On October 16th, DaVita’s Chairman and CEO, Kent Thiry spoke to the Denver Medical Study Group. His presentation focused on DaVita’s strategy for the company’s leadership and culture. It was a very interesting and informative presentation. One area that our group was interested in hearing more about was related to DaVita’s Medical Group. However, not much was shared at that time.

As Paul Harvey used to say “and now for the rest of the story” that may have been “under wraps” at the time of our meeting.

Since our meeting in October, DaVita has been in the local news related to its Medical Group’s operations with managed-care practices in six states including Colorado and the apparent acquisition on Nov. 28th of Northwest Physicians Network, a Tacoma, Washington-based independent physician association (IPA) of more than 1,000 primary care and specialty care physicians.

Now in today’s Denver Post (see the link below), DaVita is selling its physician network to health services company Optum. The use of some of the proceeds will be to buy back company stock over the next one to two years and pay down debt and other general corporate uses.

Denver’s DaVita selling its physician network for $4.9 billion