U.S. District Court Judge William Haynes in late March moved forward one of the class actions filed in the fall of 2009 against the former Psychiatric Solutions and three of the executives who now run Acadia Healthcare. Haynes certified the class of investors who bought Psych Solutions shares between February 2008 and February 2009 and have accused executives of misleading them about performance and patient safety issues.

An ambitious Memphis-based behavioral health venture has signed a deal to buy two facilities in Las Vegas from Universal Health Services. Strategic Behavioral Health is buying the centers after the Federal Trade Commission ruled UHS needed to shed some assets. The deal is being financed by Fifth Third, First Tennessee and Pinnacle Financial Partners, which also are backing SBH's expansion in North Carolina and Colorado.

“We have seen fumbles in the handoff when communication breaks down between development and operations,” Carpenter says. To avoid those breakdowns, the Brentwood, Tenn., company started a transitional services division that is present at the creation of a deal, so to speak, working side by side with the development team from the moment a tentative deal is struck. The transitional services division, headed by Jeff Seraphine, works with the development team once LifePoint begins due diligence on an acquisition, Carpenter says. The company first employed this approach when it acquired 154-bed Rockdale Medical Center, Conyers, Ga., in February 2009.

Keith Pitts, vice chairman of Nashville-based Vanguard Health Systems, classifies his company's acquisitions in three categories, and the state of the information systems plays a significant role in the classifications. The first category covers acquisitions of a stand-alone hospital or a small system of two or three hospitals. These facilities already have all the systems in place that you expect a hospital to have, but nothing terribly complicated, Pitts says.

The firm expects that the company will provide guidance in late February, but predicts that UHS will experience successful integration results and cyclical multiple expansion, which they believe will drive shares toward their price target of $52.