Tim Hingtgen: Yeah, Kevin, I’m going to add on to that. And Ben, good morning. As we said in our comments, we’re really pleased with how this transaction has taken shape and our ability to, I think rapidly in-source these providers in the last two months of the quarter, we see a lot of opportunities looking forward. I think some of the key wins in that regard are, we have now an internal group of leaders who are operating that hospital-based component of our finish and practice enterprise, which is uniquely different from our past experience of just running more traditional medical practices. And the team has just done an outstanding job of stemming that up. We are also now adding to that functionality, some resources to help us tackle anesthesia, medical specialist fee clients that we’re experiencing.
Again, it won’t be an across-the-board initiative for the company. But having those capabilities, those competencies and those resources, we think, really helps us balance out our approach to managing the medical specialist fee spend.
Ben Hendrix: Thank you.
Operator: The next question is from Brian Tanquilut with Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Brian Tanquilut: Hey, good morning, guys. Tim, maybe I’ll follow-up with that last point that you made. So, as we think about physician outsourcing or physician staffing as a whole, how are you thinking about, number one, the decision to in-source versus outsource, because it sounds like this is turning out to be a modest positive? And then second, what are we seeing in terms of subsidies? And what are your expectations in terms of subsidy payments going forward to third-party outsourcers? And how difficult would it be to, if you decide to bring some of those in as we see some of these pressures, what are those processes and moving parts to like bring all this in-house at some point if that’s a possible option? Thanks.
Tim Hingtgen: Good morning, Brian. Yeah, I’ll start that and then head up to Kevin for some of the financial implementations of that type of plan. I mean as we said last quarter, when we were starting to really pursue the in-sourcing opportunity, I mean it’s not our end-all and be-all. We don’t expect to have every single one of our hospital-based contracts serviced by an in-source model. So we have not set our sights on a 100% transition to that type of work. However, again, building it over time, if that’s what happens. I think we’re inclined to say we would be able to do that. We, like the in-source model for the financial purposes that Kevin called out, we think there was a slight EBITDA improvement as a result of our first two months under the in-sourced model.
But we also like it from an ability to align those hospital-based providers more closely to our patient safety and clinical initiatives, our throughput initiatives it’s really still early to see how much benefit we can glean from that type of affiliation with in-source providers. But it’s something we’re keeping a close eye on. I think there is tremendous upside down the road. I should point out that for our traditional hospital-based contracted providers, I don’t want to characterize that if we don’t have good relationships and that they’re not partnering with us on those same types of initiatives. Hence, the reason we don’t really believe we have to make this 100% of our approach to our hospital-based physician contracting or spend process.
Kevin Hammons: Yeah. And maybe just to add on a few kind of financial metrics around that. Our current medical specialist fees represent approximately 500 basis points of net revenue they did this quarter. That’s about a 100 basis point increase over the prior year. Although we had expected the first quarter, as we previously indicated, we thought the first quarter was our high watermark for the year in the medical specialist fees. They’ve been harder to reduce than we had previously anticipated. They ran relatively flat sequentially, just a small increase sequentially. I would expect the fourth quarter to be pretty much in line with where we are in the third quarter, and so not expecting a material reduction kind of in the near-term as we continue to work on a number of things, as Tim mentioned, and we look to either further in-source, further renegotiate contracts to try to get these down going forward.
