Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- HealthPort Inc., the developer of software used to manage medical records electronically, postponed its $96 million initial public offering, becoming the fourth U.S. company in three weeks to shelve its IPO.

Alpharetta, Georgia-based HealthPort, controlled by private-equity firm ABRY Partners LLC, pulled its sale today after seeking $14 to $16 each for its 6 million share offering, according to Bloomberg data. The stock had been scheduled to start trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker HPRT. Deutsche Bank AG of Frankfurt and Chicago-based William Blair & Co. were the lead underwriters of the sale.

HealthPort failed to find enough buyers after a 61 percent increase in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index since March 9 spurred the busiest period for IPOs in almost two years. While sellers such as Blackstone Group LP have raised almost $10 billion unloading shares, institutional buyers of half the IPOs since September are sitting on losses.

“There seems to be this pretty wide disconnect between where the issuers think the company is worth and where investors are willing to buy” for some deals, said Paul Bard, a Greenwich, Connecticut-based analyst for Renaissance Capital LLC, which specializes in IPO research. “It’s reflective of something that’s surfaced in the past couple of months.”

HealthPort followed AEI, Aviv Reit Inc. and Dallas-based Plains Capital Corp. in postponing its U.S. initial share sale.

Private Equity

All four except Plains Capital were backed by private- equity funds. George Town, Cayman Islands-based AEI, Enron Corp.’s former international energy business controlled by London-based Ashmore Group Plc, postponed its $800 million offering on Oct. 29. The company cited “market conditions” after underwriters cut the IPO 58 percent to 21 million shares and lowered the forecast price range.

Aviv REIT of Chicago, owned by JER Partners, the McLean, Virginia-based buyout firm that specializes in real estate acquisitions, shelved its $315 million IPO on Nov. 3.

HealthPort is a setback for the IPO market that started to rebound from the worst returns on record. The six companies that completed offerings in November have beaten the S&P 500 by 18 percentage points on average, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

That’s a reversal from the prior two months, when shares from 18 IPOs underperformed the benchmark for American equity by 0.8 percentage points in their first month of trading, the worst performance since at least 1995, according to Bloomberg data.

IPOs by American companies have beaten the S&P 500 by an average 21.3 percentage points since 1995, the data show.

Total Debt

The money raised from HealthPort’s IPO was intended to redeem preferred stock and pay down debt. HealthPort had about $175 million in total debt at the end of September versus $2.2 million cash, according to its filing.

ABRY Partners planned to keep its entire 12.7 million share stake and retain 56 percent of HealthPort after the offering, the company’s regulatory filing on Nov. 16 showed.

While HealthPort’s sales rose 6.4 percent in the first nine months of 2009 compared with the same period a year earlier, taking into account its acquisition of ChartOne Inc. last year, the company reported a net loss of $8.9 million. The loss was due to interest expenses of $22.9 million that exceeded income from operations by 36 percent.

First Nine Months

Using HealthPort’s preferred measure of financial performance, the company would have had $30.8 million in earnings before interest, taxes depreciation and amortization in the first nine months of 2009, after taking into account the IPO proceeds at $15 a share, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

At that price, the IPO implied a so-called enterprise value, or the sum of HealthPort’s stock and debt minus its cash, of $510 million, data compiled by Bloomberg show. That puts the takeover value of the company at 12.4 times Ebitda of $41 million over a full year, the data indicate.

That’s higher than the 11.6 times multiple for Emdeon Inc., the Nashville, Tennessee-based provider of billing systems for hospitals and doctors that Renaissance Capital considers HealthPort’s closest comparable publicly-traded company.

To contact the reporter on this story: Michael Tsang in New York at mtsang1@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 19, 2009 14:30 EST