Dive Brief:
- Tenet's surgery center unit USPI said it entered into a deal with Compass Surgical Partners to acquire its ownership and management interests in nine ambulatory surgery centers located in Florida, North Carolina and Texas for an undisclosed sum. USPI will acquire Compass' 20% ownership stake in the nine centers.
- When the deal closes, USPI will jointly own and operate the centers with 125 physicians and, in some cases, local health systems. It is expected to close in the fourth quarter.
- The majority of cases performed at these facilities are for musculoskeletal procedures followed by ENT and ophthalmology, USPI said in a Monday release.
Dive Insight:
Tenet continues to bet on its long-term strategy of expanding its ambulatory surgery center business.
Just this summer, the legacy hospital operator sold five hospitals in the Miami-Dade area to Steward Health Care System, but the deal did not include its surgery centers, further underscoring Tenet's strategic focus moving forward.
And late last year, Tenet inked a $1.1 billion cash deal to acquire up to 45 surgery centers from SurgCenter Development, providing significant scale to the portfolio. At the time, the deal was meaningful because it helped USPI pull further ahead of competitors in terms of the number of surgery centers under its control.
Consequently, it may be time to start thinking of Tenet as an ambulatory surgery center operator first and a hospital operator, second.
Tenet's ASC portfolio is many times larger than the number of hospitals it operates, and its ambulatory earnings are expected to represent nearly half of the company's overall earnings this year.
USPI currently operates more than 330 ASCs across the country, just a fraction of the more than 5,800 Medicare-certified centers in the U.S., according to a March report from MedPac. Medicare alone spent $5.2 billion on ASC services in 2019.
USPI's new centers will be located more specifically in the Tampa, Florida, area; Asheville, Raleigh and Winston-Salem in North Carolina and Waco, Texas.