Episode 005: How to plan your exit strategy with Chip Bierbaum

Transcript: How to Plan Your Exit Strategy with Chip Bierbaum

Dylan McCabe:  WeInfuse podcast episode number five. Welcome to the  WeInfuse Podcast, where we take the confusion out of infusion and we do so by interviewing industry experts, giving a behind the scenes look at the industry, and providing tips, tools, and a roadmap so you can navigate this incredibly unique business model and form of treatment for patients.

Now, this episode is unique because we’re gonna interview Chip Bierbaum from Edgemont Capital. And so he’s got a really different take on this unique business model, really, especially for those companies that own infusion suites, manage infusion suites and want to sell their business. What does it look like?

A lot of people when they get into this, especially if you’re a CEO listening to this, you’re a business person listening to this. What’s the exit strategy for a practice like this? What’s the likelihood of being able to sell for a profit after being in business? That’s what we’re gonna get into.

I will not go any further than that. I’ll let you hear the rest right now. Let’s jump right into it. Welcome to the  WeInfuse Podcast. My name is Dylan McCabe, and each week we give you a behind the scenes look at the infusion industry. And today we have a special guest, Chip Bierbaum with Edgemont Capital, and he’s gonna give us a different take on what we typically hear when it comes to the infusion practice, but an incredibly.

Important one. We also have our very special co-host, Mr. Reece Norris, one of the co-founders of  WeInfuse. Chip, thank you for being on the show today.

Chip Bierbaum: Thanks, Dylan. It’s great to be here. Hot day down in Dallas.

Dylan McCabe: Yeah, it’s a little warm. It’s a little warm out there. I think we’re making the national news, aren’t we?

Reece Norris: Yes. It’s hotter than a furnace.

Dylan McCabe: Oh gosh. Not something to brag about, but it is the truth. Chip, it’s really cool to have you on here. And so for our listeners, I just wanna give you a chance to give a little bit of your background in the business world, and what led you to get into the world of the infusion practice.

First I’ll tell you guys what Edgemont Capital is. We’re a healthcare services investment bank, and I lead coverage of the broader pharmaceutical distribution sector there with a particular focus on the specialty supply chain and the infusion supply chain, infusion pharmacy, ambulatory infusion, office infusion distribution, specialty pharmacy, the whole nine yards.

I actually didn’t start my career in healthcare or even in advisory services for that matter. I started way back when as a corporate credit analyst and equity analyst with the infamous Bear Stearns hedge funds. And moved on over to the prop desk at a large French bank called Credit Agrico.

Needless to say, when the credit crisis hit, being a credit trader wasn’t such a great profession and so I took the opportunity to go back to business school, found myself down in Nashville. This was back in 2008 Vanderbilt, and it was serendipitous, but of course, being in Nashville, you can’t walk out your front door without bumping into a healthcare executive.

And Vanderbilt had a great healthcare program within their broader MBA program and did my summer associate position with a healthcare private equity firm called New Capital Partners. They’re based down in Birmingham, Alabama. And the work that I did for them, the first few deals that I worked on with them were institutional pharmacy and then scouting the infusion pharmacy market broadly. I then transitioned that work to work for a fundless sponsor at the time called Fault Line Ventures, based down in Nashville run by a guy named Rob Coppedge, who is now with Echo Health Ventures. And Chris Price, who’s now with OHCFT. And again, my primary focus was on the specialty supply chain and services providers. They’re one company that we looked at heavily and tried to buy was Centric Health.

You guys might be familiar with them. They were the exclusive, I think they still are exclusive distributor administrators, an administer of Prolastin. And so that was really the first, I’d say pure infusion supply chain deal that I worked on, even though it didn’t close. And carried that interest really all the way through.

And picked my point from there and ended up running my own shop called South Main Equity for a while. Primarily focusing on M&A advisory within the supply chain. Notable infusion deal would be diplomats acquisition of BioRx amongst a few others, probably at this point. Advised on about five to 600 million in infusion M&A infusion services related M&A.

