PointClickCare: The Hidden Monopoly That Will Control America's Post-Acute Care Market
How a little-known Canadian company built the data infrastructure that makes value-based care work—and why it won't stay independent.
Let’s say you break your hip, get surgery, spend three days in the hospital, then move to a rehab facility for two weeks before going home with a visiting nurse. That entire chain of events that occurs after you leave the hospital but prior to recovery—skilled nursing facilities, rehab centers, home health agencies—is called post-acute care. It's a $490 billion market in the United States growing at 6.4% annually, and barely anybody outside healthcare really thinks about it.
PointClickCare, a Canadian health-tech company founded in 2000 in Mississauga (just outside Toronto), owns the data infrastructure that connects the entire post-acute care ecosystem. The company hit $673 million in revenue in 2024, serves over 30,000 facilities, and is valued at more than $5 billion. At first glance, this looks like the entire growth story. However, PointClickCare is poised for an even greater evolution. Right now, increased Medicare Advantage enrollment and resulting regulatory changes are forcing hospitals and insurance providers to coordinate post-acute care or lose money, and PointClickCare has built the only network that executes this coordination at scale. I believe the company will either become a $20+ billion platform by 2030 or, more likely, get acquired by a strategic buyer who realizes they can't compete in value-based care without it.
The Problem Nobody Was Solving
For decades, post-acute care ran on phone calls, faxes, and guesswork. Hospitals discharged patients to nursing homes based on whoever had an available bed. Nobody tracked outcomes. Nobody measured readmissions. Facilities got paid per day regardless of results.
Then two things changed. First, as of February 2026, 55.4% of Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in Medicare Advantage, with 30 states now exceeding 50% penetration. Medicare Advantage plans get paid a fixed amount per patient. Every hospital readmission and preventable complication costs them money, and the recent changes in penetration meant that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) wanted to stem the bleeding.
So what did CMS do? They started penalizing hospitals for readmissions. For example, if a patient gets discharged to a nursing facility, develops an infection, and ends up back in the ER within 30 days, the hospital eats the penalty.
These developments have cascaded into a coordination crisis. Hospitals now need to know which nursing homes can handle which patients, while nursing homes need real-time access to patient records so they don’t accept patients they can’t manage. Home health agencies need medication lists without manual data entry, and Medicare Advantage plans need to track outcomes across every setting to avoid paying for preventable complications.
Hardly anyone invested in the infrastructure to solve this because nobody needed it until CMS flipped the incentives. But PointClickCare did.
An Unbeatable Network Effect Moat
PointClickCare's core product is an EHR for post-acute facilities. However, its real asset is the network it has cultivated over decades. By connecting 30,000+ facilities—84% of them in the United States—and processing data on millions of patients moving between hospitals, nursing homes, and home health agencies, PointClickCare has created something competitors can’t copy by just building better software. The company's 2,800+ hospital integrations and partnerships with every major US health plan position it squarely in markets where Medicare Advantage penetration and CMS readmission penalties create the strongest forcing function.
Their acquisition strategy makes this vision even more explicit. In 2020, PointClickCare acquired Collective Medical, a platform that sends real-time alerts when patients show up in emergency departments. If a nursing home patient goes to the ER at 2am, the facility gets an alert immediately instead of finding out days later through a fax. That's not just simple EHR functionality; this is the connective tissue that makes value-based care actually work. In 2022, the company snagged Audacious Inquiry, which builds networks for secure data transmissions across healthcare systems. In 2023, it snapped up Patient Pattern, which has tools to help providers proactively manage high-needs patients through early preventative intervention.
By integrating these various platforms, PointClickCare’s value proposition increases tenfold for every new facility that joins. Every hospital integration makes the network stickier for post-acute providers who need real-time patient data. New market entrants can build an EHR, but they can't build the network effect of already connecting the majority of post-acute facilities to the hospitals that discharge to them.
Why Competitors Can’t Catch Up
MatrixCare serves 15,000+ providers in the post-acute care space. Epic is a legacy giant dominating acute care EHRs. Netsmart and WellSky compete in specific post-acute verticals. On paper, these competitors look like credible alternatives.
However, these companies are solving a different problem by selling plain-vanilla EHR software (relatively speaking) to post-acute facilities. PointClickCare controls the data infrastructure between hospitals, post-acute providers, Medicare Advantage plans, and CMS reporting systems. MatrixCare can manage a nursing home's internal workflows, but it can't tell that nursing home in real-time when their patient is admitted into a hospital ER across town, pull that patient's latest medication list from the hospital's system, and automatically flag the case for the Medicare Advantage plan's care coordinator. Replicating this organically means building relationships with 2,800+ hospitals and 30,000+ post-acute facilities simultaneously while PointClickCare's network effects compound every quarter.
When CMS expands value-based purchasing mandates in 2027-2028, facilities already integrated into PointClickCare’s hospital network can prove outcomes immediately. Competitors will spend years playing catch-up on infrastructure PointClickCare already built in 2023.
The Only Question That Matters
Here’s what people miss about PointClickCare: this isn’t a story about whether they win. They’ve already won. The question is whether they stay independent long enough to extract full value.
I don’t think they will.
The natural path is an IPO at $8-10 billion in 2026-2027, then compounding to $25+ billion by 2030 as Medicare Advantage penetration crosses 60% and value-based care mandates make their infrastructure non-optional. However, this scenario assumes strategic buyers wait on the sidelines while PointClickCare’s leverage increases every quarter.
But they won’t. Epic has spent two decades failing to build post-acute presence while watching PointClickCare connect the one part of the care continuum they don’t control. Oracle burned billions on Cerner and is still losing to Epic; they need a strategic pivot or they’re finished in the healthcare IT race. UnitedHealth and CVS both own extensive provider networks—including surgery centers, physician practices, and home health agencies—but don't own the post-acute care coordination data that determines whether their Medicare Advantage beneficiaries avoid costly readmissions.
For any of these buyers, PointClickCare is worth more as an acquisition than as a vendor relationship. When 60% of Medicare beneficiaries are in Medicare Advantage plans and CMS penalizes readmissions across the continuum, these companies need to either own the infrastructure or pay someone else for access to data that determines their profitability. This strategic urgency compounds faster than PointClickCare’s ability to reach full public market valuation.
My bet: PointClickCare is acquired by mid-2027 for $12-18 billion. Once Medicare Advantage penetration hits 58-60% and the 2027 CMS value-based purchasing expansion becomes concrete policy, the gap between PointClickCare’s strategic value to buyers and its public market valuation creates irresistible M&A logic. In healthcare IT, when the government mandates coordination and penalizes the lack of it, the buyer with the most to lose will move first.
PointClickCare built the only scalable solution to a government-mandated problem. By 2028, post-acute care coordination will be table stakes for every health system in America. The question isn't whether this infrastructure matters—it's who ends up owning it.