Avatar International is a leader in patient-experience improvement solutions.  Founded in 1981 and based in Orlando, FL, Avatar uniquely captures the patient’s voice through its proprietary technology-enabled solutions and empowers healthcare providers with an unrivaled set of capabilities and solutions keenly focused on helping organizations improve the patient-experience.  The Company – whose primary clients include health systems, large physician practices, group purchasing organizations, and home health agencies – serves more than 400 hospital clients within more than 20 hospital systems, as well as 120 facilities representing 14,000 physicians, and 120 home health agencies.  Avatar is the industry’s only third-party, HIPAA-certified patient experience vendor, and provides clients with data that tracks a patient’s journey from admission to discharge.

In a period of rapid growth, Avatar’s management team and owner Veronis Shuler Sevenson (VSS) retained TripleTree to address increasing inquiries into the business.  The primary objective in the engagement was to address the market forces rallying around patient satisfaction while providing the Company’s outside investors with a liquidity exit and simultaneously give the management team an opportunity to grow the business aggressively under new ownership.

Prior to market outreach, TripleTree conducted independent industry briefings and analysis around various drivers, positioning patient experience as a key strategic area of focus for hospitals in forming a strategy to address market demand.  TripleTree advised VSS and the Company to pursue discussions with a group of hand selected firms that would strategically see Avatar as a platform.  TripleTree managed the process from start to close, approaching potential strategic and financial acquirers, creating targeted management presentations, advising on exit opportunities, coordinating due diligence, and assisting in negotiating the key elements of the letter of intent and definitive transaction agreements.  With its deep appreciation for patient-experience and value-based purchasing market dynamics, TripleTree’s presentation of the Company showcased the growing importance of Avatar’s solutions.  Engaging a select group of potential acquirers, the Company evaluated a range of attractive alternatives that concluded in a sale to The Riverside Company, a global private equity firm focused on rapid growth companies.  The transaction provided a terrific investment outcome for VSS and an opportunity for accelerated growth for the Company.  Riverside will partner with Avatar’s current management team to continue its proven model of bringing innovative solutions to measure and enhance the patient’s care experience.