BC Partners and Silver Lake are set to buy U.S. healthcare services firm MultiPlan, the private equity firms said on Friday, in the year's largest secondary buyout worth about $3.1 billion.

BC Partners and Silver Lake are buying the company, which provides systems to reduce the cost of healthcare claims, from rival buyout firms Carlyle and Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe.

The deal values the company at about $3.1 billion, a source familiar with the situation said, and is another example of private equity firms buying companies from each other as they look to deploy hundreds of billions of dollars of unspent funds.

MultiPlan is the leading provider of healthcare cost management services to insurers and health plan administrators in the U.S., processing more than 100 million medical claims a year.

The healthcare industry has been a hot spot for private equity deals as firms target a sector that has proved resilient during the financial crisis. U.S. buyout firm TPG and Canada Pension Plan last November led the $4 billion buyout of prescription drug sales data provider IMS Health, the largest leveraged buyout deal of 2009.

BC and Silver Lake together own a majority of satellite services group Intelsat and previously partnered in Unitymedia, the German cable television provider.

The deal marks BC's fifteenth acquisition out of its current 5.8 billion euro ($7.36 billion) fund, raised in 2005 before the peak of the leveraged buyout (LBO) boom.

It has spent about 85 percent of the capital and aims to start a new fundraising drive later this year.

(Editing by Erica Billingham and Jon Loades-Carter)

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