100 companies, 881 moves

The Chicago-area healthcare conglomerate that began in 1888 as a doctor's pill business and, after spinning off its research pharma arm as AbbVie in 2013, rebuilt itself around medical devices, diagnostics, nutrition and branded generics. Its defining products are the FreeStyle Libre continuous glucose monitor, which made sensor-based diabetes care a mass market, and the BinaxNOW and ID NOW COVID-

The research-based pharmaceutical company that Abbott Laboratories spun off in 2013 to hold Humira, then the world's best-selling drug. AbbVie's story is the clearest modern case of a single-product company managing a patent cliff: it extended Humira's US exclusivity to 2023 with a dense patent estate and settlements, used the cash to buy Pharmacyclics (2015) and Allergan (2020), and built two suc

The Pittsburgh-born ambient AI company that listens to the doctor–patient conversation and drafts the clinical note. It began as a consumer app for patients, pivoted to selling to health systems, became Epic's first ambient-documentation "Pal" in 2023, won the Kaiser Permanente rollout in 2024, raised more than $500m in 2025 at up to a ~$5.3bn valuation, and is now trying to turn a scribe into a "

The employer-paid "health navigation" company that put a named human Health Assistant, backed by nurses, physicians and software, between American workers and the confusing system of insurance, providers and benefits. It grew on one anchor customer (Comcast), went public in July 2020 at the peak of the digital-health boom, bought its way into expert medical opinions (2nd.MD) and virtual primary ca

The private-equity-built platform that promised to turn established independent physician groups into full-risk Medicare Advantage businesses without buying them. agilon signed 20-year joint ventures with community physician groups, took global capitation contracts from insurers on their behalf and split the "medical margin". It went public in 2021 as one of the most valuable companies in value-ba

The Bethesda, Maryland company founded in 2014 by Farzad Mostashari, the Obama administration's former national coordinator for health IT, to prove that independent primary care physicians could beat hospital systems at value-based care. Aledade does not own clinics or employ doctors. It forms and runs accountable care organizations (ACOs) around independent practices and community health centers,

Amazon's healthcare business: a mail-order and same-day pharmacy built on the 2018 PillPack acquisition, a primary-care practice bought as One Medical in 2023, and a cloud and AI business (AWS) that sells to the rest of the industry. Its first eight years in health were a run of experiments, several of them public failures (Haven, Amazon Care, Halo), followed by a narrower strategy: own the pharma

The Baton Rouge home health and hospice company founded by a nurse in 1982 that rode Medicare's home health payment system to national scale, was nearly broken by a therapy-billing scandal and a $150m False Claims Act settlement, rebuilt itself under a former Humana strategist as a quality-focused home health, hospice and hospital-at-home operator, and in 2025, after a bidding war and a two-year a

The Boston telehealth software company founded in 2006 by physician brothers Ido and Roy Schoenberg. It sold white-label video-visit platforms to health plans and hospitals long before the pandemic made telehealth ordinary. Amwell raised ~$922m around its September 2020 New York Stock Exchange IPO, including $100m from Google. It then spent four years watching revenue stall at ~$250m a year, losse

India's largest private hospital group and the company that created the country's corporate hospital industry. A cardiologist who returned from the United States opened a single 150-bed hospital in Madras in 1983; four decades later the group runs ~78 hospitals, India's largest retail pharmacy chain (~7,000+ stores), a network of clinics and diagnostic centres, and the Apollo 24|7 digital platform

The health platform and regulated-feature business inside the world's most valuable consumer-electronics company. Apple never built a clinic, an insurer or a hospital software line that lasted. Instead it turned the iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods into the most widely carried set of health sensors on earth, won a string of FDA clearances for software features (ECG, irregular rhythm, sleep apnea, h

The St. Louis-based Catholic health system, formed in 1999 and for two decades the largest nonprofit hospital system in the US, that combined religious mission with one of health care's largest investment portfolios, outsourced its revenue cycle to the company that became R1 RCM, shared patient data with Google ("Project Nightingale"), was accused of cutting staff to protect profits, suffered a cr

The Watertown, Massachusetts company that began as a San Diego birthing-clinic business in 1997, failed at that, and turned the billing system it built for itself into the first large cloud-based practice-management and electronic health record (EHR) service for independent physician practices. Its signature idea was to be paid a percentage of the practice's collections, so athenahealth only did w

