Full Year 2021 Healthcare Industry Trends

2021 Key Highlights 

The most active acquirer in 2021 either directly or through an affiliated business was Insight Venture Partners with ten industry transactions: Inovalon, Protein Metrics, ABA Tools, Behaviorsoft, Partington Behavior Analysts, LabArchives, De Novo Software, PatientPing, Dotmatics, and Avail Support. The largest of these was the acquisition of Inovalon, a provider of cloud-based platforms supporting data driven healthcare, for $7.31 billion.

The Healthcare IT segment accounted for 55 percent of total volume during the year.

There were 163 financially sponsored transactions with an aggregate value of $30.04 billion, representing 31 percent of the total volume and 32 percent of the total value, respectively.

2021 Key Trends

Total transaction volume in 2021 declined by five percent over 2020, from 555 to 528.

Total transaction value in 2021 nearly doubled over 2020, from $47.79 billion to $93.87 billion.

The median revenue multiple increased from 3.0x in 2020 to 4.2x in 2021. The median EBITDA multiple decreased from 15.8x in 2020 to 12.7x in 2021, which was in line with its 2019 level.

The segment with the largest rise in volume in 2021 over 2020 was Pharma IT with a 19 percent gain, from 52 to 62 deals.

M&A Market Overview

Berkery Noyes tracked 1,622 Healthcare/Pharma Information and Technology transaction between 2019 and 2021, of which 328 disclosed financial terms, and calculated the aggregate value to be $157.03 billion. Based on known transaction values, we project values of 1,294 undisclosed transactions to be $19.77 billion, totaling $176.80 billion worth of transactions tracked over the past three years.

Disclosed median enterprise value multiples for all segments combined in this report during the last 36 months were 3.2x revenue and 14.3x EBITDA.