Consistent with Mercury’s thematic based origination approach, we were exploring opportunities to invest in services to the aged care industry when we met a highly entrepreneurial team led by Stanley Sack and Owen Nathan who were rapidly growing a mobile allied-health offering to residential aged care providers. Mercury partnered with them in 2014 to support their ambitious growth aspirations for HealthStrong.

At the time Mercury invested, HealthStrong had a mobile allied-health workforce of ~170 practitioners, mostly physiotherapists but also occupational therapists and podiatrists, working across over 100 residential aged care facilities. HealthStrong were the second largest provider of outsourced allied health services to the aged care sector in Australia, and the leading provider in NSW, Queensland and Western Australia. HealthStrong had a strong operating platform, with growing demand for their services in residential aged care, but also in retirement homes and community care (servicing people in their homes).

As a valuable remote-services allied health platform the business had numerous growth avenues available to it, including for the provision of allied health services to end markets outside aged and community care. Mercury worked closely with the HealthStrong team to determine the highest-value growth areas and to focus the business resources on these. This included the development of an in-home allied health rehab program for patients after a joint replacement procedure, pitched to health insurers as a highly cost-effective substitute for the typical route of two week in-patient rehab stays.

After a number of inbound approaches to acquire the business, the development of the rehab program piqued the interest of Australia’s largest private health insurer Medibank who ultimately acquired the business in 2017, realising an excellent outcome for all shareholders.