The London-founded "digital-first" health company that promised to put "an affordable and accessible health service in the hands of every person on Earth" through an app, AI symptom checking and video consultations. It ran the NHS's largest GP practice (GP at Hand), a national digital service in Rwanda (Babyl) and licensing deals in Asia and Canada, raised one of Europe's largest health-tech round

Not one company but a federation: 33 independent, locally run insurance companies (BCBSA's current count; 36 in 2020) that license two of the most valuable brands in American healthcare from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association in Chicago. Born as a nonprofit hospital prepayment scheme for Dallas schoolteachers in 1929, the system grew into the backbone of US private insurance, covering roughly

The Minneapolis insurtech that promised to fix health insurance by tying each plan to a single "Care Partner" health system, raised roughly $1.5bn of venture money and ~$924m in the largest IPO in Minnesota history, grew to about a million members in five years, and then lost more than $2.5bn in two years on ACA exchange and Medicare Advantage risk. It exited insurance entirely in 2022–2023, sold

The largest senior living operator in the United States. It was assembled by Fortress Investment Group from a public company it took private and a bankrupt assisted-living chain, floated in 2005, and doubled in 2014 by merging with Emeritus. It then spent a decade shrinking, restructuring leases with the big healthcare REITs, selling its home health and hospice arm and its CCRC stakes, and fightin

The Connecticut-born maker of the first whole-body ultrasound probe built on a semiconductor chip, which plugs into a smartphone and sold for $1,999 at launch (2017), a fraction of a cart-based ultrasound system. Founded in 2011 by serial genomics entrepreneur Jonathan Rothberg, it raised ~$350m+ privately, went public through a SPAC in February 2021 at a ~$1.5bn valuation on a projection of $334m

The Miami primary-care group that a young physician started with one clinic in 2009 and that private equity and a SPAC turned, within twelve years, into a ~$4.4bn listed company. It served a few hundred thousand Medicare Advantage, Medicaid and ACO patients, most of them Hispanic seniors in South Florida, and was paid mainly by capitation from a handful of insurers led by Humana. It bought practic

The Ohio food wholesaler that became one of the three companies that move most of America's prescription drugs. Cardinal Health is the smallest of the "Big Three" US drug distributors by revenue but the most diversified. It joins a thin-margin, very high-volume pharmaceutical distribution business to a medical-products and distribution arm (gloves, gowns, syringes, catheters, its own-brand supplie

The second-largest US drug wholesaler. It was formed in 2001 when AmeriSource and Bergen Brunswig merged, after regulators had blocked both firms from joining larger rivals. Its defining relationship is with Walgreens: a 2013 deal made it Walgreens' supplier and gave Walgreens a stake that reached ~26% by 2017 and ~28% at its early-2022 peak, and in 2021 it bought most of Walgreens Boots Alliance'

The largest Medicaid managed-care company and the largest ACA exchange insurer in the United States. Centene grew from a single Milwaukee Medicaid plan into a Fortune-top-25 government-programme insurer by winning state contracts one at a time and then buying its peers (Health Net 2016, Fidelis Care 2018, WellCare 2020, Magellan 2022). Its whole business depends on public payers: state Medicaid ag

The San Francisco tele-mental-health start-up that sold psychiatric medication management and therapy as a cheap monthly subscription, rode a pandemic-era DEA waiver to national scale and a ~$4.8bn valuation in under three years, and then became the defining enforcement case of the digital mental-health boom. Pharmacies refused its stimulant prescriptions, its founder-CEO was ousted, it disclosed

The largest claims clearinghouse and healthcare payment network in the United States, assembled over two decades from WebMD's transaction businesses (Emdeon), private-equity ownership, a 2017 joint venture with most of McKesson's health IT business, a 2019 IPO and, in October 2022, a ~$13bn sale to UnitedHealth Group's Optum that the Department of Justice tried and failed to block. By 2024 it said

The Miami family practice that became the largest privately held, physician-led chain of full-risk primary care centres for low- and moderate-income Medicare seniors in the United States. Operating as Chen Senior Medical Center, JenCare Senior Medical Center (a joint venture with Humana) and Dedicated Senior Medical Center, it built its model on tiny physician panels, door-to-doctor transport, on-

