A Practitioner’s Guide to Using Data on Private Equity Hospital Acquisitions

Introduction Private equity (PE) investment in US hospitals has attracted substantial policy and research attention, but empirical work has been limited by fragmented and inconsistent transaction data. We aimed to construct a more comprehensive, validated dataset of PE ownership of US hospitals and to provide a practical guide for using these data in research. Methods We integrated six major commercial deal databases to identify PE invest- ments in US hospitals from 2000 to 2024. We filtered transactions to PE-related hospital deals, matched targets to AHA and CMS hospital identifiers, manually verified uncertain matches, reconciled duplicate transactions across sources, expanded system-level deals to constituent hospitals, and verified deal and exit dates. Results We identified 141 unique PE deals involving 555 unique short-term acute care hospitals, corresponding to 721 hospital-deal observations. The six databases differed substantially in deal coverage, deal type, and whether transactions were reported at the hospital or system level. Reliance on a single source would therefore omit many valid deals and can produce biased or incomplete analytic samples. We also found that linking transactions to stable hospital identifiers required substantial manual verification because of system-level transactions, inconsistent reporting, and identifier changes over time. Conclusion Accurate study of PE ownership in hospitals requires multi-source data construction, transparent validation, and careful linkage to stable hospital identifiers. This harmonized dataset and workflow provide infrastructure for more accurate, transparent, and replicable research on PE ownership in the US hospital sector.