Brown University’s free Private Equity State Tracker lets you explore documented private equity activity in U.S. health care across all 50 states, from 2015 through 2023. It includes more than 6,000 investments and offers views by state, county, ZIP code, year, and selected physician specialties. It is a research tool—not a real-time or complete census of every deal.
What the Brown Private Equity State Tracker shows
The interactive tool is designed to visualize private equity activity in U.S. health care and help users examine how it varies by location and over time. Brown describes it as free and open to policymakers, researchers, journalists, and the public. Users can request the underlying data through a short form.
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Its stated transaction period is 2015–2023. Brown says the tracker includes more than 6,000 investments across all 50 states, including acquisitions of physician practices and hospitals. That figure describes the tracker’s coverage; it does not mean every investment is captured.
Explore location, time, and specialty
Users can examine activity at state, county, and ZIP-code levels, compare change over time, and look at physician specialties such as primary care, orthopedics, and oncology. Brown’s launch announcement gives examples from Texas and Indiana: fewer than half of Texas oncologists are affiliated with hospitals, one-third of independent doctors in Texas are employed by private equity-backed entities, and a majority of Indiana oncologists are employed by hospitals and health systems.
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Those examples illustrate different ownership and employment patterns; they do not establish that hospital employment causes more or less private equity investment. When comparing results, keep the geography, period, provider specialty or setting, and measure consistent.
How the tracker’s data were assembled
Brown’s physician-practice investment records draw on PitchBook, Medicare Data on Provider Practice and Specialty (MD-PPAS), and manual review of press releases, industry reports, and current and archived websites. The short-term acute care hospital acquisition data for 2015–2023 come from publicly available data compiled by Kim and colleagues.
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The tracker also estimates physician affiliations using 2023 data. Brown links investment records with MD-PPAS to estimate private equity affiliation, and links the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Compendium of U.S. Health Systems with MD-PPAS to estimate hospital affiliation. These affiliation estimates use a different time basis from the 2015–2023 transaction coverage, so they should not be read as a year-by-year transaction count.
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What the tracker does not include
Brown says there are no systematic reporting or disclosure requirements for private equity investments in health care. Smaller or otherwise unreported transactions are likely missing, so the estimates should be treated as underestimates rather than a complete count.
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Gaps in provider and facility coverage
- The Medicare-based physician data omit some specialties, including obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, and dentistry, as well as non-physician providers such as advanced practice providers.
- Hospital acquisition data cover short-term acute care hospitals, not psychiatric, rehabilitation, or long-term acute care hospitals.
- Some specialty estimates omit staffing-firm arrangements in anesthesiology and emergency medicine.
Deal structure and ownership changes
The tracker cannot systematically identify deal structures such as leveraged buyouts, joint ventures, or reliance on management services organizations. It also cannot track exits. An entity still classified as private equity-affiliated may therefore have changed ownership through an exit, sale, or divestiture.
How to use state comparisons responsibly
The tracker is useful for identifying patterns and questions for further investigation, particularly as states consider policies on health care ownership and consolidation. It is not, by itself, evidence that private equity caused a particular employment or affiliation pattern. Brown assistant professor Yashaswini Singh described the aim as moving debate toward evidence-based policymaking that considers health care corporatization more broadly, rather than focusing on private equity alone.
For a meaningful comparison, make sure both views refer to the same unit—transactions, physician affiliation, or hospital affiliation—and align the geography, years, specialty, and setting. In particular, do not treat 2023 physician affiliation estimates as equivalent to transaction activity accumulated over 2015–2023.
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Brown’s official Private Equity State Tracker provides the interactive tool, access details, methodology, and formal citation. The citation is: Singh Y, Reddy M, Shroff J, Whaley C, Hostert N, Fuse Brown E. Private Equity State Tracker. Brown University School of Public Health; 2026. doi:10.26300/xfj4-s836.
Brown announced the tracker on September 8, 2026, describing its launch, headline coverage, and intended public-policy use: Brown University announcement.
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