A nonprofit, physician-led academic medical center in Cleveland, Ohio, founded in 1921 as a group practice of salaried doctors, that turned a heart-surgery reputation into one of the most recognized hospital brands in the world. Under Delos "Toby" Cosgrove (2004–2017) it reorganized around organ- and disease-based institutes, published its own outcomes, and began exporting the brand to Abu Dhabi a

The venture-backed "insurtech" Medicare Advantage plan that promised to beat incumbents with data science and a physician software tool, raised over $900m privately, went public through Chamath Palihapitiya's SPAC at a ~$3.7bn valuation, was hit within a month by a short-seller report and federal inquiries, lost more than $1bn over 2021–2023, retreated from its Medicare experiment (ACO REACH), and

The largest Catholic and one of the two or three largest nonprofit hospital systems in the United States, created in 2019 when Denver-area Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI) merged with San Francisco's Dignity Health. It was built on the theory that scale across 20-plus states would buy purchasing power, capital access and the money to modernize. Instead it became the clearest case study of a mega-

The Franklin, Tennessee hospital company that built the largest US hospital chain by count through debt-funded acquisitions of non-urban hospitals (Triad in 2007, Health Management Associates in 2014), peaked at ~200 hospitals, and then spent a decade selling more than two-thirds of them to manage ~$10–17bn of debt. It is the industry's clearest case study of what leverage plus rural and small-mar

The Rhode Island drugstore chain that turned itself into the most fully assembled "integrated health company" in the United States: roughly 9,000 retail pharmacies, the Caremark pharmacy benefit manager, the Aetna health insurer, Omnicare long-term-care pharmacy (until 2025), and the Oak Street Health and Signify Health care-delivery businesses. Its history is a sequence of very large bets that th

The Denver-based kidney care company that, with Fresenius Medical Care, runs most of America's outpatient dialysis clinics. DaVita was rescued from near-bankruptcy in 1999 by Kent Thiry, who rebuilt it around a quasi-religious "Village" culture, a roll-up of clinics, and a business model in which a small minority of commercially insured patients pays for much of the profit that Medicare's fixed ra

The privately held Medicare Advantage insurer and medical group founded in 2017 by athenahealth's Park brothers, which bet that a single company owning the health plan, the member-service "Guides", its own virtual and in-home doctors, and its own software could deliver better care to older Americans at lower cost. Devoted became the best-funded insurance start-up of its generation and the one surv

The San Diego device maker that turned continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) from an inaccurate, fingerstick-dependent research tool into a prescribed, factory-calibrated sensor worn by millions. It built one of medtech's best recurring-revenue franchises on a 10–15-day disposable sensor. Along the way it won the regulatory and reimbursement fights that made CGM a standard of care for insulin users.

The Johannesburg-founded insurer that built South Africa's largest private health-insurance administrator and then turned a wellness rewards programme, Vitality, into a "shared-value" insurance model licensed to insurers covering tens of millions of people worldwide. The idea is that if an insurer pays people to get healthier, they claim less, and the savings fund the rewards. The bet behind Disco

The professional network that most US physicians actually use. Free to clinicians, it makes its money by selling pharmaceutical companies and hospitals access to those clinicians, for brand marketing and for recruiting. It became one of the most profitable companies in digital health by giving doctors free tools (fax, a calling app, video visits, scheduling and, since 2023, generative AI) that kee

The largest for-profit operator of Blue Cross Blue Shield plans and the second-largest US health insurer by medical membership. It was assembled from converted nonprofit Blues across fourteen states, rebuilt itself as a Medicaid powerhouse after 2012, lost its fight to buy Cigna, took its pharmacy benefit in-house, and in 2022 renamed itself Elevance Health with a services arm, Carelon, meant to m

The Indianapolis drugmaker that commercialised insulin in 1923, launched Prozac in 1988, refused to merge through its 2011–14 patent cliff, and then became the most valuable healthcare company in the world on the strength of tirzepatide (Mounjaro and Zepbound). Lilly was the first drugmaker to reach a ~$1 trillion market value (21 November 2025), and it has rewritten the pharma commercial playbook

The Nashville-based physician-staffing company that ran emergency departments, anesthesia, hospitalist, radiology and neonatology services for hundreds of US hospitals. It went from a Dallas emergency-physician group (EmCare, 1972) through four owners (Laidlaw, Onex, Clayton Dubilier & Rice, the public markets), a merger with surgery-center operator AmSurg (2016) and a ~$9.9bn KKR buyout (2018) to