And close to 2 billion in broader pharmaceutical supply chain transactions.

Those numbers aren’t large, and you went to Vanderbilt, so that’s, there’s nothing impressive about that. But so you have an incredibly specialized skillset. You’ve obviously helped manage investments and business decisions that are particular to the infusion industry. Out of all that, in your experience up to this point today, what would you say is your main area of expertise for our listeners to say? I just heard Chip is involved in a ton of stuff that sounds really high level, really, especially like on the investment side.

What about today? What do you offer today?

Chip Bierbaum: Sure. My main focus again is providing advice to owners, founders, perhaps private equity funds who have portfolio companies in the space when they’re considering a sale of the company or a liquidity event. And within that, again, my hyperfocus, if you will, is broader outsourced infusion services. So home infusion, ambulatory infusion centers, MSOs, or office infusion suite managers. Yeah, and specialty pharmacy.

Reece Norris: So when you say MSO, just for our listeners out there, that’s a managed service organization, when we talk about managed service organizations we’re talking about, for our folks out there, the Helixes of the world, Intrafusion, and Altis.

Those are the bigger players. But obviously there’s a lot of smaller players out there in the market as well. And I was excited to have Chip here. One, because you went near an infusion center operator, you need to begin with the end in mind. If you’re wanting to build a business and ultimately sell it or look for an exit or a strategic partnership or whatever your end goal is, it’s always nice to have an expert on the other side of the table that knows not only the investment banking and mergers and acquisitions world, but also knows your actual industry. And that is really, obviously our industry’s very niche. And so it’s great.

Chip Bierbaum: And thank you for mentioning that Reece. For a long time when I was running my own shop, I’d supplement my M&A advisory work with strategy and consulting work, and that translated very nicely to pure M&A advisory because it allows me to really get in at the operator level, and talk at a level that I’d say most pure M&A or finance guys probably don’t. But that becomes fairly critical, both being a strategic partner and a long term partner. Most of the client relationships that I’ve had, I’ve developed over at least a couple year period of time, and hopefully provide some decent business guidance and introductions and some advice for owners to think about as they do grow their business and contemplate potential liquidity events in the future.

And importantly, I’m out there every day also talking to the big strategics, and the aggregators, and the private equity funds, and so understanding what they’re thinking, what they’re looking at, how they view the marketplace and where opportunities are I think can be of some value to the broader community.

Reece Norris: And Chip, you and I talked about this quite a bit when we were infusion operators, it sometimes is even hard to get an audience. Now the space is quote-unquote hot. Meaning there’s a lot of interest in activity, not only from a mergers and acquisitions perspective, whether it’s private equity or strategics.

And when we say strategic, we usually mean the larger to Chip’s point, larger aggregators, larger healthcare organizations. And you can think about your payers being an aggregator. You can think about your CVSs of the world, your distributors of the world- McKesson, etc.

So there’s a lot of these big players that are also entering the space. But, all that to say is, when you’re just down in the trenches and again, thinking about the end in mind, it’s always great to know that we have investment bankers and advisors that we can reach out to. That’s something that we really relied on the BRAF group when we sold our business.

Again, going back to the first podcast, we sold our business to Paragon Healthcare. And again, BRAF is a great, another great investment banking firm in the space. We got a know Chip just through interacting in this delivery channel and infusion. We’re excited to have him on and continue to flush this out.

Dylan McCabe: So Chip, if I understand correctly, if I’m a doctor or a partner in a practice and we own a practice and we want to sell, you’re the guy I talk to.

Chip Bierbaum: That would be one of my partners, Mont, who deals with physician practice as sales.

Dylan McCabe: If I’m a management company, I wanna sell.

You’re the guy I talked to.

