Early healthcare investors in the 2000s "made very good investments, high-return investments," Franz-Robert Klingan, a partner at Bain and co-author of the report, said in an interview.

Interest in these assets continued to increase in the subsequent decade, and in any year, particularly for the past five years, there has been both "an increasing absolute amount, [and an increasing] relative share of private equity money going into healthcare," coupled with an increasing ability to unwrite underlying risks, Klingan added.

Healthcare investments were considered more recession-proof following the global financial crisis. Investors could "take out cost and drive change and, therefore, create the value creation opportunities that private equity is looking for," Klingan said.

There has been "some sort of perturbation, clearly," in the healthcare sector throughout the pandemic, but "if you ask me, was it all bad? No. The pandemic has highlighted specific opportunities for alternative sites of care for telemedicine, for modernization of the clinical trial system, and then for consolidation in the provider sector," Klingan said.