The privately held, founder-controlled software company from Verona, Wisconsin, that became the dominant electronic health record (EHR) vendor in the United States. It never raised outside capital, never made a significant acquisition and does almost no advertising, yet by 2025 it ran ~44% of US acute-care hospitals and ~57% of hospital beds (KLAS). Its rise is the story of one idea held for four

The world's largest provider of dialysis services and the largest maker of dialysis machines, dialyzers and supplies: a German-listed, US-earning company that was built by joining a family pharmaceutical group's dialysis equipment business to America's biggest dialysis clinic chain in 1996. Its strategy rests on vertical integration ("we make the machines and run the clinics"), roll-up acquisition

The medical imaging and patient monitoring business that spent more than a century inside General Electric before becoming an independent company in January 2023. GE HealthCare is one of the "big three" global imaging makers alongside Siemens Healthineers and Philips. It sells CT, MRI, X-ray, molecular imaging and ultrasound systems, patient monitors and anesthesia machines, and the contrast agent

The consumer price-comparison site and discount-card network that made US cash prescription prices visible and turned the hidden economics of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) into a consumer brand. It earns most of its money from fees that PBMs pay when a patient fills a prescription using a GoodRx code. Founded in 2011 by tech executives who were annoyed by pharmacy pricing, it was profitable ear

Alphabet has spent more than a decade, and several billion dollars, trying to turn the world's best search, data and AI engineering into a healthcare business. The pattern has been brilliant research and repeated reorganisation. Its moves include DeepMind's Streams app with the Royal Free (found in 2017 to have breached UK data law), a unified Google Health division (2018–21) that was dissolved af

The Nashville hospital company that invented the investor-owned hospital chain in 1968 and became the largest for-profit hospital operator in the world. Its history covers the full arc of US hospital capitalism: founding roll-up, a management LBO, the Columbia/HCA merger and the largest healthcare fraud case of its era, a record private-equity buyout in 2006, a record PE-backed IPO in 2011, and a

The San Francisco direct-to-consumer (DTC) telehealth brand that began in 2017 selling generic hair-loss and erectile-dysfunction drugs to men through a slick online questionnaire, added women's health (Hers, 2018), dermatology and mental health, listed on the NYSE through a SPAC in January 2021, and then became one of the largest cash-pay prescription businesses in the United States by selling co

The digital musculoskeletal (MSK) clinic that turned at-home physical therapy into a benefit sold to self-insured employers through health plans and pharmacy benefit managers. It started with a tablet and wearable motion sensors, replaced them with phone-camera computer vision ("TrueMotion"), raised ~$600m in 2021 at a peak private valuation of ~$6.2bn, went public on the NYSE in May 2025 at a val

The Louisville company that has reinvented itself three times: from nursing homes (1961) to the largest US hospital chain (1970s–80s) to a health insurer (1990s), and then to the purest large-cap bet on Medicare Advantage in America. By the 2020s roughly 80–85% of its revenue came from the federal government through Medicare, it owned the CenterWell brand of senior primary care, home health and ph

IBM's attempt to turn the computer that won *Jeopardy!* in 2011 into a business that would "outthink cancer". Between 2011 and 2022 IBM built Watson Health through clinical partnerships (WellPoint, Memorial Sloan Kettering, MD Anderson) and more than $4bn of acquisitions (Phytel, Explorys, Merge Healthcare, Truven Health Analytics). It became the best-known cautionary tale in healthcare AI: oncolo

The nonprofit health system that the Latter-day Saints church gave to the people of Utah in 1975. It became the most studied example of data-driven, protocol-based hospital care in the United States, built one of the country's most successful provider-owned health plans (Select Health), and spun out ideas such as the Civica Rx generic-drug nonprofit. Since its 2022 merger with SCL Health it has tr

The company that took a military telesurgery research project and made it the standard of care for robot-assisted soft-tissue surgery. Intuitive's da Vinci system has been the dominant surgical robot for a quarter of a century. Its real business is the procedure: each da Vinci operation consumes proprietary instruments and accessories, and each installed system carries a service contract. Roughly

