Community Health Systems, Inc. (NYSE:CYH) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

On the hospital-based medicine and ED side, with APP maneuver this quarter, we have now about 25% of our contracts in-source. So we’re going to learn from that, again, be able to scale that where it makes sense for us. But in general, we hope there are operational efficiencies and our ability to partnership with — to partner with the hospital-based providers, we can really enhance the care delivery. I do want to point out again, the change out that we had — rapid change out that we have it’s going really well. No disruption to operations to providers and really just a delight to work with. And we have brought on some really high-caliber talent from the APP organization which has allowed us to scale this so quickly. Again, we plan to work through this over the next several quarters and leverage it as a core strength for the organization.

Brian Tanquilut : I really appreciate that. I guess my follow-up, Kevin, as I think about the divestitures that you’ve announced, maybe just for modeling purposes, as we think about 2024, how should we be thinking about the impact of that on revenue and EBITDA?

Kevin Hammons: Sure. The El Dorado, Arkansas and other ones were immaterial, the Bravera Health Network we underwrote that at about a 10x EBITDA price. I would kind of use that similar to what we’ve been selling other hospitals on average, and you can probably use that to to model out ’24. We expect it to close in the fourth quarter. So it really won’t have a material impact on 2023 as that should be out for the full year ’24.

Operator: The next question comes from Ben Hendrix with RBC Capital Markets.

Unidentified Analyst: This is Mike Grant on for Ben. It looks like payer mix and inpatient mix for the drivers of better revenue per adjusted admission. Could you talk a little bit about the moving pieces here? What drove the inpatient improvement? And then I have a follow-up.

Kevin Hammons: Sure. Let me start that. So part of that, I believe, is just some of the recovery coming back from the pandemic. Initially, as patients started to come back, we saw in the fourth quarter, patients were coming back for clinic visits for screenings for diagnostic testing. We believe that’s leading to further care downstream. In the first quarter, we experienced much more disruption from the economy, I think even with that recovery and that we’re seeing fewer commercial patients in all of our increased level of business in Q1 was from Medicare Advantage patients who did not have an economic barrier to coming back in the system. But we saw the payer mix improve as we expected. We think that will continue to improve throughout the year.

The biggest improvement late in the year before co-pays and deduct try setting in. But it’s really kind of just some of the downstream impact of recovery that we’re seeing some of that business come back into the inpatient side.

Tim Hingtgen: Yes. And Mike, I’ll add on to that, deliberate in our approach here with the build-out of inpatient capabilities. As we mentioned in our opening remarks, we’ve added a lot of beds in core markets. We’ve recruited a lot of doctors to help us further round out specialties in advance our service line capabilities that tends to drive some case mix improvements. And then we overlay on top of that the transfer center, which we did mention this morning but we talk about almost every quarter, that continues to post sequential and year-over-year growth opportunities for us as we add this capacity in those core markets. So we believe those are really key to the game for further advancing in patient acuity and volumes.

Unidentified Analyst: Okay. And then my follow-up. Obviously, in the quarter, you had pretty good revenue per adjusted admission. You’re coming up against some easier comps in the back half of the year. How should we think about growth in the second half?