(Reuters) -Athenahealth will be bought by private equity firms Hellman & Friedman LLC and Bain Capital for $17 billion, the latest sign of rising interest in companies driving the healthcare sector’s shift to the cloud.
Demand for artificial intelligence and cloud-based solutions that increase productivity and protect patient data have boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Microsoft Corp earlier this year struck a $16 billion deal to buy Nuance Communications Inc, a provider of intelligent solutions such as clinical speech recognition, medical transcription and medical imaging.
Privately held Athenahealth offers a software that can be used to organize patient visits, document patients’ clinical records and track and collect payments.
Its purchase, announced on Monday, is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022.
Evergreen, hedge fund Elliott’s private equity arm, and investment firm Veritas had taken Athenahealth private in 2019 in a $5.7 billion deal.
The company was then merged with Virence Health, a healthcare software provider that Veritas had previously acquired from General Electric Co.
(Reporting by Amruta Khandekar; Editing by Shailesh Kuber and Aditya Soni)