Chip Bierbaum: If you are operating infusion suites of any kind, or a home infusion pharmacy, I would be the call that you make. It’s interesting, I think. What we’re seeing right now in the market, and probably the audience is aware of this, that, at least the clients that I talk to, prospective clients that I talk to, everybody’s interested and wants to understand the ambulatory infusion center opportunity and how to move into that, how to think about either building a business, is there anybody to buy? Usually the ladder is not many, it’s a fairly nascent sector. And, it can be a challenging answer too, because it really depends on where you’re starting, right? So if you’re starting as a home infusion provider, you’re the set of core competencies that you have and assets that you can lever into this adjacent vertical, or a whole different set than if you are a management services organization who’s running physician infusion centers. Which is very different than if you’re a specialty pharmacy looking to make the move. Broadly though, there are shared commonalities or at least things to lever as an entry point into this new market.

There’s a lot to like about it. You’re not splitting your margins with docs. Which is nice. Versus, say if you’re an Intrafusion or a Helix, your model is largely to split EBITDA, cause EBITDA generated from physicians, infusions, and infusion operations. And so that can in today’s environment, certainly as reimbursement becomes more challenging.

I think docs increasingly don’t view third party infusion suite managers in the same way that they did say 8-10 years ago when a lot of this was found money, it’s no longer found money. IVIG in the practice is well established, right? For neurology, GI, and various other groups.

And as payers look to put the screws to the specialty pharmaceutical channel broadly and reduce trending cost of care there, that puts pressure on practices. And in turn, if you’re a third party in those practices, it makes your business particularly challenging because you’re asking your docs to split a smaller income stream. And what I see in that world particularly is it’s, and Reece, you can probably talk about this because your previous company did both, right? Ambulatory infusion and office, and it’s a real sort of, you’re almost treading water, trying to swim up a waterfall, right?

Because every practice that you add, you’re probably losing one. And it’s a very difficult market. The selling cycles are a lot longer. And you really have to develop an incredible suite of ancillary services to bring to bear as the years go on to remain competitive. So it’s tough.

Reece Norris: Yeah, I think, sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off, but I think we talked about this when I was the guest in the podcast show, and being a management company for a physician office is very challenging. It’s hard to scale. And again, that’s why I think, so few have done it well.

And again, I just mentioned the big three Helix, ALTIS, and Intrafusion. They’ve been able to scale their business, and grow it substantially. There’s definitely other players out there that are doing a great job as well. We’ve got a few of our clients and we’re thankful for those that are managing infusion centers.

And there are those physicians that just need that full turnkey service. And they want to have someone managing their infusion center. But to Chip’s point, as reimbursement gets tighter and tighter, those management companies have to be better and more experienced. And because you have to really run a really tight ship in this business.

Chip Bierbaum: You do, and you’re also very much limited by the constraints of the individual practice. It’s very challenging to consolidate purchasing. So outside of IVIG, you’re probably not going to be able to scale or at least hit rebate tiers in the way that you would hope, even if you have managed to aggregate a number of practices.

And then of course individual practice and center capacity. If the physicians in question may, they may not wanna make a huge outlay in a new infusion center that can support outside referral generation and administration of infusions for patients managed by others. And so given that, you’re gonna be constrained by hours, when do the advanced practitioners and docs want to be in the office and chair count and location count.

And it’s a very hard model to grow, right? And the guys that have done it have created a lot of value for themselves as evidenced by the transactions that they’ve had recently. McKesson bought Intrafusion and I believe it was TA Associates buying Helix.

And that’s again, in recognition of just how tough it is to become a national player in that particular business.

Reece Norris: Which have you talked about the challenges for management companies and again, we’ve definitely named a few that have done it and been able to scale and grow their business.

And again, we have our clients that are managing infusion centers. We’re thankful for those. They’re smaller, currently they’re smaller players in the market and just glad to see the value that they bring to the physicians. But you also talked about the ambulatory infusion suite. That’s right. And that’s really what Bryan Johnson and I, we owned and operated and ultimately sold to Paragon. So we talked a little bit about how big do you think this infusion center channel is? I think you and I tried to put some numbers to it. We said 40 billion.

