Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare, parent company of ASC chain United Surgical Partners International, is regaining full control of its revenue cycle management subsidiary Conifer Health Solutions as Chicago-based CommonSpirit exits the partnership.
Here are five things to know:
1. Under the agreement, CommonSpirit will pay about $1.9 billion to Tenet over the next three years, while Conifer will pay CommonSpirit roughly $540 million to redeem CommonSpirit’s 23.8% equity stake, retroactively effective Jan. 1, according to a Feb. 2 Tenet news release. Conifer will continue providing services for CommonSpirit through the end of 2026.
2. CommonSpirit signed a 20-year revenue cycle outsourcing deal with Tenet’s Conifer in 2012, later amended in 2015, but the parties are ending the agreement early, ahead of its original 2032 expiration.
3. In the news release, Tenet said it expects incremental earnings in 2026 as a result of the equity transfer, reflecting earnings that otherwise would have been allocated to CommonSpirit.
4. Tenet said its 2025 adjusted EBITDA is expected to come in at the upper end of its guidance range of $4.47 billion to $4.57 billion, driven by strong same-store revenue growth and disciplined expense management.
5. Tenet CEO Saum Sutaria, MD, said on a Feb. 2 investor call that revenue cycle performance depends on having algorithms that can accurately and efficiently sort millions of claims to generate the highest yield, and he said those priorities are guiding Conifer’s investment strategy.
“So our investments are split between things that we are doing to drive automation, things we’re doing to improve the reliability and speed of the workflow and things where we are deploying AI in order to either augment what people are doing, or in some cases, replace what people are doing in a higher-fidelity way,” he said.
