Healthcare market maps
built to win the first call.
Ranked call lists of physician groups, enriched with decision-maker identification, transaction-readiness signals, geo maps, and approach notes. For buy-side acquirers and sell-side bankers sourcing proprietary deal flow. Built by a practitioner, in your hands in days.
The pipeline that matters is the one built before a banker runs a process.
Most healthcare deal teams are running more active processes with the same team they had three years ago. PE associates are buried in live deals. Bankers are covering more sub-sectors than their analysts can track. SPS by With Intelligence found the median PE firm saw 17.6% of its target-market deal flow in 2024. The other 82% never crosses the desk.
The default fix is a data stack. PitchBook. Grata. S&P Capital IQ. ZoomInfo. Definitive Healthcare. Clay. Real line items running $50,000 to $200,000 a year across three to five platforms. The platforms stop at a universe of names; the call sheet still gets built by hand. They won’t tell you the physician owner is 63 with no succession plan, whether a junior partner recently left the group, or which 15 of 200 names are worth a call this month. Figure two to three weeks of scrubbing and enrichment, every engagement.
The other instinct is to hire. A senior-level BD professional with real healthcare deal experience runs $250,000 to $410,000 fully loaded in Year 1. That cost sits on SG&A. At 10x to 14x EBITDA, every dollar of permanent overhead is $10 to $14 off enterprise value at exit. And every BD hire I have watched onboard spent the first quarter building the target list. That list should exist before they start.
The firms that source deals off-market build the map before they hire against it. No platform subscriptions. No workbooks. The finished work product - delivered in days.
A working call sheet - not a lead list.
Delivered as an Excel workbook and executive summary PDF. Format varies by engagement - typically includes a ranked call sheet, practice profiles and approach notes, competitive landscape, market context, and methodology.
Ranked target universe
Fifty to two hundred targets depending on sub-sector and geography, scored against your criteria: provider count, location density, payer mix signals, succession timing, and strategic fit.
Ownership and provider verification
NPI-validated provider counts, state licensing cross-reference, entity structure, and ownership type - founder-owned, MSO-affiliated, PE-backed, or hospital-employed.
Revenue and EBITDA range estimates
Directional financial estimates built from provider-count benchmarks, adjusted for in-house procedures, imaging, specialty pharmacy, and other revenue layers specific to the sub-sector.
Competitive overlap mapping
Which PE-backed platforms are in the market, when they acquired, whether they are in buy-and-build mode or approaching an exit, and where the white space lies.
Transaction readiness signal
A composite score built from five publicly sourceable factors: founder age and succession path, recent physician departures from the group, lease renewal windows, competitor consolidation in the market, and reimbursement exposure by therapy mix. Collapsed into a single Approach Priority tier - Very High, High, Moderate, or Low - with guidance on how to pitch each tier. When signals stack on the same target, the timing picture comes into focus. Refined from patterns across $1B+ in closed healthcare transactions.
Enriched practice profiles
For each priority target: sub-specialty mix, clinical footprint, website and public disclosure review, and relevant transaction history pulled from public filings and press.
Approach notes
Practical guidance on how to navigate past practice gatekeepers to the actual decision makers. Names where public, reception patterns, banker relationships, and how the target has responded to prior inbound.
Contact routing
Website, phone, and email or contact form for every target. A working call sheet your team can operationalize on Day 1.
Six to ten weeks of manual desk research, compressed to two to five business days.
The same market map that took my corp dev teams six to ten weeks to produce is delivered in two to five business days by combining three layers:
- Data extraction infrastructure that queries state licensing databases, NPI registries, CMS provider files, payer directories, and commercial data providers in parallel rather than serially.
- A scoring framework calibrated to your buy-box or prospect criteria - specialty, geography, size thresholds, ownership preferences, payer mix signals - rather than a generic screen.
- Practitioner judgment on what AI cannot automate: which sixty-two-year-old founder is likely ready versus the forty-five-year-old still building, which MSO is an actual competitor versus an irrelevant one, which market has consolidation room versus being saturated.
The finished product is a deal-team-ready deliverable, calibrated for investment committee review on Day 1 with no internal cleanup required.
Built for deal teams on both sides of the transaction.
PE-backed healthcare platforms
Building out add-on pipelines in new MSAs or expanding into adjacent sub-specialties. Typical use: an investment committee greenlights a new vertical or geography, and you need a ready-for-partner universe within a week to start approach.
Private equity funds
Entering a new sub-sector thesis. Typical use: your investment committee is finalizing a thesis and needs market structure intelligence before committing to active sourcing or a full-time BD hire.
Investment banks
Two jobs. Winning new sell-side mandates by arriving at a physician owner call with intelligence no competing banker has - the ranked pitch list, the decision-maker identification, the market context. And building defensible buyer universes spanning strategics, PE-backed platforms, and financial sponsors, especially in sub-sectors you cover less actively.
