Urgent care capabilities can act as a “front door” to higher-acuity services. That, in turn, can be a boon to ambulatory surgery center (ASC) expansion.
This was Ardent Health Partners Inc. (NYSE: ARDT) CEO Marty Bonick’s sentiment on the outpatient market during the company’s investor presentation on March 10.
“There’s about 5.6 million people that live in our markets,” Bonick said. “We saw over 1.2 million unique patients last year. … As we can get more people into our system, they’re going to need those facilities and specialty care.”
Brentwood, Tennessee-based Ardent Health became publicly traded in July 2024. During the company’s recent Q4 earnings call, Bonick highlighted Ardent’s recent acquisition of two NextCare urgent care facilities in Oklahoma and New Mexico, as well as six facilities in east Texas, which brought Ardent’s total urgent care count to 27 facilities.
During the investor call on March 10, Bonick expanded on the link between recent urgent care acquisitions and how Ardent plans to expand into outpatient care in the coming year.
“We started urgent cares, we’ll be growing into ASCS,” he said. “We expect to do support on that this year.”
He added that urgent care centers serve as an additional access strategy to bring new patients into Ardent’s ecosystem.
“About 45% of those patients that were seen in [recently acquired East Texas clinics] last year were brand new to the UT and Ardent system, and about 15% of those patients were seeing follow-up care within 30 days,” he said.
As far as a specific plan involving ASCs goes, the company expects a blend of building new centers and acquiring existing ones, CFO Alfred Lumsdaine said.
“While the urgent care [push] has largely been a buy strategy because of the prevalence of assets available in our markets, I would actually expect that the ASCs will be a mix of de novo and M&A,” he said.
Still, some existing centers might come with valuations too high to fit Ardent’s acquisition strategy.
“It’s a lot harder, depending on market dynamics, to find the right center in the right location at the right price,” he said. “So we could expect that some of those ASC activities will be de novo, and not M&A.”
Bonick echoed Lumsdaine’s measured approach.
“We’re going to be very disciplined in our technical allocation approach,” he said. “And you know, for an ASC to perform well, it’s trading above, typically, what our multiples would be for the urgent cares.”
