Gentiva, a hospice company backed by Clayton Dubilier & Rice and Humana Inc., has agreed to acquire a business from not-for-profit health-care system ProMedica, Gentiva’s chief executive officer said.
(Bloomberg) — Gentiva, a hospice company backed by Clayton Dubilier & Rice and Humana Inc., has agreed to acquire a business from not-for-profit health-care system ProMedica, Gentiva’s chief executive officer said.
Gentiva’s deal for hospice and home-care assets from ProMedica’s Heartland is valued at $710 million, including debt, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the information is private.
CEO David Causby said in an interview that Atlanta-based Gentiva is the biggest hospice company in the US by revenue and number of patients. The deal will expand its reach to more than 500 locations from about 380 after the transaction closes, he added. Causby, a licensed nurse, said patient count will jump to 34,000 from about 25,000 while its employee-base will increase by about 4,000 from more than 30,000.
“The senior population is the fastest growing population across the country and I believe the demand for hospice services is going to continue,” Causby said. “The combination of these two is going to allow us to further expand our footprint and give patients access to much higher quality care.”
Gentiva, which provides hospice care to patients in their homes and at assisted-living and skilled-nursing facilities, formerly operated as part of Kindred at Home. It was renamed last year after CD&R bought a 60% stake in Kindred at Home’s hospice and personal-care divisions from Humana. Humana maintains a 40% stake in the business.
Gentiva says it staffs patients with more nurses than its competitors do, even as the industry faces a national nursing shortage, and that it plans to continue that after it acquires the ProMedica assets. Gentiva nurses look after an average nine patients, compared to a hospice-industry average of about 13 to 15 patients per nurse, Causby said.
“Our ability to attract and hire and retain our clinical staff we believe is something we’ll be able to lay over onto the ProMedica footprint and by doing this acquisition we believe more seniors will have more opportunity to receive the highest level of end-of-life care,” he said. “We continue to invest and do alternative scheduling, we’ve done creative things with on-call and work schedules and we have a very low turnover rate.”
Gentiva has received committed-debt financing from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to help fund the deal, a representative for Gentiva said. Deutsche Bank AG, UBS Group AG, BNP Paribas SA, Citizens Financial Group Inc., Truist Financial Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. advised Gentiva and provided financing. Houlihan Lokey Inc. advised ProMedica.
(Updates starting in sixth paragraph with context on Gentiva’s nurse-to-patient staffing ratio)
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.