Houlihan Lokey Advises himagine solutions

Houlihan Lokey is pleased to announce that himagine solutions (himagine), a portfolio company of BPOC, has been acquired by Omega Healthcare (Omega), backed by Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking and Everstone Group (Everstone). The transaction closed on March 10, 2021.

Headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, himagine offers the industry’s largest scalable HIM platform with more than 850 U.S. employees supporting 250 clients across 50 states with outsourced medical coding, coding audit, and registry services. The company is 100% focused on the healthcare industry, working with children’s and specialty hospitals, academic medical centers, large health systems, small rural and secondary market facilities, and physician and group practices across multiple specialties. Himagine’s services are purpose-built to address the growing need for outsourced HIM solutions that enhance the revenue cycles and quality of care of the company’s customers.

BPOC is a Chicago-based private equity management firm founded in 1996 to invest in middle-market buyout transactions, recapitalizations, and growth platforms exclusively in the healthcare industry. BPOC has structured, managed, and realized investments on behalf of institutional and individual investors for over two decades. BPOC targets investments in healthcare companies with up to $20 million in EBITDA with a focus on four sectors: providers, outsourced services, products and distribution, and pharmacy and pharma services.

Founded in 2003, Omega Healthcare helps payors, providers, and pharmaceutical companies eliminate administrative burdens, accelerate cash flow, and reduce health management costs while enhancing patient care. The company streamlines medical billing, coding, and collections processes and also provides virtual nursing services, including triage, care continuation, clinical documentation improvement, and re-admittance avoidance. Combining the largest medical coding staff in the world with proprietary technology, analytics, and automation capabilities, Omega provides comprehensive outsourced solutions and is ranked among the top revenue cycle management business process services by industry analysts.

Through this acquisition, Omega will expand both its global delivery model and its clinical services portfolio. With himagine, Omega strengthens its U.S. delivery capabilities and ability to support clients with a best-shore delivery model. Omega also gains himagine’s expertise in chart abstraction for medical registries, including the U.S. cancer and trauma registries, clinical documentation improvement (CDI), and coding audits. With this acquisition, himagine customers can now benefit from additions to its capabilities, including Omega’s end-to-end revenue cycle management and patient interaction services, as well as gain access to Omega’s extensive analytics and automation offerings.

Founded in 1869, the Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., is a leading global investment banking, securities, and investment management firm. Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking is one of the leading private equity investors in the world, having invested and committed approximately $75 billion of capital in more than 880 companies across its corporate equity investing business since 1986.

Founded in 2006, Everstone has a large institutional platform and a team of over 350 experienced professionals based in Singapore, India (Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru), London, New York, and Mauritius. The firm manages assets of ~$6 billion across private equity, real estate, credit, green infrastructure, and venture capital. Everstone’s investment style focuses on compounding capital over the long term through an active and hands-on partnership approach.

This transaction represents Houlihan Lokey’s continued leadership and momentum in the healthcare technology and tech-enabled services sector, having advised on 39 transactions since 2015. Houlihan Lokey’s Healthcare Technology team continues to be the advisor of choice in the RCM sector, having advised on 19 deals in the broader RCM market in the past five years. Houlihan Lokey's Healthcare Group is among the largest dedicated healthcare investment banking groups in the country. In 2020, the group closed 22 transactions and was ranked the No. 1 advisor for U.S. healthcare M&A transactions under $1 billion by Refinitiv. Houlihan Lokey's Healthcare Group has closed more than 300 M&A healthcare transactions since inception.

Houlihan Lokey served as the exclusive financial advisor to himagine and assisted in initiating, structuring, and negotiating the transaction on its behalf.