Chip Bierbaum: The total, I’d say the total provider market.

So this would be administered in the hospital setting as well as independent practices and in the home, I’d say it’s probably about 40. There’s gonna be some squishiness around that number. But it’s big.

Reece Norris: What is great is I think Bryan and I ran our own number, ran our own research to try to get ahold of that number.

And again, we were pretty close both of our numbers and we were and you guys had run it independently as well, and so it was just, again, this is such a niche. It’s so hard to make apples to apples comparisons because of what’s delivered in through specialty pharmacies versus what’s delivered in the clinic or physician office environment or in the infusion suite environment.

It just was a very meaningful industry.

Chip Bierbaum: That’s right. And then of course that doesn’t include oncology. And we all largely view that as in relation to outsourced infusion services providers as unaddressable.

Clearly health systems docs want to keep as much of their patient volume as they can. Their entire practices have for decades been built around buy & bill. There’s not much room aside from I’d say, pure technology platforms and perhaps some practice managers that don’t participate in drug profit.

There has been and probably continues to be some opportunity. But we’re largely talking about the big medical specialties that are addressable- neurology, gastroenterology, infectious disease, allergy and immunology. Rheumatology of course and the, I think their genetics as a volume is becoming a player.

They’re now some of the specialties that are addressable by ambulatory infusion centers really aren’t addressable by MSOs. Genetics may be one, because they’re not generating enough infusion volume despite the presence of perhaps a blockbuster or two. Being written by these medical specialties, they’re not generating enough broad infusion volume to really support a third party in any kind of meaningful way.

And that’s one of the exciting things about it. Ambulatory infusion centers, staffed properly in order to qualify, meet the supervisory requirements of Medicare as well as buy through the physician class of trade broadly, or have the flexibility to do really opens up this outsourced market, two third parties that wouldn’t have been able to participate before. Historically it had been dominated by home infusion, right? And the home infusion market is there because of a series of exceptions to the Medicare part with supervisory requirements, good exceptions practical, right? If IG patients have to have an infusion a few times a week depending upon the indication factor, that’s a prophylactic treatment. And you need to have enough on hand to prevent lead if and when that occurs because even just a few minutes after a severe bleed, you could end up with brain damage.

So it’s pretty critical to have those types of therapeutics delivered in home. Medicare recognized that and created the necessary exceptions. Some of the other therapeutics that fall under that would be nutrition therapies, so ENT and TPN. And we don’t have to drill down into each individual exception because it’s pretty arcane between, the, how they’re reimbursed under the durable medical equipment or whatever it may be.

Or associated with a part, a visit. It’ll put you to sleep.

Reece Norris: What you’re saying though is it created opportunity under the Part B, so Medicare Part B as in boy, opportunity which still exists today for these biologic medications to be delivered to Medicare patients.

That’s right.

Chip Bierbaum: Yeah, that’s right. Because previously without this particular independent staffing model, unless you were affiliated with a physician, you were largely unable to administer these drugs either because of restrictions via Medicare or because of class of trade restrictions. In many cases, commercial plans historically would have reimbursed for drugs like Medicaid or to TYSABRI (natalizumab) or LEMTRADA (almtuzumab).

Under the pharmacy benefit or to a non-ad advanced practitioner staffed infusion center. But they couldn’t purchase it under the correct class of trade. So if you were buying say, Remicade, through the pharmacy channel, your gross margins administering that drug are gonna be in the 3 to 4%.

If you’re buying through the physician channel, it’s 15 to 25%. And so that makes it, all the difference in the world.

Reece Norris: Not always 15 to 25, but yeah, but it’s definitely better. And under the physician class of trade and throwing a lot at you, Dylan, I want to get, you’re the host here and I feel like Chip and I are just mind blown over here.