The New Jersey surgical-dressings maker that became the world's largest and broadest healthcare products company, then spent the 2020s narrowing itself. J&J's history holds the most admired crisis response in corporate history (the 1982 Tylenol recall) and some of its most damaging failures: the McNeil recall crisis, the Risperdal and opioid cases, and more than a decade of baby-powder talc litiga

The largest integrated, nonprofit health plan and care-delivery system in the United States, in which one organization collects the premium, owns the hospitals and contracts exclusively with its own physician groups. It began as prepaid industrial medicine for desert aqueduct workers and wartime shipyards, became the model for the 1973 HMO Act, and has spent eighty years trying, mostly unsuccessfu

The Louisville post-acute conglomerate that invented the modern long-term acute care hospital (LTAC) business as Vencor in the 1980s, overreached into nursing homes, split off its real estate as the REIT Ventas, went bankrupt in 1999, re-emerged as Kindred Healthcare in 2001, bought its way to ~$7bn of revenue as the largest US post-acute provider across hospitals, rehabilitation, nursing homes, h

The Dutch light-bulb maker that spent three decades turning itself from a sprawling electronics conglomerate into a pure health-technology company, then suffered one of the most damaging recalls in medical device history. Philips sells MRI, CT, ultrasound and image-guided therapy systems, patient monitoring, sleep and respiratory devices and consumer health products (Sonicare toothbrushes, shavers

The Burlington, North Carolina, laboratory giant formed in 1995 by merging National Health Laboratories with Roche Biomedical Laboratories. For two decades it was the second of America's two national labs behind Quest; buying Covance for ~$6.2bn in 2015 made it the larger company by total revenue and, for eight years, one of the world's biggest drug-development contract research organisations. It

The Burlingame, California employer mental-health benefit founded by former Facebook and Genentech CFO David Ebersman. It replaced the traditional employee assistance program (EAP) for large companies with fast access to a vetted network of therapists, coaches and psychiatric prescribers plus its own employed clinicians. It became one of the most valuable private digital health companies (~$5.6bn

A Dallas online pharmacy and generic-drug supplier, set up as a public benefit corporation, that publishes the same formula for every price: what it paid for the drug, plus a 15% markup, plus a flat pharmacy fee, plus shipping. Co-founded by radiologist Alex Oshmyansky and funded by billionaire investor Mark Cuban, it launched in January 2022 with about 100 generics. It became the best-known chall

The nonprofit, physician-led academic group practice from Rochester, Minnesota, that is the most famous hospital brand in the world. It invented much of what "integrated multispecialty care" means: salaried physicians, a shared medical record, team diagnosis under one roof and the patient's needs first. Around that core it has built three destination campuses, a regional health system in rural Min

The oldest and largest US drug wholesaler. It began as a Manhattan import shop in 1833 and now moves roughly a third of the medicines dispensed in North America, with about $400bn of revenue on operating margins near 1.5%. Its history includes two of the most famous accounting frauds in American business (McKesson & Robbins in 1938, HBOC in 1999), a decade-long and mostly failed attempt to become

The world's largest pure-play medical device company by revenue. It began in 1949 as a Minneapolis garage business repairing hospital equipment, became the pioneer of battery-powered and implantable pacemakers, and grew through acquisitions into a ~$36bn-a-year maker of cardiac, surgical, neuroscience and diabetes devices. Its defining strategic moves are the 2015 Covidien merger, structured as a

The New Jersey drugmaker (MSD outside the US and Canada) known for a science-first culture, the free donation of Mectizan against river blindness, and the Vioxx withdrawal that became the industry's defining drug-safety scandal. Merck's twenty-first-century fortunes rest on Keytruda, an anti-PD-1 cancer immunotherapy it inherited almost by accident through the 2009 Schering-Plough merger and turne

The speech-recognition company whose Dragon software became the default way American doctors dictated notes, rebuilt from the wreckage of two failed speech pioneers, rolled up through dozens of acquisitions, bought by Microsoft for ~$19.7bn in 2022, and turned into Microsoft's clinical AI franchise: first DAX ambient documentation, then the unified Dragon Copilot assistant that by early 2026 was u

The Long Beach health plan that began as one physician's clinic for Medi-Cal patients and became the most purely government-funded managed care company in the United States. Molina earns nearly all of its revenue from state Medicaid contracts, dual-eligible Medicare plans and ACA marketplace policies. Its story has three acts: a family-run growth company (1980–2017), a board-led ouster of the foun

