HealthPartners and Essentia Health have a signed deal. They don’t have a combined organization yet.

Both boards approved the merger in late September. It will create a 22-hospital system across Minnesota, North Dakota and Wisconsin. The close date isn’t until January 1, 2027, and Minnesota’s Attorney General has yet to sign off.

Here’s the part that’s true of almost any acquisition, not just this one: some data sampling before close is always worth doing. You don’t need the deal to be a lock to justify a first look at the data you would be inheriting. That look can turn a vague sense of integration risk into a real estimate of remediation cost and timeline, something financial due diligence alone can’t give a deal team or the post-close team that will lead the systems integration and data migration.

What’s different about this deal isn’t whether to look. It’s how deep you can go. HealthPartners and Essentia are past the signing stage, and both boards have already said yes. What’s left is a regulatory process, not a financing contingency that could unwind the whole thing. That changes how much scoping and profiling makes sense right now.

When a deal is this far along, going deeper doesn’t just inform a decision that’s already been made. It buys a valuable head start. Sample more of the data, cover more of the functions in scope, and whoever eventually charters the real migration project won’t be starting from zero. They’ll be starting from an actual map of where the remediation work is going to be heaviest, with a real shot at a rough estimate of project cost and duration.

Scope isn’t just what data you’re bringing over. It’s also how much remediation work it will take to make that data operational in the destination system, and that part of scope doesn’t begin to show up until someone is actually interrogating the inbound data itself.

Rocketweave has a pre-acquisition data due diligence process built around exactly this kind of sampling and scoping. I would recommend that HealthPartners and Essentia strongly consider putting some of their own SMEs and data engineers to work on something similar right now, rather than waiting for January.

If you’ve been inside a deal that sat in regulatory limbo for months, did anyone scope any of the data remediation work ahead of time? Or did that work only start after close?

Originally posted on LinkedIn.