Just totally mind blown. No, it’s great though because we do have listeners who are doctors, CEOs, partners, passive investors, and this is the kind of stuff that, this is why it’s so great to have this podcast and have you on this show because people are getting to see this in a different light than they normally would, and that’s what makes it so interesting to us and hopefully adds a ton of value to our listeners.

Let’s do this, let’s talk about maybe one specific story that you’ve encountered as you’ve dealt with different clients that you’ve had. What’s a big challenge? If you can think of a story without giving too much detail to where it would expose somebody, what’s a challenge you’ve seen one of your clients face that people can learn from?

Chip Bierbaum: Sure. I have to be very sensitive with how I talk about this stuff, but I would say broadly a common challenge when we are looking at one type of provider expanding into an adjacent area. So again, let’s say home infusion trying to launch ambulatory infusion center initiatives is changing both their mindset in terms of how they do business because fundamentally, how you’re going to succeed -again, while there are shared, some shared competencies- how you’re gonna succeed as an ambulatory infusion center operator is different than a home infusion pharmacy from an operational standpoint. And so you don’t need to be licensed as a pharmacy in every state.

You don’t need any pharmacies. You don’t need to have a USB 797 compounding cause you just don’t. As long as your nurses are well trained and you’ve got the staff there who is competent as it relates to the clinicals and edits and PA requirements and reimbursement.

You don’t need the pharmacy part at all, really. Now, that’s not to say the pharmacy part doesn’t add value. It certainly can. And it can add a lot of optionality and strategic value to the overall business having both, being able to be reimbursed under the pharmacy benefit ongoing and not just first fill in certain states and whatever it may be.

Also, purchasing through the home infusion or pharmacy class of trade can be beneficial for certain drugs. And having that infrastructure there is great. And pharmacists, I think generally are better trained and more well-equipped to handle the increasingly complex PA require, PA process.

Reece Norris: When you’re saying PA you mean prior authorization?

Chip Bierbaum: That’s correct. And they’re so familiar with it because it’s been such an issue with the pharmacy benefit for managed care has been far more successful implementing- we’ll call it barriers- Utilization Management.

Utilization Management Initiatives within the pharmacy benefit. And so pharmacists who have been trained in that environment know exactly what to do if they get- let’s say- a Remicade referral. Okay. Have we checked the methotrexate box and whatever it may be. And knowing what to tell the inside sales force to go back to the doc with, in order to get the additional information that’s required to complete the form and on. And plus another advantage of pharmacies- it can help make your internal distribution among centers more efficient. If you have a centralized USP 797 facility in which you can do all your mixing and shipping out again, you’re gonna have some geographic limits there in terms of what you can do so you’re not a quote-unquote wholesaler.

But anyway, plenty of advantages and I think one of the big advantages is a physician sales culture, so most home infusion pharmacies, specialty pharmacies, independence anyway that haven’t grown because they’re part of a payer that’s, using network access to drive volume rely on a strong physician sales force, and you’re largely selling to the same.

Medical specialties. If you’re a home infusion provider and you’re calling on GI docs all day long, there’s a lot of Remicade volume sitting in the GI practice that you can’t support. Now, if you’re an AIC, you can and so there is a leverageable component of that. And frankly, a very important one because that’s how you drive scale, right? And that’s one of the big advantages of AICs over OICs, which is the acronym that I use for the MSO managed office infusion center players is you can aggregate referrals from a whole swath of providers, and you’re not relegated to your captive dock base.

And that’s a key component to scaling the business.

Dylan McCabe: And so if I go to that challenge though, when I asked you about the challenge, if I hear you correctly it sounds like you’re saying, there’s a lot that you have to consider if you want to calculate the cost financially, business wise, on so many different levels, all the different details.

If you’re going from home infusion to standalone infusion, ambulatory infusion suite.

Yeah. Is that right? And even vice versa, right?

