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Investing in Medical Practices: Vision and Strategy Matter More than ‘Growth for the Sake of Growth’

Marti Washburn Giunto

By Marti Washburn Giunto, Senior Director, Health Tech

Published May 30, 2025

money and medicine

I attended the McGuireWoods Healthcare Private Equity and Finance Conference in May, and one thought has stuck with me: Growth for the sake of growth is starting to show a chink in its armor.

After attending the meeting, I returned home reflecting on the following takeaways:

Liquidity is starting to take priority over EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization).

With rising costs and tightening margins, liquidity is attractive and makes a business resilient and investable.

Medicaid reimbursements are going to decline.

Now is the time to build reimbursement strategies. Identify profitable procedures, negotiate better commercial rates, and diversify the payer mix.

Growth for the sake of growth erodes value.

Whether opening de novo locations or acquiring practices, provider and patient satisfaction starts with vision and includes education.

Private equity is facing some resistance.

Younger providers are hesitant to join private equity-owned practices. To win them over, vision and values must be clear, authentic, and aligned with purpose.

Private equity continues to influence the structure and strategy of healthcare in powerful ways. Vision and strategy are the keys to success when investing in medical practices. The resilient and long-term thinking of the firms at the conference will shape the future of healthcare portfolios.

In our evolving landscape, smart data is the keystone of success. Reimbursement insights, payer disparities, and procedure-level data are essential for strategic decisions. Better reimbursement is more important now than ever. It supports liquidity, increases revenue, improves EBITDA, offsets declining Medicaid rates, guides vision-grounded growth, informs capital investments, and builds the kind of organization that younger providers value.

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