Sale prescribed for Crescent Capital’s 24-7 home doctor service

Previously known as National Home Doctor Service, 24-7 also owns 13SICK. It offers urgent medical care after hours and has about 400 doctors.

The sale process for home doctor service 24-7, owned by Crescent Capital, is gathering pace.

Information memorandums hit the desks of prospective suitors last week.

The sale process has been a long time coming.

This column first reported in 2020 that 24-7 was on offer, but now the pandemic is out of the way, the process is under way in earnest.

Previously known as National Home Doctor Service, 24-7 also owns 13SICK. It offers urgent medical care after hours and has about 400 doctors.

The 24-7 business is likely to appeal to private equity or private health insurers such as Medibank or NIB.

Crescent Capital is working to offload 24-7 as Australian Clinical Labs, which was previously owned by the private equity firm, recently tried to merge with Healius, which rejected its offer.

Crescent retains a 30.1 per cent stake in ACL, which is believed to be awaiting a decision from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission about whether a merger would be permissible with Healius.

Ironically, Crescent was in negotiations with Healius to sell it the ACL business in 2019 before it floated the healthcare operator.

Meanwhile, Fresenius is expected to sell the country’s largest day hospital provider, Cura, as tipped by DataRoom in February.

Cura is 70 per cent-owned by Fresenius Medical Care, which purchased the stake in 2017 from Intermediate Capital for a price believed to value the company at more than $400m.

Other healthcare operations for sale include The Growth Fund’s dental care business, Ekera Dental, and its diagnostic imaging provider Quantum Radiology.

Both are on the market through Allier Capital.

Quantum generates about $15m of annual EBITDA and the owners hope to achieve about 14 times that number.

Ekera Dental is expected to be worth about $200m.