The contracting process is different with peg. It’s a totally different business model. It is. And I think there’s a broader perception out there that, whether you.

A suite manager, MSO or an AIC or a home infusion provider? Oh, they’re, they’ve all gotta be pretty much the same. It’s all infused specialty drugs and and we can send drugs in a home. And why aren’t they, why aren’t these drugs getting done at home? It should be.

We can do that and. We can just move into this vertical. No no you can’t .

Reece Norris: It’s funny, Chip, because literally we had a discussion this morning and we were going over this with a prospective client and we were literally talking about the main challenges is the different classes of trade.

Making sure you keep those lines of businesses separate, but at the same time leveraging the synergies between the two different entities. And I think it’s really important for our listeners, and again, we deal with a lot of larger healthcare organizations that have multi lines of business. And so they’re operating a home infusion pharmacy.

They may be operating a specialty pharmacy and then, a durable medical equipment line of business-sure- and now they’re opening an ambulatory infusion suite. And yes, there’s a lot of things they can leverage internally but it’s still a different business- that’s right. Typically with a unique tax ID purchasing with a different class of trade from, sometimes this a different, even wholesalers, etc.

And so it’s just really important that you get advice, get expertise before you delve into this business and

Chip Bierbaum: That’s right. And, one thing I would say broadly to anybody considering moving into an adjacent vertical, make sure you got sound legal counsel in terms of how you are structuring this because, it.

The entire pharmaceutical supply chain operates in sort of an interpretive gray area, right? And as I’d say the market has evolved the expectation of I’d say high legal standards and regulatory standards of operation have certainly risen over the years. Buyers, by and large, are far more sophisticated now than they’ve ever been in large part because they have aggregated so much and they do have so much experience across the various verticals.

And if you look at the major strategics like cvs, McKesson United the list can go on Express Scripts and who, whomever, whomever it may be. It is good. They will look at. how clean your business is, first and foremost. Because the impact on them as an acquirer is much larger than it would be for you standalone.

And in most cases they’re, in today’s day and age, they’re just not willing to take risks that they’re not already taking. . And so I would. Very cognizant of that. And when you do start blurring these sorts of verticals, there is a lot of potential to be a little bit wishy-washy or leave some room for questioning as to how you’ve structured things.

Reece Norris: We’re getting ahead of us cause we definitely, we’re going to be inviting some lawyers on that specialize in this delivery channel as well.

Chip Bierbaum: And that’ll be a valuable conversation. I’d say all your listeners should tune in. Yeah. For that one, for sure.

Dylan McCabe: So out of all that, there’s just so much we could talk about here, which is always the case when we’re interviewing somebody.

I just wanted to go on for two hours. But out of all that, what’s one lesson you want our listeners to take away from that?

Chip Bierbaum: Start thinking about it early. Don’t rush into it. Make sure that you’re talking to the right people and it doesn’t necessarily have to be somebody like me.

Since I’m probably a call you make, when you’re thinking about selling your business, talk to, we infuse Reese and Brian and the crew has a lot of experience seeing various components of the broader infusion services market and running various businesses there. And so they can help you a lot as you think about structuring or, or expanding your service offerings.

Make sure you’ve got good counsel and I’d also say take a good look at the AIC model, if you can in a compliant way. Because I think it’s clearly going to be the fastest growing area, not just within the broader infusion services market, but one of the fastest growing areas in the entire healthcare services industry.

It’s sitting at this. Confluence is kind of a perfect storm, if you will, with the trends that are in place right now and the solution it actually provides to these pressures. If you look at the therapeutic pipeline and innovation over the past, we call it, 10 years, 15 years.

One of the main reasons why this business, or at least this business model is only gaining steam and traction now is because, back. Let’s say back in 2010, you really the only therapeutic non oncolytic anyway that might be addressable by an A I C that couldn’t be delivered in homeless Remicade.

