Healthcare financial and strategic advisory firm Kaufman Hall is being acquired by minority stakeholder Vizient, a healthcare data and improvement company.
Announced Tuesday, the deal is expected to close in the back half of the year pending standard regulatory review. Financial terms of the arrangement were not disclosed.
Kaufman Hall is currently majority owned by funds affiliated with private equity firm Madison Dearborn Partners (MDB), which made its first investments in Kaufman Hall in 2014.
“When we founded Kaufman Hall nearly 40 years ago, we could not have envisioned the growth in our advisory services and expertise. This growth has been appropriately recognized by our remarkable partnership with both MDP and Vizient,” Ken Kaufman, managing director, co-founder and chair of Kaufman Hall, said in a release announcing the transaction. “We are excited by what this new chapter in our firm’s history will bring.”
Kaufman Hall’s team includes over 530 professionals, experts and clinicians, per its website. Within the last decade alone, the firm said it (or groups it later acquired) has advised over 800 healthcare organizations—largely hospitals and other providers—and more than 200 strategic partnerships, mergers and acquisitions.
Vizient has held a portion of Kaufman Hall since 2021 when it made a strategic investment that included an option to acquire the remaining interest in Kaufman Hall.
That deal, they said, paved the way for the firms to collaborate on enterprise and service line growth strategy, financial performance improvement, access to capital, clinical quality and other advisory areas for their healthcare clients. They pointed to the success of that team-up as the basis for a deeper relationship.
“This next chapter in our partnership with Vizient will build on our joint success to date and enable our continued growth well into the future,” said Kate Guelich, managing director and CEO at Kaufman Hall. “Our clients will now have enhanced access to our combined capabilities and expertise and the combination will deliver even more career opportunities for our people.”
“We believe we can create more value together for our clients who share the responsibility of improving healthcare in communities across the country,” added Vizient President and CEO Byron Jobe.
Vizient describes itself as “the nation’s largest provider-driven healthcare performance improvement company.” It works with around two-thirds of U.S. acute care providers, nearly all academic medical centers and over 35% of the country’s non-acute market. Its contract portfolio reflects $140 billion in annual purchasing volume, it said.