An inside look at the M&A dance

Shareholders of AmSurg and Envision voted Nov. 28 on their companies’ proposed multibillion dollar marriage. The seeds of the deal were sown in the summer of 2015, when the companies’ CEOs first met to talk about the potential for a deal. In the 10 months that followed, there were plenty of backs and forths and stops and starts. A number of those came in the form of TeamHealth, the Knoxville-based physician services company that itself had shown an appetite for deals by agreeing to buy hospitalist company IPC Healthcare for $1.6 billion.

AmSurg’s search for more physician services business led it to bid nearly $8 billion for TeamHealth in October. TeamHealth’s board rebuffed that offer and AmSurg walked away two weeks later. But that wasn’t the end of their M&A interactions — not by a long shot. Here, based on documents AmSurg and Envision filed this summer, is a glimpse into how TeamHealth walked onto and off the dance floor with both AmSurg and Envision several more times over the course of the ensuing months.