Emdeon files to go public

Healthcare billing services provider looking to raise $460M

Email | Print By Geert De Lombaerde and Walker Duncan

Local revenue cycle management company Emdeon has filed papers for an initial public offering that would raise $460 million.

Emdeon in 2007 earned $16 million on revenue of $809 million. Based on the first half of this year, the company is on pace to earn $12 million and revenue of $851 million. It processed 3.7 billion transactions last year, including half of all private commercial claims.

Emdeon's current owners, General Atlantic Partners and Hellman & Friedman, completed their purchase of the company earlier this year in a deal that valued it at $1.8 billion.

Prior to that, Emdeon Business Services, which was better known at the time as WebMD Business Services and WebMD Envoy, had been a unit of New Jersey based Emdeon Corp. (That company has since been renamed HLTH Corp.)

General Atlantic bought a 52 percent chunk of the company in ’06 before completing the purchase.

The company now, should the transaction go through, will be the first prominent Nashville company to go public in some time . In the past two years, the majority of the market commotion has centered on buyouts rather than IPOs.

2006 saw a cadre of companies go public with the likes of Mapco owner Delek US Holdings, biotech firm BioMimetic, and managed care organization HealthSpring hitting the market in the first half of that year.

Shortly after that HCA started the LBO wave that resulted in a handful of Nashville’s largest public companies started going private, with no one coming into the market to take their place.

In fact, since 2006, the only other prominent Nashville company to file as S-1 has been Cumberland Pharmaceuticals, which filed the form back in May of 2007 announcing intentions to raise about $115 million.

Despite the filing and support from the likes of UBS Investment Bank, Jefferies & Co., Wachovia Securities and Morgan Joseph, to date Cumberland remains private. The company last month amended its filing and now says it wants to raise about $84 million.

A long list of investment banks has signed to manage Emdeon's IPO. Leading the way are Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, UBS and Merrill Lynch.

To see a full copy of Emdeon's form S-1, click here.