The second quarter of 2014 saw a pair of billion-dollar venture capital health IT milestones.
According to the market intelligence firm Mercom, the April-June time period was the first quarter to surpass $1 billion worth of HIT investments, with $1.8 billion raised in 161 deals, more than doubling the $861 million raised in the previous quarter. In addition, investments particular to mHealth broke the $1 billion barrier, the first time since Mercom began tracking those investments in 2010.
Mobile health companies "continue to outraise other technologies," Mercom CEO Raj Prabhu said in a prepared statement.
Within mHealth, $129 million went to companies developing apps and $226 million went to firms that make wearables. Personal health companies received $115 million, while scheduling, rating and shopping applications got $61 million.
"It was a quarter of several milestones,” Prabhu said. “It was the first billion-dollar fundraising quarter for the (overall HIT) sector, which has now raised almost $7 billion in venture funding since 2010.”
What's more, healthcare IT funding rounds have now crossed 1,000, Prabhu added.
[I make House Calls: An iPad, a stethoscope and the future of medicine.]
With 10 funding deals worth more than $50 million each, this was the most lucrative VC quarter yet, according to Mercom. In fact, the $2.6 billion raised so far this year has already exceeded the $2.2 billion raised in all of 2013.
Practice-centric companies garnered 61 percent of all investments in Q2, with $1.1 billion across 61 deals - especially in technology related to practice management ($220 million in eight deals), analytics ($204 million in nine deals) and population health management ($144 million in four deals).
Consumer-facing technology, meanwhile, attracted $678 million in 100 deals, with most going to mobile health ($401 million across 45 deals).
The top VC deals of more than $100 million in Q2 were $135 million raised by NantHealth; $130 million raised by Flatiron Health; $125 million raised by Alignment Healthcare and $120 million raised by Proteus Digital Health.
As for mergers and acquisitions, there were a record number of M&A transactions in healthcare IT, according to Mercom. Health information management companies saw the most activity, with 20 transactions, followed by revenue cycle management and service providers with 11 transactions each and mobile health and personal health companies with six transactions each.
Of the top M&A transactions, the biggest was the $550 million leveraged buyout of the ABILITY Network, a provider of Web-based workflow solutions that aid clinical and administrative tasks for acute and post-acute healthcare providers, by Summit Partners, a growth equity investment firm.
This was followed by the $532.5 million acquisition of Evolution1 by WEX. St. Jude Medical, a medical device company, acquired privately held CardioMEMS, a provider of a wireless sensing and communication technology designed to improve management of chronic cardiovascular diseases, for nearly $450 million. Other top disclosed transactions were the $225 million acquisition of ISG Holdings by Xerox and the $150 million acquisition of Corventis by Medtronic.
There were two IPOs in Q2 for health IT: IMS Health raised $1.3 billion through its offering, and Imprivata launched an IPO that raised $86.3 million.
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