Cornerstone Research has extensive experience using rigorous, state-of-the art analysis in healthcare mergers across all parts of the healthcare system, including physicians, insurers, facilities, and data and technology firms. Our professionals and experts have held senior economist roles at enforcement agencies in the United States and have decades of experience and deep institutional knowledge investigating healthcare markets.
Select Internal Experts
Our accomplished team of economic experts has extensive experience with healthcare merger reviews, including consulting and communicating with the agencies on behalf of our clients.
Select Academic Experts
Our extensive network of testifying experts includes top academic and industry experts.
Aviv Nevo
George A. Weiss and Lydia Bravo Weiss University Professor,
University of Pennsylvania
Gautam Gowrisankaran
Professor of Economics,
Columbia University;
Senior Advisor, Cornerstone Research
Benjamin R. Handel
Professor of Economics,
Director, Gilbert Center for Industrial Organization Research,
University of California, Berkeley
Michael R. Richards
Professor,
Director, Sloan Program in Health Administration (M.H.A.),
Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy,
Cornell University
Healthcare Merger Capabilities
Our team has extensive experience with mergers within and across all levels of the healthcare system, including physician acquisitions and rollups, insurer mergers, and hospital and clinic mergers.
Our professionals and experts also have extensive experience analyzing the competitive effects of healthcare mergers. With a strong foundation of knowledge and experience across the healthcare space, we can efficiently examine how a merger may impact patients, the parties, and other industry participants in the short and long run.
Cornerstone Research professionals and experts have a sophisticated understanding of how healthcare markets work and ongoing developments in the space. As enforcement shifts from hospitals to other areas, our experience can aid clients in navigating novel issues that are increasingly under focus of regulators, including:
- Vertical mergers in healthcare, including acquisitions of physician groups by hospitals or of facilities by insurers.
- Cross-market mergers
- Labor impacts of mergers
- Serial acquisitions
- Effects of mergers on quality of care and how the merger can impact patients
- Acquisitions related to healthcare technology and artificial intelligence
- Acquisitions by private equity firms
Our team has extensive experience with merger enforcement agencies in the United States. Many of our professionals and experts have served as agency economists working on healthcare mergers, including at the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). We have substantial experience with agency merger reviews and mergers that result in litigation. Our experts are regularly retained by the agencies to offer independent, defensible opinions about the potential effects of a merger.
Our agency experience gives us insight into how enforcers, both at the federal and state level, think about healthcare merger review. This allows us to communicate credibly and effectively about how a healthcare merger will impact competition, prices, and quality of care. Working with our team gives clients an advantage when navigating merger review proceedings.
We have experience working with early-stage healthcare mergers to provide merging parties with assessments of antitrust risks and to address potential agency concerns. Our team examines the entire scope of a merger, including potential benefits to patients, doctors, and local communities. We have helped parties avoid costly and disruptive reviews by consulting at the early stages of a merger when a deal is being structured.
Our professionals and experts have extensive experience engaging with the FTC and DOJ on the facts and economics of healthcare mergers and providing well-grounded economic analysis of the anticipated effects of a given healthcare merger, including the quality impacts.
We work with merging parties to provide relevant economic analyses and respond to agency requests. This includes providing analytical support for white papers and agency presentations.
Our team supports clients to efficiently and effectively comply with data and document requests in the course of a merger review, such as agency Second Requests. We work with clients to generate and organize the relevant data and/or documents and can leverage our experience to analyze data and documents in parallel.
Our extensive background in healthcare cases also allows us to identify potentially overlooked sources of data that may be crucial parts of a relevant economic analysis, such as internal investments, quality metrics, and affiliations of staff and facilities with larger hospital systems.
Our deep experience with mergers that proceed to litigation and potentially to trial offer clients an advantage from the earliest stages of a transaction’s review, helping clients avoid or prepare for the possibility of litigation.
In the event a case does progress to litigation, Cornerstone Research’s experts are well-accomplished economists with decades of experience in healthcare mergers and trial testimony. Our experts provide valuable insight into a case and can provide testimony either in front of the agencies or at trial.
We leverage industry-leading data analytics capabilities and manage vast, complex datasets, including healthcare claims and discharge data, containing hundreds of billions of records. With support from specialized professionals in the firm’s Applied Research Center, we apply predictive analytics and the latest economic research in healthcare to address complex economic questions and uncover important metrics of healthcare competition and quality from available data.
In collaboration with our Data Science Center, we also leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to manage and analyze massive, disparate datasets. Our commitment to state-of-the-art technology and continuous investment in data science enables our experts to leverage significant analytical power to rapidly operationalize complex economic analyses.
Featured Cases
Select Professionals
Our professionals contribute expertise in all levels of healthcare mergers, including physicians, insurers, vertical integration, and quality effects. They combine rigorous analytical skills and business acumen with a deep understanding of healthcare market structures, litigation processes, and regulatory requirements, ensuring they provide outstanding support in complex merger disputes.