The Accra-founded company that set out to fix Africa's broken medicine supply chain from the pharmacy counter backwards. It started by managing inventory for independent pharmacies and hospitals, then bought pharmacy chains in Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria, built its own "mutti" pharmacy brand, franchise programme (QualityRx), patient membership and in-pharmacy telemedicine (Mutti Doctor), and raised

The Bengaluru hospital group founded by cardiac surgeon Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty that became the world's best-known example of "assembly-line" high-volume, low-cost surgery. It applied manufacturing logic (scale, standard processes, task-sharing and daily cost reporting) to heart operations priced at a small fraction of US levels. From that base it built a listed multi-specialty chain in India, a hi

The national body that, from 2013, ran the English National Health Service: the tax-funded system founded on 5 July 1948 that gives ~57 million people in England comprehensive care that is mostly free at the point of use. It is not a company. It is the world's largest single-payer purchaser of care, a near-monopoly employer of clinicians and the buyer every health-technology vendor in the UK has t

The New York consumer health company that began as a fitness-app maker, became famous for a psychology-based weight-loss subscription sold through heavy digital advertising, raised $540m at a ~$3.7bn valuation in 2021, then spent 2022–2023 cutting staff, settling an auto-renewal class action and losing its growth story to GLP-1 drugs. It rebuilt itself as a telehealth prescriber that pairs behavio

The Danish insulin maker, controlled by a charitable foundation, that created the modern obesity-drug market with semaglutide (Ozempic and Wegovy) and briefly became Europe's most valuable company. Between 2023 and 2026 it went from supply-constrained triumph to a cautionary tale: it lost US share to Eli Lilly, fought compounders and telehealth sellers (then partnered with the biggest of them), pa

The Chicago company that built a national chain of primary-care centres for low-income and dual-eligible Medicare seniors, paid almost entirely by full-risk capitation from Medicare Advantage plans. It was the clearest public-market test of the "de novo senior primary care" model: a 2020 IPO, a ~$10.6bn sale to CVS Health in 2023 at the top of the value-based-care cycle, a $60m kickback settlement

The San Francisco "virtual-first" chronic-care company that began in 2011 by turning the National Institutes of Health's Diabetes Prevention Program into an online, coach-led course with a connected scale. It grew into a multi-condition programme (prediabetes and weight, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, musculoskeletal pain and support for people taking GLP-1 drugs) sold to employers and health plan

The San Francisco membership-based primary care practice founded in 2007 by physician Tom Lee to make seeing a doctor feel like a modern consumer service: same- or next-day appointments, well-designed offices, an app with 24/7 virtual care, and a ~$199 annual fee on top of insurance. It became the employer-benefit primary care of choice for technology companies, went public in January 2020, bought

The Kansas City health IT company founded in 1979 that built the first widely deployed integrated hospital platform (Cerner Millennium), won the two largest EHR contracts in the world (the US Department of Defense in 2015 and the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2018) and was bought by Oracle for ~$28.3bn in 2022. Under Oracle it became a test of whether a cloud and database giant can rebuild an

The venture-backed, technology-first health insurer that bet its existence on the Affordable Care Act's individual exchanges. Oscar spent a decade losing money, went public in 2021 at ~$7.9bn and lost most of that value, then under Mark Bertolini became the largest ACA-focused insurtech and the first of its cohort to post an annual profit (2024). It was knocked back into loss by the 2025 exchange

The Brooklyn chemicals firm that became the archetype of the big-pharma acquirer. Pfizer bought its way to the top of the industry with Warner-Lambert (for Lipitor), Pharmacia and Wyeth, survived the Lipitor patent cliff, failed twice to buy its way into a lower tax bill, then earned the largest one-off windfall in the industry's history with the BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine and Paxlovid. Since 2023

China's best-known online consultation platform, built in 2014 inside the insurance and financial conglomerate Ping An. It used an in-house medical team plus AI triage to answer hundreds of millions of health questions. It listed in Hong Kong in May 2018 at a ~US$7.5bn valuation, then lost money for a decade. A traffic boom in the 2020 pandemic did not change the economics. Its founder was removed

