Six items from the week to 20 August. Riverside wants more than $500 million for the allied health group Altius, about ten times earnings on the reported figures, while the twenty most recent acquisitions notified to the ACCC, from 5 to 19 August, include no general practice at all. Treasury opened its foreign investment conditions consultation on 19 August, and the Treasurer put $60 million behind state scope of practice changes on 14 August.
The Riverside Company has put Altius Group, the Australian allied health business it bought in 2021, up for sale. AFR Street Talk reported on 17 August that Riverside wants more than $500 million for a business earning about $50 million. That is roughly ten times earnings on the reported figures, and it is the closest public read a practice owner gets on what buyers pay for a clinician-staffed services business.
Radiology Partners has moved in front in Livingbridge's sale of the teleradiology group Everlight, reported at about $1 billion. AFR Street Talk said on 16 August that Partners Group has its investment committee approval but depends on credit funds for the money. Buyers pay these multiples for teleradiology because the earnings do not sit in one building or one town. A GP practice is the opposite case.
RebateRight, a Sydney company selling Medicare eligibility software, says its checks have stopped more than $25 million in claim rejections, testing claims against more than 300 Medicare rules and about 6,000 item numbers before lodgement. Pulse+IT carried the figure on 19 August. The number is the company's own, unaudited. Rejected claims are work already done and never paid for, and they sit inside the billings a buyer underwrites.
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Western Australia
The Treasurer announced $60 million from the $900 million National Productivity Fund on 14 August, at the Council on Federal Financial Relations meeting, payable to states and territories that remove scope of practice barriers. The 2024 review named general practice among the professions working under restrictions. Nurse prescribing is the example given. The states now have money riding on widening what other professions can do without a GP.
Treasury opened public consultation on 19 August into the conditions it attaches to foreign investment approvals, running to 15 September and starting with tax conditions. The review began on 1 July, and existing approval obligations stand while it runs. Any Australian practice or group sold to an offshore buyer clears this regime, so the conditions now under review are the ones a foreign acquirer would carry.
Sixty-four WA GPs finished the state's first ADHD training program and can now assess patients aged 10 and over and prescribe stimulants, Medical Forum reported on 14 August. The state put $1.3 million behind the program, the RACGP and the Australasian ADHD Professionals Association designed it, and more than 400 GPs applied for 65 places. Assessment work that went to paediatricians and psychiatrists now stays in the practice.
Private equity in clinician-owned and adjacent health services, the pool GP buyers come from, and the policy threads that move a practice's costs.
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