Vague mutterings about the real value of once-dominant general practice management software vendor MedicalDirector have echoed through the years, particularly since it was flogged off to a private equity firm by former owner Primary Health Care (now Healius) in 2016 for what we thought of at the time as the extravagant sum of $155 million.

Five years later and the private equity owners have done their job, stripping the company of staff through multiple rounds of redundancies to cut costs and maximise their sale price. Telstra Health, amongst others, has been sniffing around for a few years, and earlier this week announced it had snapped MD up for the astonishing sum of $350 million. It dwarfs Telstra Health’s earlier acquisition of 18-odd companies for a combined total of $235-240 million, as well as its recent purchase of PowerHealth Solutions for $95m.