The major player in healthcare portals Healtheon/WebMD was officially born Thursday as Healtheon Corp, WebMD Inc, MEDE America Corp and Medcast announced the completion of their four- way merger. The mergers were sealed following the approval by stockholders of the four companies at their respective stockholder meetings. Healtheon/WebMD shares will trade on the Nasdaq National Market under the ticker symbol HLTH.
Healtheon and WebMD first announced plans to merge in May in a deal valued at roughly $7bn at the time. The new entity says it has effectively become the first full service internet-based healthcare company and aims to enable the reduction of the estimated $250bn in administrative waste in the US healthcare market alone. The combined company claims to be actively deploying services to 280,000 physicians, 11,000 dentists, 1,100 hospitals and 46,000 pharmacies, in addition to consumers visiting the site.
Under the structure of the four-way deal, WebMD stockholders will receive 1.796 shares of Healtheon/WebMD common stock for each of their shares, while MEDE America stockholders will receive 0.7494 shares. Medcast stockholders will receive approximately $2.3m in cash and 2.6 million shares of the new company’s stock. Healtheon says it will issue about 75 million common shares in connection with the deal and will assume roughly 51 million options and warrants of the merged companies.
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