Nashville Health Care Council Sessions: Brian Regan, WCAS

Private equity is increasingly part of today’s healthcare’s framework. As a $4+ trillion industry teeming with innovation, healthcare is a seedbed for new ideas and, thus, investments from private equity streams. But as a relatively new trend, at least at this scale, private capital partnerships tend to be shrouded in some mystique.
This week, we continue our Nashville Health Care Council Sessions podcast series with a conversation featuring Brian Regan, Head of Healthcare Group at WCAS (Welsh Carson), a renowned private equity firm specializing in healthcare and technology. In it, we discuss the role of private equity in healthcare, as well as some of Regan’s insights on the industry at large – including the importance of building companies by focusing on people.

Key Points:

Method matters, and each is unique. Faced with the healthcare industry’s outsized scope and complexity, Regan has a methodical process for identifying possible value amid its myriad subsectors. His approach: analyze trends in each vertical, from IT to biopharma to care delivery, independently, then use those insights to identify possible targets for investment.

No matter what sector you’re in, put your data where your mouth is. Top-down, the ability to measure performance is valued just about as highly as financial performance itself. As both a differentiator and an indicator of future value, strong metrics are key to earning the trust of stakeholders, growing the business and discerning what is – and isn’t – working.

Of all the historic developments unfolding in healthcare, biopharma might be the most exciting one today. Meaningful investments and discoveries in areas like monoclonal antibodies, antibody drug conjugates and gene therapy over the past several decades have laid the foundation for a momentous inflection point not just in new treatments but curative therapies. As Regan put it with some understatement, “The potential is enormous.”

“Healthcare is evolving” seems to be the strapline of our industry. However, Regan points out that significant change will come slower than we think. The industry is just too vast and partitioned for a swift, clean turn of the page. That said, real progress will be built on micro steps forward, rather than a few giant leaps.