How often does it happen that a company like teamhealth or whatever gets the contract for a hospital system and the democratic group is just disbanded versus the democratic group gets bought out and all shareholders get a lump sum ?
One thing you can do, if you're the group getting pushed out, is try to use your non-competes as leverage. Keep in mind, a pure EM services group without a contract and site to provide your services is largely worthless in and of itself. So, once the group has lost it's contract, it has very little real worth, no real estate, no inventory, little if any capital and zero income beyond a couple months of trailing EM bills (accounts receivable). This equals no leverage. They just break the group and push you aside and the docs scatter looking for jobs.
But, the new group coming in, desperately needs to staff that ED they just stole from you. By themselves, it's very hard to do quickly, while keeping decent coverage and throughput. So in general, they rely on stealing at least a few docs from the old (your) group to help fill the slots day 1. Although some will certainly move on, irritated at having been pushed out, some will inevitably sign on with the new group since that's an easy option, ie, you know the system, live locally and likely don't have enough cash reserve for a prolonged job search (CEOs know statistically most docs don't).
Most competent ED groups however, have some provision in your contract, or have at some point ask you to sign something that says you will not work for a new group that comes in. It's essentially a non-compete clause.
The outgoing group can try to threaten to sue the new group and physicians for violating the non-competes, or better yet, ask them to "buy them out." Put another way, you're asking them to play nice, pay a negotiated lump sum to your old group, to avoid legal wrangling. Most often, if the outgoing group is small, the hospital will not fear that too much, because they know that without any income coming in, you have little means to sue. But if the outgoing group can continue in some other form, has other sources of revenue or the remaining docs have the money and desire to play hardball, there may be enough leverage for the hospital to pay the outgoing group some money. Whoever is still on the books at the outgoing group (shareholders, owners) are going to get the money. The docs who jumped ship early, are not likely to get anything.
if so, how do they determine how much they buy the group for? Curious minds need to know.
It's negotiated. Demand your price, hope you have the leverage to get them to bite or make a counter offer. But it's all about leverage and value. If you have little leverage or value, you might get $0. If the group has leverage and value, you could get seven figures. I was involved in a situation where we managed to get a decent chunk of money (about $1 million) in such a scenario. It just so happens that several very large shareholders had just left, so it ended up being enough to buy back their shares, without much left over. So, essentially no one got any money they didn't have coming to them anyways, in my n of 1, scenario, but it did save us from having to foot the bill to buy the senior partners out over a 10 year period, as we would have been required to do. This happens to be a group that wasn't 100% dependent on EM and a group that carried on post-EM, therefore the incoming group and hospital had reason to believe we might have more fight in us, that your typical EM-only SDG.
I'd have to know the intimate details of the situation you're describing to give you a guess as to whether or not any money is likely to go to the Docs in the situation you're watching and I don't expect you to do that, nor do I want you to do that.
