Baxter Acquires Hillrom To Help Achieve Connected Care Ambitions

Healthcare company Baxter International has made public its upcoming acquisition of connected care technology vendor Hillrom. Intermixing the portfolios of these two companies will stimulate the expansion of digitally enabled connected healthcare. The overlap of their efforts in therapeutic delivery, blood purification, monitoring, diagnostics, and communications will surely raise the level of quality for future, joint-effort connected care service deployments.

The demand for non-hospital care and treatment options is surging, and these companies’ products will capitalize on that trend. Although the technology will undoubtedly make its way into hospitals, improved home and alternative-site distribution is the ostensible selling point of the Hillrom acquisition. Beyond reducing costs and boosting reliability, digital health technologies provide an unmatched flexibility for application of care.

Baxter is set to shell out a cash sum of $156 per outstanding share of Hillrom common stock. This makes for a whopping total purchase price of $10.5 billion. As part of the deal, Baxter will also absorb Hillrom’s outstanding debt and cash for a cumulative enterprise value of around $12.4 billion. The transaction is set to close near the beginning of 2022.

Baxter has certainly been on an acquiring streak of late. Communications tool vendor Voalte was bought out by the company in 2019 for $180 million, and some assets from continuous monitoring technology company EarlySense were brought into the Baxter fold earlier this year.