The Arlington, Virginia physician-enablement company that lets independent doctors stay independent while joining a single-tax-ID Medical Group in each state, running on one athenahealth EHR and a shared management company, and contracting together for value-based care. Backed by a Goldman Sachs-led ~$400m investment in 2014 and listed on Nasdaq in April 2021, it grew from one Virginia group in 20

The privately held, Sackler-family-owned drug company whose 1996 launch and aggressive marketing of OxyContin, an extended-release oxycodone pill, made it the emblem of the US prescription opioid epidemic. Purdue earned an estimated ~$35bn from OxyContin (reported), pleaded guilty to federal crimes twice (2007 and 2020), filed for bankruptcy in 2019, and lost a landmark Supreme Court case over the

America's largest independent clinical laboratory by test volume and, in clinical diagnostics alone, by revenue (Labcorp is larger in total revenue only because of its drug-development lab business), built from a New York lab founded in 1967 and spun off from Corning in 1996. Quest runs a national network of labs, couriers and ~2,000+ patient service centres and serves roughly a third of US adults

The largest US end-to-end revenue cycle outsourcing company for hospitals and health systems. It was founded in 2003 as Accretive Health and built on a single anchor client, Ascension, whose revenue cycle staff it took over in return for a base fee plus a share of the improvement. It went public in 2010, nearly collapsed after the 2012 Minnesota attorney general case over aggressive collection pra

The Pennsylvania discount drugstore chain that grew by acquisition into America's third-largest pharmacy operator, and then spent a quarter of a century paying for it. Its story includes one of the largest accounting frauds of the 1990s, a debt-funded purchase of Eckerd and Brooks at the top of the market, a pharmacy benefit manager bought too late, two failed sales (to Walgreens and to Albertsons

The New York direct-to-consumer telehealth and pharmacy company founded in 2017 by Zachariah Reitano, Rob Schutz and Saman Rahmanian, which launched as Roman (erectile dysfunction treatment for men), became Ro in 2018, added smoking cessation (Zero), women's health (Rory), at-home blood draws (Workpath) and fertility testing (Modern Fertility), and reached a reported ~$7bn private valuation in Feb

The Basel-based, family-controlled group that is both one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies and the world's largest in-vitro diagnostics company. Roche's modern shape comes from two very different bets: buying majority control of the Californian biotech pioneer Genentech in 1990 (and the rest in 2009), which made it the leader in cancer antibodies, and buying Boehringer Mannheim in 1

The medical technology arm of Siemens, born in the X-ray workshops of Erlangen within months of Röntgen's discovery and listed separately in Frankfurt in 2018. Siemens Healthineers is the largest of the "big three" imaging makers by revenue. It sells CT, MRI, X-ray, molecular imaging and ultrasound; one of the world's largest laboratory diagnostics businesses; and, since its ~$16.4bn purchase of V

The private-equity-built hospital company that began in 2010 when Cerberus Capital bought Boston's Catholic Caritas Christi hospitals, grew into the largest privately held for-profit hospital operator in the US by selling its hospitals' real estate to Medical Properties Trust and using the proceeds to expand, and collapsed into one of the largest hospital bankruptcies in US history in May 2024. It

The Kalamazoo surgeon's workshop that became one of the largest and most consistent medical technology companies in the world. Stryker sells orthopedic implants (hips, knees, trauma, extremities), the Mako robot that pulls those implants into operating rooms, and a broad MedSurg and neurotechnology portfolio: hospital beds and stretchers, surgical power tools, endoscopy cameras, neurovascular devi

The New York online-therapy company that made "text your therapist" a consumer product, built a national brand on direct-to-consumer subscriptions and Michael Phelps advertising, went public through a SPAC at a ~$1.4bn valuation in June 2021, lost more than 90% of that value within a year as consumer acquisition costs soared, pushed out its founders, and then rebuilt itself under CEO Jon Cohen as

The Dallas-born "doctor by phone" company founded in 2002 that sold employers and health plans a per-member access fee for round-the-clock virtual visits. It won a long fight with the Texas Medical Board, went public in 2015, bought its way into a global virtual-care portfolio (BetterHelp, Best Doctors, Advance Medical, InTouch Health) and, at the pandemic peak in 2020, agreed to buy Livongo for ~

