervasively low wages. Private equity expansion into home health and hospice may exacerbate impacts to workers and patients. Read our reports on private equity’s investments in home health and hospice here, and on private duty nursing, in particular, here .

Joint ventures

The dealmaking data discussed in this report has not taken into account joint ventures involving private equity-owned healthcare companies partnering with nonprofit health systems to provide a particular service, such as home health and hospice care.

Private equity firms are increasingly using joint ventures with nonprofit health systems as a growth strategy that can provide them with trusted brands and access to geographic markets they might otherwise not readily access. Joint venture partnerships may also help both parties evade antitrust scrutiny versus if they were engaging in traditional merger and acquisition growth strategies.  Nonprofit health system joint ventures with for-profit entities remains a relatively under-scrutinized and under-regulated area in the health policy landscape.

PESP has identified multiple private equity owned-healthcare companies that have entered into joint ventures with large, nonprofit systems, including the following:

• The Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), a nonprofit hospital in New York, announced a joint venture in October 2025 with private equity firm General Atlantic, in which the parties will launch “independently operated” ambulatory surgical centers. As part of the partnership, HSS and General Atlantic have acquired Legent Health, an operator of spine and orthopedics centers, from BTG Pactual Strategic Capital.
• In February 2025, nonprofit system Mass General Brigham in Massachusetts announced a joint venture with Regent Surgical, an operator of ambulatory surgical centers backed by Towerbook Capital and Ascension Capital.
  • To read more about private equity’s foray into ambulatory surgical centers, see PESP’s October 2025 research brief on the topic.
• Lifepoint Health, owned by Apollo Global Management, continued its joint venture growth strategy in 2025, announcing the openings of various new hospitals operated under joint ventures with nonprofit systems, as well as plans to build others. As of January 2026, LifePoint operates at least 70 joint ventures with over 30 different nonprofit partners, including PeaceHealth, OhioHealth, Ascension Saint Thomas, and UC Davis.

Stay tuned for more research on private equity-backed joint ventures that PESP will be releasing later this year.

Methodology

Each month, the healthcare team at PESP uses PitchBook to identify private equity-backed buyouts, add-on acquisitions and growth investments in the United States healthcare sector. A list of deals is generated, and then each reported deal is reviewed to verify accuracy and relevancy. This year, we also began using LevinPro HC to track deals alongside PitchBook. The companies involved in the deals are then classified using categories tailored to PESP’s strategic research needs. The PitchBook and LevinPro HC data is verified and supplemented with news and internet searches. Using this methodology, we identified 151 buyouts, 664 add-on acquisitions, and 214 growth investments for 2025, for a total of 1029 unique deals.

Limitations: Our final deal count for 2025 is likely an underestimate, as some private equity deals go unreported, and some were likely missed due to our methodology. Therefore the data for this research brief should be read as an approximation of the private equity activity happening in the US health sector. Further, tracking private equity deal activity relies on firms accurately self-reporting their acquisitions and investments. It is possible some deals were missed or classified under the wrong month due to incomplete information from the parties involved in the transactions.

The classification scheme for healthcare companies was designed by PESP; note that some companies do not fall neatly into one category. Sometimes, a company is assigned two or even three categories, or a single category is chosen to best represent the company type. There is some subjectivity involved in the classification system and so the data may not align perfectly with similar datasets using different classification schemes.

Changes from our “Private Equity Healthcare Deals: 2024 in Review” report: Between our 2024 report and our 2025 report we slightly modified our data collection methodology due to time constraints. We did not implement an end-of-year sweep to find missed deals, although we did start using a second subscription database in 2025 to track deals. Our overall deal numbers may be more of an undercount than in past years; however, based on cross referencing other industry reports and analyses, we are confident our overview captures key trends in private equity healthcare dealmaking for 2025.

Footnotes

^[1] Our deal numbers represent a slight decrease from what we tracked in 2024, although we attribute this decrease to changes in data collection and believe this year’s data is more of an undercount than previous years. For more information see our Methodology section.

^[2] Our deal numbers represent a slight decrease (1.9%) from what we tracked in 2024, although we attribute this decrease to changes in data collection and believe this year’s data is more of an undercount than previous years. For more information see our Methodology section.