A New York hedge fund manager bullish on the prospects for hospital companies has been on a big buying spree in LifePoint Hospitals of late and has become the company's second-biggest investor.

Officials at Glenview Capital Management this week filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission disclosing that its stake in Brentwood-based LifePoint has grown to almost 3.2 million shares from 2.4 million shares at the end of 2012. Eyeballing LifePoint's share price action so far this year, it appears Glenview has invested more than $30 million in the past eight weeks to grow its stake to 6.8 percent. That would trail only Dimensional Fund Advisors, the massive Texas-based investment shop that puts money to work based on various index strategies.

Not so Robbins, who is making a big sector bet and has been aggressively buying hospital names since last spring, when he told a New York investment conference the sector stands to benefit big time from President Obama's health care reform package. Many other market watchers have since made the same case and that emerging consensus has helped drive up local stocks. Glenview last November filed similar papers with the SEC saying they controlled more than 8 percent of Community Health Systems' shares, making them the top investor in that locally based hospital operator.

LifePoint shares (Ticker: LPNT) are up almost 20 percent so far in 2013 but are lagging fellow Nashville-area companies HCA, CHS and Vanguard by more than 20 percentage points over the past six months.