Health Care and Life Sciences Finance

Many financial institutions have a team of professionals dedicated to lending to the health care industry. At Vedder Price, we have mirrored that structure to better serve the specialty health care lending units of our financial institution clients. Many of the attorneys in the Firm’s Health Care and Life Sciences Finance Group (the “HCF Group”) have regulatory backgrounds or extensive experience in lending across the full spectrum of the health care industry, including senior care providers, acute-care hospitals, health care staffing companies, ambulatory surgery centers, diagnostic imaging centers, dialysis centers, durable medical equipment suppliers, practice management companies and others. With this comprehensive industry knowledge and experience, our clients can be confident that we are familiar with the issues unique to healthcare lending, such as:

• the difficulties in structuring combined asset-based receivables financing with real estate financing for seniors housing providers, including access to receivables collateral, certificates of need and provider agreements;
• the Change in Ownership and Change in Control overlays involved in transfers of regulated facilities, including temporary leasing arrangements to the licensed provider and perfection against receivables collected under the existing provider’s name;
• the impact of Corporate Practice of Medicine laws on loan structures, including perfection against underlying accounts receivable by non-borrower providers in diagnostic imaging centers, dental practices and others;
• perfection against unique healthcare-related assets, such as bed rights, certificates of need, disproportionate share payments and others;
• and structuring and documenting cross-collateralized asset-based receivables loans and real estate loans to seniors housing facility owners and operators.

Knowledge of these regulatory overlays becomes even more important if a financing transaction reaches a work-out, bankruptcy or liquidation stage. Consequently, Vedder Price’s HCF Group works hand-in-hand with the attorneys in the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Practice in workouts, bankruptcies, liquidations and debtor-in-possession financings to ensure that regulatory requirements remain at the forefront of every workout plan. A growing number of financial institutions have begun to develop dedicated lending teams for the Life Sciences industry, and again Vedder Price has responded with a team of finance professionals experienced in this industry sector. Members of our HCF Group have worked on numerous transactions lending to companies in the life sciences industry and are intimately familiar with the issues unique to those transactions, such as warrants, exclusion of intellectual property from the collateral pool, the focus of documentation on cash runway issues, restrictions on outgoing licenses of technology and perfection against unique business assets.

Vedder Price’s attorneys within the HCF Group have expertise in all areas of finance, including leveraged/cash-flow lending, asset-based loans, real estate loans, mezzanine loans, equipment lending and the “cash runway” loans that are so common in the life sciences industry. Regardless of the type of transaction, Vedder Price’s health care and life sciences finance clients benefit from an extensive grasp of health care and life sciences regulatory and structuring issues, which remain at the forefront of all successful transactions in these areas.

Show all attorneys in this practice