“Most IPOs haven’t done very well this year, and there hasn’t been enough health care deals yet to really test the market for those specifically,” says Derek Deutsch, a managing director at ClearBridge Advisors, an asset management firm. “Investors are going to want to see a few successful deals before they go out on a limb.”

Team Health may be one such test case. If the underwriters do a blockbuster job and investors like Deutsch find the company’s prospects appealing, and if the stock price holds up after its debut, it could help pave the way for more deals. That’s a lot of ifs, however, as Deutsch is quick to point out. “There are plenty of already-public companies out there at attractive valuations for me to choose from,” he says. “Why should I go further out on the risk spectrum?”

For bankers, of course, the answer is the usual one: the higher the risk, the higher the potential reward. And, they note, health care companies really have less risk than many other kinds of companies, thanks to the demographic trends. Aging baby boomers, they argue, will inevitably consume more and more health care products and services, from stents to nursing-home care, as the decades pass. “The question is whether the companies that are poised to hit the market are going to be the right ones to play that trend,” says one health care banker at a mid-market firm. “For now, investors seem prepared to pick and choose.”

At Lazard’s annual health care conference earlier this week, Stephen Sands, global co-head of health care investment banking at the firm, took a cautiously optimistic attitude to the business. Some of those in the audience tell StreetWise that Sands was fairly upbeat, arguing that a return to risk taking in the stock market was a matter of "when" not "if." On the other hand, Sands suggested that some of the best private equity-backed health care companies may not make it to the IPO market, but instead be snapped up by strategic acquirers. That’s still not bad news for bankers like Sands and Ditkoff, who could probably earn a larger fee in dollar terms for advising on those transactions than they would from underwriting an IPO. It does, however, mean that those IPOs that are launched might be harder to sell to a still-risk-averse bunch of investors. Sands, who confided to his audience that his children loathe green M&Ms and set them aside for their father to consume, compared these deals to the despised “greenies.” “There’s certainly no love lost for private equity firms, and we’ve got no real interest in making their buyout deals look good,” said one investor who attended the conference.

Still, all it may take is for those companies to make it into the public market.

"When they go public, there will be many attractive M&A opportunities among them," Ditkoff says. (If they end up trading at a discount, that would make those deals still more compelling.) Any way you look it, he argues, health care banking is poised for a once-in-a-lifetime kind of boom.