The Chicago precision-medicine company founded by Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkofsky that uses a genomic-testing lab as the engine of a data business. Tempus sequences tumours and germline DNA for oncologists, gets paid for each test by insurers and Medicare, keeps de-identified copies of the molecular and clinical data, and licenses that growing library to drug companies for research, trial design

The Dallas-based for-profit hospital company that grew out of National Medical Enterprises (NME), survived two of the largest healthcare fraud scandals in US history, nearly broke itself with the debt-funded Vanguard deal, and then remade itself in the 2020s into an ambulatory surgery company (USPI) that also owns hospitals. It is the clearest case study of a hospital chain deliberately moving its

A Connecticut insurer with roots in two of America's oldest insurance companies that turned itself, through the 2018 purchase of Express Scripts, into a company that earns most of its revenue from pharmacy benefits and specialty pharmacy (Evernorth) rather than from insuring medical risk. It is the clearest example of a "payer" that became a health-services and PBM business, and since 2024 it has

The Palo Alto blood-testing startup that claimed it could run hundreds of laboratory tests from a few drops of blood from a fingertip, quickly and at a fraction of normal prices. It raised roughly $900m+ from private investors, reached a ~$9bn valuation in 2014, put testing centres in ~40 Walgreens stores, and then collapsed after the *Wall Street Journal* showed in October 2015 that its technolog

The largest healthcare company in the world by revenue. It began in 1977 as a Minnesota HMO manager and grew into a vertically integrated giant that combines the biggest US health insurer (UnitedHealthcare) with Optum, a services empire that employs or affiliates tens of thousands of physicians, runs one of the three dominant pharmacy benefit managers and owns much of the plumbing of US healthcare

The vertical cloud-software company that built the pharmaceutical industry's standard sales CRM on top of Salesforce, then used that foothold to become the operating system of drug development and commercialization: clinical trials, regulatory filings, safety, quality, customer data and AI agents. In 2021 it became the first public company to convert to a public benefit corporation, and from 2022

The Chicago company founded in 2013 to put independent primary care doctors into value-based contracts, which became the vehicle for Walgreens' biggest strategic bet: roughly $9.7bn of Walgreens money (~$1bn in 2020, ~$5.2bn in 2021, ~$3.5bn in 2022; ~$12.2bn including Cigna's ~$2.5bn), a plan for 1,000 "Village Medical at Walgreens" clinics, and the ~$8.9bn purchase of Summit Health–CityMD in Jan

The San Francisco AI company that taught the industry to sell clinical AI as a care-coordination workflow rather than a detection score. Its stroke software received the FDA De Novo authorization that created the computer-aided triage category (2018) and the first Medicare New Technology Add-on Payment for AI (FY2021). It then spread across ~2,000 US hospitals and into cardiology, pulmonology and

The Chicago-area drugstore chain that for most of the twentieth century was America's largest pharmacy, merged with Britain's Boots and Stefano Pessina's Alliance UniChem wholesale empire to form the world's first global pharmacy-led health and wellbeing company (2014), and then spent a decade discovering that size alone did not protect a pharmacy without a PBM or an insurer. Its moves include an

The healthcare arm of the world's largest retailer. Walmart runs one of the largest pharmacy chains in the US, about 3,000 vision centres and a Medicare insurance agency. For five years (2019–2024) it also ran Walmart Health, a chain of low-price primary care "health centres" next to its supercentres. Its biggest healthcare move was price, not care delivery: the $4 generics list of 2006 changed wh

The private-equity-built healthcare payments software company that sits between US providers and payers. It checks eligibility, scrubs and routes claims, works denials, and collects patient payments. It was assembled from two early-2000s internet clearinghouses (Navicure and ZirMed) and a string of acquisitions, passed through three private-equity sponsors, and listed on Nasdaq in June 2024, month

The autonomous drone logistics company that began in 2016 by parachuting blood to rural hospitals in Rwanda, grew into a government-contracted medical supply network across Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and Côte d'Ivoire, and then used that record to build a US home-delivery business for retailers and health systems. It is the clearest case of an emerging market serving as the proving ground for a technol

The New York marketplace that lets patients search for doctors who take their insurance and book a real appointment online, free to patients and paid for by providers. A 2015 unicorn that nearly stalled on a flat subscription model, it rebuilt itself around a fee for each new patient booked, became profitable, and in 2026 began turning its scheduling network into infrastructure that insurers, sear