What Healthcare Providers Must Get Right After a Merger

Introduction

Healthcare providers continue consolidating—multi-site groups, specialty networks, PE-backed platforms, and value-based care organizations. Growth often comes through acquisition, but the real test of value creation begins after the deal closes, when clinical operations, financial systems, and patient experience must function as one.

This edition of Data Leaders Uncovered features Micheal McAughey, a data and strategy leader whose experience spans Fresenius Medical Care and other major organizations in chronic kidney care. His work inside a complex, multi-entity healthcare merger reveals what actually breaks, what must be rebuilt, and how providers and investors should think about data as the foundation for clinical and financial performance.

1. When Systems Collide After a Merger—and How the Real Work Begins With Integration

Healthcare rollups bring diverse operational histories together—different EHRs, documentation patterns, coding logic, and data models. As Micheal described it, “you get as many versions of the truth as you have companies involved.” What looks like an acquisition on paper becomes, in practice, a deep integration exercise where every core system has to relearn how to work.

Integrating these environments requires substantial foundational work:

• Standardizing patient identity across inherited systems
• Rebuilding ingestion pipelines for clinical, claims, and operational data
• Normalizing labs, diagnoses, and classification logic
• Establishing a unified cloud and analytics architecture
• Consolidating workflows into shared operational platforms
• Defining common metrics and reporting standards

These steps don’t eliminate complexity overnight, but they create the first opportunity for the organization to behave like a single platform instead of a collection of inherited parts. A healthcare merger doesn’t function until the data does.