Addus HomeCare Corp. has agreed to pay about $275 million to buy nearly all the personal care operations of AccentCare, a deal that will grow the publicly traded company by about a fifth.

The planned purchase will bring to Frisco, Texas-based Addus roughly $280 million in annual revenues from an average daily census of about 13,700 people being served from nearly 70 branches in 10 states, with Texas, Illinois, California and Arizona figuring most prominently. (Addus is not buying AccentCare’s New York assets.) CFO Brian Poff told the recent Jefferies Healthcare Services and Technology Conference that Addus should be able to quickly generate some back-office savings and then steadily improve the profitability of the AccentCare assets.

“Their EBITDA right now, or out of the gate, is probably going to be just under 10 percent,” Poff said at the conference. “We will have some opportunity, we think, to bring that up to the normal level of our [personal care services] division.”

Including the personal care group it’s preparing to divest, Dallas-based AccentCare serves about 220,000 hospice, palliative and home care patients annually. The company employs about 30,000 people and runs more than 280 locations around the country.

“This agreement ensures that our clients will continue to receive outstanding, compassionate care from a team completely focused on their daily needs, allowing for continued growth of the segment under proven leadership,” AccentCare CEO Laura Tortorella said in a statement. “This is an exciting milestone for our personal care colleagues, and a clear reflection of both the strength of our personal care service line and the exceptional care our teams deliver.”

Personal care accounts for about 77 percent of Addus’ nearly $1.5 billion in annual revenues. Government and private payers account for roughly half of that $1.1 billion, with managed-care organizations taking up most of the remainder. The management team led by Chairman and CEO Dirk Allison has been steadily buying peers, most notably of late paying about $350 million for Gentiva’s personal-care group. Coincidentally, that deal also grew Addus’ revenue base by roughly $280 million.

Speaking at the Jefferies gathering, Poff said the Addus team has an appetite for more sizable deals in personal care and also will continue to eye home-care transactions that tie into the company’s hospice and personal-care networks.

“There are a couple other larger, similar-sized opportunities that we think will come to market over the next, say, 12 months [to] 18 months,” he said. “We will see how the timing perspective and how the cadence of those come into play.”

Addus is one of a handful of notable names consolidating parts of the healthcare services sector these days. The finance chiefs of two other companies, UnitedHealth Group and CVS Health, also discussed their ambitions at a recent conference hosted by Wells Fargo:

• United’s Wayne DeVeydt said the sector giant has made good progress of late on lightening its debt load and is ready to get back to being a buyer. “We would expect to be re-engaged in the acquisition space as we have historically been, albeit a lot more focused on what we think are the big growth drivers of time. We think value-based care is a massive opportunity for us and we think these OptumInsight innovations are a massive one.”
• Speaking for CVS at the Wells Fargo gathering, CFO Brian Newman told a similar story. The company has significantly trimmed its debt-to-EBITDA ratio since 2024. Now, “it’s getting time to turn back on share [repurchases], to look at bolt-on acquisitions.”

A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde has more than two decades of business journalism experience and writes about markets and economic trends for Endeavor Business Media publications Healthcare Innovation, IndustryWeek, FleetOwner, Oil & Gas Journal and T&D World. With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati and later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal. Most recently, he oversaw the online and print products of the Nashville Post for more than a decade and reported primarily on Middle Tennessee’s finance sector as well as many of its publicly traded companies.