Primary care will be an additional area of home-based care focus for BrightSpring Health Services (Nasdaq: BTSG) over the next few years.
BrightSpring President and CEO Jon Rousseau discussed it as part of the company’s broader strategy at the Goldman Sachs 45th Annual Global Healthcare Conference Monday.
“Our playbook — which has been successful really now for over the last seven years — has been to drive volume growth, operational excellence, and then accretive acquisitions,” he said during the discussion. “On the volume side, we participate in very large growing markets, and so we like to focus on markets, on the provider side, that are growing at 6% to 8%.”
Based in Louisville, BrightSpring delivers care to patients in the home and in the community. The company focuses on complex populations, offering primary care, home- and community-based services, pharmacy services and rehab services to over 400,000 consumers throughout 50 states.
Rousseau called the three main pillars — volume growth, operational efficiency and accretive acquisitions — of BrightSpring’s overall strategy a “winning formula.”
What’s more, BrightSpring is looking to layer another growth strategy on top of the areas Rousseau outlined, and that is the company’s ability to provide value-based care. Home-based primary care will play a role in this effort.
“We have pharmacy, provider services and home-based primary care,” Rousseau said. “We are seeing about 400,000 people a day between our pharmacy and home health patients. That is just a tremendous amount of access to patients that are available to us, if we can serve them under our primary care, and serve them in a more attractive payer model. That’s a potentially really unique opportunity that we have into the future as well.”
On the M&A side, the company continues to prioritize proprietary deals.
“We tend to be a company that a lot of local owners want to sell to for the long term and be a part of our story for the long term,” Rousseau said. “A lot of our deals are proprietary, and then we bring our operational prowess and our scale, and our synergies to bear. We’ve typically been able to cut our acquisition multiple by about 50% to 100%. We usually get things onboarded within about 30 days, and the synergies come very quickly.”
Over the past five years, the company has completed nearly 60 transactions.
“Our acquisition strategy is to achieve three objectives,” Rousseau said. “Number one, to deepen and expand geographically. A good example would be, on the provider side, there are some CON states where you can’t participate without a Certificate Of Need. Number two, continuing to have a mix of our complementary services in each market and, and having those integrated care capabilities. Number three, just continuing to drive broad-based growth in the organization. There’s so much fragmentation in our markets and we can leverage our scale to a great extent by focusing on small transactions that fit those three.”
Ultimately, Rousseau believes that there’s an endless opportunity to complete accretive tuck-in acquisitions in the markets that BrightSpring operates in.