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Learn why healthcare strategic partnerships falter and how to improve outcomes with credible business cases, aligned incentives, durable structures, rigorous due diligence, and simpler, effective agreements from real-world deal insights.

Explore how hospitals and health systems are navigating persistent financial headwinds through strategic mergers, partnerships and realignment. The 2025 M&A Review, offers expert insights on evolving deal structures, capital constraints and the growing role of scale and specialization.

In healthcare today, organizations can face opportunities across geographies and sectors, each with their own unique benefits and risks. But like a fruit tree at harvest time, these opportunities can be time sensitive.

Following a modest uptick in hospital and health system M&A activity in Q2 2025, with eight announced transactions, Q3 continued to trend upwards, with 15 transactions announced—an activity level more in line with historical observations.

Sustained momentum in lab transactions is being driven by national lab operators’ desire to build scale and health systems’ recognition that divestiture of their lab business could free up capital to fund other core operations. This article provides key considerations in evaluating a potential lab transaction.

Q2 2025 showed a modest uptick in hospital and health system M&A activity over Q1, with eight transactions announced. Partnerships and affiliations in other areas – including rural healthcare and ambulatory services – remains robust.

Only five hospital and health system M&A transactions were announced in Q1 2025, reflecting an environment of economic uncertainty and volatility. Financial distress was a driver in many of the announced transactions, continuing a trend from 2024.

Senior living mergers and acquisitions involving not-for-profit entities continued to rise in 2024, with 62 announced transactions—up from 59 in 2023—according to a new analysis by Kaufman Hall, a Vizient company.

The numbers from hospital and health system M&A activity in 2024 confirm the unevenness of recovery and the challenges that many organizations continue to face. The percentage of transactions involving a financially distressed party and the percentage of transactions involving a divestiture both reached record highs.

Partnerships with imaging companies can offer a unique value proposition for health systems looking to blend their imaging offering between hospital outpatient department and independent diagnostic testing facility settings.

As ambulatory services grow, so does competition in the area of ambulatory surgery center (ASC) management services. Health systems have an ever-expanding range of potential partners that are offering increasingly flexible alignment structures.

Evolving industry dynamics will prompt further consolidation among not-for-profit life plan communities, especially as organizations look to add scale to their platforms. This activity will have strategic implications for LPC organizations of all sizes.