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Tuesday, Nov 13 2018

Full Issue

Athenahealth, Elliott Deal Wraps Up Months-Long, Contentious Process To Get Health Records Company To Sell

Athenahealth has rejected the hedge fund's attempts to push it into a sale previously. The all-cash deal between the companies values the medical billing software maker at $135 per share.

Private equity firm Veritas Capital and hedge fund Elliott Management are buying Athenahealth Inc for about $5.7 billion, the U.S. healthcare software maker said on Monday. The all-cash deal values Athenahealth at $135 per share, representing a premium of 12.2 percent to the stock's closing price on Friday. (11/12)

Elliott Management, which acquired a nearly 9% stake in Athenahealth in 2017, offered to buy the rest of the company and take it private in May. The firm鈥檚 offer was to buy the rest of the company for $160 a share, which valued the company at $6.5 billion. The company had announced in June that its board was going to start looking at strategic alternatives for the firm. At that time, co-founder Jonathan Bush stepped down as president and chief executive amid takeover pressure from Elliott. Jeff Immelt, the former CEO of General Electric Co., was also named executive chairman of Athenahealth. (Prang, 11/12)

While it鈥檚 not the $160 Elliott had initially proposed, investors may be happy enough. 鈥淭he business had notably deteriorated,鈥 said Ross Muken, an analyst at Evercore ISI. Muken lauded the choice of Segert to run the business after the close, saying he 鈥渉as a long history of IT turnarounds and we believe this will be much easier for Athenahealth to undergo in the private markets.鈥 (Hammond and Deveau, 11/12)

Athenahealth, based in Watertown, Massachusetts, makes medical record, revenue cycle and care coordination products and delivers most of it through the cloud. On Friday, it reported third-quarter earnings that topped analyst expectations, but its revenue fell short of the average forecast on Wall Street. The latest athenahelath bid offers "a decent valuation for what has increasingly appeared to be a struggling business," Leerink analyst David Larsen said in a research note. (11/12)

In other news from the health industry聽鈥

Moderna Therapeutics鈥 long-awaited IPO filing means two things: The company is one step closer to going public, and the world finally gets a look under the hood at the famously secretive firm. On that second point, we now get to gawk at executive pay figures, marvel at just how many bankers are involved, and speculate on what a (very brief) Food and Drug Administration clinical hold might mean for the future. Here鈥檚 what we learned from Moderna鈥檚 IPO filing. (Garde, 11/12)

Driver, an ambitious startup marketing an app to match cancer patients with clinical trials, has shut down after running out of money just weeks following its聽high-profile launch. The company let go of all of its approximately 85 employees on Oct. 16, Driver鈥檚 co-founders confirmed to STAT. About 60 percent of those employees worked at Driver鈥檚 headquarters in San Francisco; the rest were based in Shanghai, New York, and Boise, Idaho. (Robbins, 11/12)

This is part of the Morning Briefing, a summary of health policy coverage from major news organizations. Sign up for an email subscription.
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