Standing still is not an option in today’s dynamic healthcare environment. Health systems face mounting pressure from shifting sites of care, tightening margins, labor shortages, and payers steering patients to lower-cost settings. To succeed, leaders need cost-efficient growth strategies that strengthen access, share operating risk, and align with consumer demand. Joint ventures remain one of the most effective ways to achieve these goals. Partnering with specialized operators allows health systems to rapidly expand into growth sectors, keep patient steerage within their networks, and bring innovation to market faster.
Industry Momentum: Proof Across Sectors
The momentum behind joint ventures is clear, and it spans nearly every healthcare sector. Joint venture partners in healthcare range from large, national operators to regional and local organizations. While the landscape includes many players of varying size and scope, the examples highlighted here represent a sample of the significant activity shaping the market today.
- Ambulatory Surgery Centers (ASCs): Tenet Healthcare’s USPI operates or holds interests in 520 ASCs and 25 surgical hospitals, as of April 2025. The ASC market overall is projected to grow from $40B in 2024 to $57.4B by 2034.
- Imaging/Diagnostics: RadNet reports 153 joint ventures within health system partnerships, representing 38.4% of its 398 locations.
- Behavioral Health: Acadia Healthcare has 21 joint venture partnerships across 22 hospitals:13 open and nine in development.
- Inpatient Rehabilitation: Encompass Health is the largest owner and operator of inpatient rehabilitation facilities, including 168 inpatient rehabilitation facilities, with 67 structured as joint ventures with acute-care hospitals as of June 2025.
- Care at Home: Contessa (Amedisys subsidiary) partners with 8 health systems, delivering hospital-at-home, skilled-nursing-facility-at-home, and palliative care services.
- Pharmacy/Drug Supply: Civica Rx, the generics-focused joint venture, includes over 50 health systems and now supplies around 80 essential medications.
Joint ventures have long been a staple in healthcare strategy, and today, they widely recognized as a standard mechanism for growth, risk-sharing, and care transformation.
Getting It Done: Collaboration Is Key
While the value proposition of joint ventures is compelling, execution requires careful coordination. Structuring a successful joint ventures involves more than clinical strategy—it demands alignment across multiple areas:
- Strategy & Market Assessment: Defining the right sectors, geographic footprint, and patient access priorities
- Financial Valuation & Due Diligence: Ensuring a fair deal structure, assessing revenue potential, and modeling return on investment
- Legal & Compliance: Navigating regulatory hurdles, Stark/Anti-Kickback Statute implications, and contractual terms
- Governance & Board Alignment: Securing buy-in from leadership and creating a framework for long-term decision-making
- Ongoing Financial & Operational Management: Monitoring performance, adapting to payer shifts, and scaling the partnership model
Each of these areas requires specialized expertise. Successful joint ventures don’t happen by chance. Just as health system leaders and their joint venture partners must collaborate together, it often makes sense to bring in a strategic partner to help structure agreements that balance incentives, keep all parties compliant, and model long-term financial performance. The secret to sustainable growth and shared success is the industry expertise that transforms a mutual vision into viable results.
VMG Health: Your Joint Venture Partner in Expertise
With deep knowledge in finance, compliance, and strategy, VMG Health supports health systems in building joint ventures that transform care across multiple sectors and service lines. Our team’s expertise goes deeper than the numbers, guiding the board-level conversations and developing the governance models that make these partnerships work.
In an era when growth and resilience matter more than ever, joint ventures remain a winning play—and VMG Health is here to help health systems make the right moves.