Health systems
Evaluating partnership, JV, or acquisition opportunities in specific markets. Typical use: you are evaluating an MSA or a sub-specialty consolidation and need an independent market structure view.
Two to five business days typical.
Most engagements deliver in that window. Complex scopes - multi-state, multi-sub-specialty, or sell-side buyer universes requiring international reach - may extend to seven to ten business days. The exact timeline is scoped during the discovery call.
Fixed project fee.
Scoped by sub-sector complexity, geography, and engagement depth. Standard structure: 50% deposit to kick off work, 50% net 30 on delivery. Healthcare M&AI does not use success fees, contingency compensation, or transaction-based pricing - all engagements are advisory research.
Need ongoing sourcing coverage rather than a one-time map? See fractional deal sourcing. Need the whole development seat run? See the fractional and interim CDO engagement.
Recent engagements.
Client names and deal identifiers withheld. Output paraphrased to preserve confidentiality.
A private-equity-backed interventional pain platform asked us to map and enrich acquisition targets across a single state. The headline finding was a practice the platform had already discarded: it sat on the client's own pass list, miscoded as chiropractic. A careful read flagged it, and verification against eight independent public sources - NPPES taxonomy, state medical license, board certification, and public patient reviews - confirmed a physician-led interventional pain practice with a strong succession profile (solo founder near retirement, two decades in practice, no succession bench). We recovered it as a Tier 1 candidate and recommended re-engagement.
The rest of the engagement carried the same rigor. From 50-plus practices pre-screened, we built a verified universe of 20 distinct operators, classified 9 as Tier 1, and identified 5 net-new independent targets the client was not already tracking. Every target was checked against at least two independent public sources; a spot-check of 18 fields across the highest-value practices passed 18 of 18 with zero re-runs. Verification also surfaced ten material findings, including two corrections to the client's own data - a physician listed as active who had died, and a misattributed practice owner. Delivery was an 8-tab workbook and an executive deck on a 2-5 business-day turnaround. The client verbally committed to the next state as a follow-on.
A PE-backed platform building an add-on pipeline in a new sub-specialty had an investment committee deadline and no internal bandwidth to build the universe in parallel with two live processes. Delivered a ranked call list tiered by succession signal and approach priority, ownership verification on all Tier 1 targets, competitive overlap against four PE-backed operators already in market, and approach notes for the top ten prospects. The business development team initiated outreach the week of delivery.
A healthcare advisory firm expanding coverage into a new sub-sector needed intelligence on which independent practices to pitch for sell-side representation (they already had the buyer universe). Delivered a tiered pitch list with decision-maker identification and estimated owner age for each target, directional revenue and EBITDA ranges paired with payer mix estimates, and approach notes calibrated to opening a sell-side conversation at the physician level - designed to route past the front desk and land in front of the decision-maker directly.
A PE fund finalizing a thesis entry in a new specialty vertical needed market structure intelligence before committing to active sourcing or a full-time BD hire. Delivered a tiered target universe with ownership verification, revenue and EBITDA range estimates, competitive landscape mapping of PE-backed operators already in market, and valuation benchmarking against recent comparable transactions in the sub-sector. The market map served as the foundation for the fund’s investment committee materials on the new vertical.
Common questions about market maps.
How is a healthcare market map different from a PitchBook search or a lead list?
PitchBook, Grata, CapIQ, ZoomInfo, and Definitive Healthcare all stop at a universe of names. They won’t tell you the physician owner is 63 with no succession plan, whether a junior partner recently left the group, or which 15 of 200 names are worth a call this month. A market map delivers the enrichment layer those platforms don’t: ownership verification, competitive overlap, succession signals, enriched practice profiles, and approach notes built to route past the front desk to the actual decision maker.
What data sources does a healthcare market map use?
State licensing databases, CMS Provider of Services files, NPI registries, payer directories, commercial data providers where subscribed, SEC filings for public operators, county records for ownership verification, and professional association directories. Public information only unless otherwise agreed under a mutual NDA.
Can you build a market map for any healthcare sub-sector?
Yes. Core verticals with deepest practitioner experience include urgent care, oncology, post-acute, physician services (primary care, multi-specialty, specialty), ophthalmology, dental, and behavioral health. Adjacent verticals are scoped with additional intake during the discovery call.
Can you build a sell-side buyer universe rather than a buy-side target list?
Yes. Sell-side mandates are a common use case. The buyer universe includes strategic acquirers, PE-backed platforms with fit to the target, and financial sponsors with active theses in the sub-sector. Each buyer is evaluated for acquisition history, current capital availability, and thesis fit against the seller.
Start a market map engagement.
Tell us the sub-sector, the geography, and the side of the table. We’ll scope the engagement on a 25-minute discovery call and deliver the map within two to five business days.