Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Healthcare PE Trends: Innovation, Investment Shifts & Market Outlook with Holly Buckley of McGuireWoods LLP 5-22-25
Thu, 22 May 2025
In this episode, Holly Buckley, Chair of Healthcare at McGuireWoods, joins Scott Becker to share key takeaways from the McGuireWoods Healthcare Private Equity Conference, including a cautiously optimistic market outlook, a shift toward tech-enabled and Medicaid-focused investments, and growing interest in AI-driven innovations across life sciences and pharma services.
What key insights emerged from the McGuireWoods Healthcare Private Equity Conference?
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. Thrilled today to visit with Holly Buckley. Holly shares the McGuire-Woods Healthcare Private Equity Conference, does an incredible job of it. And we're going to talk to her a little bit about some of the lessons learned and the thoughts she had coming out of last week's McGuire-Woods Healthcare Private Equity Conference.
Holly, let me tee up and ask you for a few observations of what you saw and what you're seeing and thinking.
Yeah, happy to do so. And it was a really fun, energizing few days. There's a lot of content there and still processing some of it. I had the privilege of interviewing Lance Armstrong, which was really fun. And he was a very interesting guy and had the entire room very much captivated.
But in terms of the actual substance around healthcare, private equity, and investing and lending, a few core thoughts. I'd say... In terms of the overall market outlook, I would frame it as cautious optimism amid regulatory and economic headwinds.
And so I would say the investors that we had speaking and just in informal discussions with folks, we talked about optimism of increased deal flow coming up, but in certain sectors, not across the board. So sectors such as health tech, IT infrastructure, pharma services,
And even Medicaid-heavy areas, there was a fair amount of optimism, notwithstanding a fair amount of what's going on on the national landscape from a macroeconomic perspective, as well as a policy perspective, and then from a state law perspective. There's really been a strategic shift from traditional provider services to more diversified investments.
And there's a real focus on things like patient outcomes, access to care, and I mean, these have always been important themes, but the investment VCs are very much focused on tapping into those themes from an IT perspective, AI perspective, and how do we really solve problems in light of the fact that generalized growth is somewhat harder to come by.
I think from a lending perspective, similar to the investment side, there's anticipated to be an uptick in deal volume the second half of the year. The first half of the year has been slower, but really competitive pricing and aggressive terms are becoming more prevalent, especially in the middle market. And the availability of capital is high, which intensifies competition for quality deals.
So let me pause there for a second and we can talk about maybe some of the more specific investment trends.
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