Tos, Ari was still struggling with its PML issues, Intrada. And so when you’re thinking about it, if you’re a quorum or you’re a bioscript or you’re an option care, it’s okay. , do we really want to create this expensive advanced practitioner based ambulatory model just so we can get some Remicade volume?

Not really, because we can do all the other stuff in home and we can do it a lot. , a lot more profitably. But then, of course to SRE kicked its chriss, at least somewhat. Androta launched in 14. You had Entyvio ACRA, Zaire Auxin. Yep. The list goes on.

It’s probably 10 or 15 additional major therapeutics that have launched aside from the smaller orphan stuff. Which is still all the enzyme therapies that-

Reece Norris: You mentioned one earlier, Prolastin.

Chip Bierbaum: Oh yeah. On the alpha one side. That actually can be done at home.

Reece Norris: Yep. We just did a lot of it in our infusion centers as well.

Chip Bierbaum: I used to see and I feel like we used to see that getting some carve out exceptions from from Talecris, I think it was at the time.

Reece Norris: That’s right.

Chip Bierbaum: But I feel like the supply chain’s tightened up there a little bit and I’m not seeing quite as much done in centers as maybe we had in the past but it varies. Yeah. Yeah.

Reece Norris: Well, now Chip- and if you’d like to our listeners, what I want our listeners to take away is- when you look at whether it’s you’re looking at BRAF or Edgemont, go with a someone that has a specialization in this delivery channel.

When you’re thinking about one, whether it’s entering the business or you’re in the business and you have an eye, whether it’s even 10 years from today towards selling. Talk with an expert that knows not only how to get a business sold, but also knows your industry and your expertise and has expertise in it.

I think Chip’s obviously proven he has that today. Dylan, do you have any thoughts?

Dylan McCabe: That’s just a perfect plug by the way for WeInfuse software. We really do believe since it’s a separate business model, since it involves a different workflow, different risks, and so many different issues involved with payers, with billing, with the drugs, with the, everything we really believe WeInfuse is the best platform to manage that entire process. So for those of you listening today, if you haven’t seen the software, be sure to check out weinfuse.com and request a DEMO, and we’d be glad to meet with you and talk about how WeInfuse can help solve the problems, know the challenges you deal with in the whole benefits investigation workflow, the headaches that you have with scheduling, and with inventory management and ordering all of that.

We’re just glad to share that with you guys and check out our website. And then one last thing we want to ask you, Chip. With the knowledge that you’re bringing to the table here, what’s one last parting piece of advice for our listeners?

Chip Bierbaum: Oh, build an AIC-

Reece Norris: It only helps us too.

Chip Bierbaum: -If you build it, it will come, but do it right.

Dylan McCabe: But do it right. It’s a huge opportunity right now. There’s finally real empirical momentum behind sight of care initiatives at the payer level. There’s an ubiquitous, what I’d say, staffing model that really enables this. And there are capacity issues that are going on right now, the provider level. Alongside more and more drugs, and an expanding patient population that’s treated by biologics that can’t be delivered in a home.

It’s a pretty exciting sector of the market. So I think barriers to building one right now are probably as low as they’re ever going to be at the moment. And so, if you’re gonna get in, I’d say this is a pretty good time.

Awesome. Yes.

Reece Norris: How do we get a hold of you, Chip?

Chip Bierbaum: You can go to Edgemont Capital’s website, which is www.edgemont.com.

Go there. My contact information is under my bio on the website.

Dylan McCabe: Excellent. Thanks a lot for being on the show today, Chip.

Chip Bierbaum: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Dylan McCabe: Reece, thanks for being a great co-host. Always fun. All right guys. Thanks for tuning into the WeInfuse podcast and we will catch you in the next episode.

Guest Speaker: Chip Bierbaum is the Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking at Stifel Financial Corp. With over 10 years of experience in healthcare banking, Chip oversees the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain and Pharma Services sectors.