Health Care Expert Sean Dodge of the Jefferies Group Explains MACRA Effects

October 6, 2017

Sean Dodge is an Equity Analyst at the Jefferies Group. Mr. Dodge joined Jefferies in March 2010 and is a senior analyst covering stocks in the health care IT and services sectors. Prior to joining Jefferies, he spent four years with SunTrust Robinson Humphrey covering the consumer sector. In his exclusive interview with the Wall Street Transcript, he details the near term prospects for stocks in this controversial business. “…We are starting to see a bifurcation happening here. The hospitals seem to be taking on a little bit of a life of their own in that they are buying more ahead of the mandates. Based on some of the recent survey work we have done, we see their spending on health care IT solutions to be less volatile and actually grow over the next few years.”

The analysis doesn’t stop there as Mr. Dodge sees a different outcome for stocks dependent on non-hospital payers. “In the ambulatory world, I think buying is still going to very much cluster around regulatory deadlines. As we dig deeper into the MACRA regulations, which I think are going to be one of the primary programs pushing forward adoption there, they will continue forward, but the threshold and the penalties for noncompliance are very low in the first couple of years.”

Sean Dodge covers many stocks in the Health Care software services sector: I cover health care IT, which includes the legacy EHR vendors, such as Cerner (NASDAQ:CERN), Allscripts (NASDAQ:MDRX), Quality Systems (NASDAQ:QSII) and athenahealth (NASDAQ:ATHN), and then, I have the other newer-aged health care IT companies like Evolent (NYSE:EVH), NantHealth (NASDAQ:NH), Cotiviti (NYSE:COTV) and HMS Holdings (NASDAQ:HMSY). I also cover some other services companies in health care like Stericycle (NASDAQ:SRCL), Owens & Minor (NYSE:OMI), Healthcare Services Group (NASDAQ:HCSG) and then Premier (NASDAQ:PINC), which is a GPO, of course.