The leaders of Ardent Health Inc. have signed a deal to buy a not-for-profit health system in Mid-Missouri, which would mark the company’s first move into that state.
Nashville-based Ardent intends to pay $47 million in cash for Boone Health, which runs the 392-bed Boone Hospital Center as well as 19 other sites of care and last year booked $480 million revenue and has about 30% of the market in and around Columbia, where University of Missouri Health Care is the market leader. Ardent also is committing to spending $200 million on capital projects in the coming decade, with an expansion of BHC’s emergency department among the early priorities.
“Boone fits exceptionally well with Ardent’s operating model,” President and CEO Dave Caspers said on a Nov. 12 conference call announcing the deal. ‘Importantly, we see meaningful opportunities to optimize financial performance. This includes multiple pathways for margin expansion by leveraging Ardent’s scale, platform and our operational excellence.”
Caspers and his team expect to be able to build up to $30 million in savings and synergies by 2029, when they also expect Boone Health to be adding up to $40 million to the company’s earnings before interest, depreciation and amortization.
Word of the Boone buyout plan came two days after Caspers and CFO Alfred Lumsdaine discussed their M&A ambitions at the 2026 UBS Global Healthcare Conference. Caspers told attendees that his team isn’t looking for small deals but has “a small array” of opportunities to acquire well-run hospitals in midsized markets.
“It’s an area where there’s a bit of opportunity where it might be just a little small for some of the bigger players and it might be a little large for some of the community to grow,” Caspers said. “We’re aimed at the midsized markets with population growth and good assets.”
Caspers in late September announced that Ardent would sell its stake in Topeka’s St. Francis Campus and affiliated locations to its partner in that venture, the University of Kansas Health System. At the UBS conference, he said that Kansas’ “challenging market for population growth” was a driving factor between concluding the Topeka JV after roughly a decade. By contrast, he called out Columbia’s expected population growth of 3.4% over the next five years as one of the reasons his team was interested in Boone Health.
Ardent is on pace to finish 2026 with between $6.4 billion and $6.7 billion in revenues and net profits of $132 million to $167 million. The company’s network (which will include St. Francis until late this year) comprises 30 acute-care hospitals and more than 280 sites of care in six states.
Shares of Ardent (Ticker: ARDT) were up nearly 1% to $17.82 in afternoon trading on Nov. 13. Over the past six months, they’ve risen nearly 80%, helped by a big surge after this month’s midterm elections. The company’s market capitalization is now about $2.5 billion.
Source: www.hcinnovationgroup.com
