Premier, Inc. (NASDAQ:PINC) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Michael Cherny: Got it. And thinking about the net administrative fees, I don’t think, it’s overly shocking to see that the Continuum of Care utilization is performing better than acute care given where we’ve seen your customers reports other various different health care participants. As you think about the strategic evolution of that part of the business, is there any pivots you need to do or changes investments pullback you need to make within the core GPO to service what appears to be for all intents and purposes a long-term transition towards more and more care happening outside the traditional four walls of the hospital?

Mike Alkire: Sure. Thanks for the question Michael. So first of all, we are actually realigning resources obviously to that non-acute area. So €“ but before I give you a bit more detail on that let me just say, the core capability of the GPO actually services acute and non-acute. So we have one capability that services both. And then we have additional value that, we create in the non-acute space leveraging technology and other things to get after things like purchase services and some of the smaller expense items. So very specific to your question the investments events that we’re going to continue to make to get after that non-acute space primarily revolve around technology. So technology to help these non-acute facilities do ordering, technology that helps them understand what’s happening with their purchase services spend, and those kinds of things.

So we have been realigning given that the growth is in that non-acute and you’re going to see us continue to make investments in those areas.

Craig McKasson: Yeah. And Michael, this is Craig. The only quick thing, I would add to that is as part of that technology evolution that Mike is describing obviously the nature of the non-acute customer base is more disparate. And so focusing through technology on ensuring roster attachments are correct, price activations are happening on to the contract portfolio. It’s €“ that part of the business is a little easier in a more centralized acute function. And so we do have efforts and initiatives to do that. And then I would remind you that, the non-acute GPO in and of itself has grown over the past four to five years from about 30% of our GPO portfolio up to 40%. So it is definitely a bigger area of growth and an area of focus as we continue to move forward.

Mike Alkire: And one other comment, I should have made, and I should have tied it back to Remitra. This is why Remitra is so important, right? Because in these non-acute areas it’s going to be really critical that we understand what’s happening from an invoice all invoices. And Remitra will be that solution for that non-acute market.

Michael Cherny: Understood. Thank you so much.

Mike Alkire: Thank you.

Operator: The next question comes from Stephanie Davis with SVB Securities. Please go ahead.

Stephanie Davis: Hi, guys. Thank you for taking my question. There’s a lot of moving pieces in the quarter. So, I was hoping we could look through the timing of license sales over the past two quarters on Performance Services business and the normalization in the Supply Chain side. And you kind of talk to some of the underlying growth in your new initiatives and what’s been better or worse than expected?

Craig McKasson: Sure. I’ll start, and then Mike can add some color. So relative to Performance Services extremely pleased with the second quarter performance, and what we saw from enterprise license agreement execution standpoint. As you’ll recall, last quarter we had indicated that we’d had a license or two that had not come in that, we’d originally anticipated. And then we had actually said that, one of those had come in sort of post-quarter close, when we announced our earnings. That €“ this demonstrates that that in fact did occur. And then we had strong performance through the remainder of the quarter, actually hitting highest levels of enterprise license that we’ve had in terms of performance for the quarter. So, very pleased with that.

As we look at the other parts of our business, clinical decision support very successful in the quarter. Contigo Health continuing to do what it needs to do ahead of plan for the quarter and on a year-to-date basis the Life Sciences business growing extremely well in terms of the work that we’re doing with life sciences organizations to move them forward. Again, where we didn’t see performance where we expected is Remitra and so that was below the expectations and the reasons for our commentary about revising that plan. So that’s sort of €“ and the last piece of Performance Services, we also had a very strong quarter in our advisory services business. We’re continuing to see growth above and had expectations for managed services where we’re actually helping health care systems provide service oversight of their IT applications and other things from an advisory standpoint, and we’re also seeing good performance in our collaborative still.

So that’s Performance Services. On the supply chain side of the business, the normalization, as we talked about in the call, we continue to expect to see direct sourcing in particular, come down this fiscal year, but begin to grow sequentially. We saw that in this quarter. We’ll continue to see that sequentially through the balance of the fiscal year, but we won’t see year-over-year growth, until we get to the fourth quarter, because we did have higher demand and pricing in the prior year compared to what we’re experiencing in the current year. And then relative to the GPO part of the business, it really is part and parcel tied to utilization and the excess inventory levels that we’ve seen. As we — as Mike discussed, we do think that inventory is getting back down toward normalized levels, but there may be a little bit of a tail on that still that could impact sort of the level of growth that we see in the back half of the year slightly.

Stephanie Davis: On the Performance Services side, if it’s not just beneficial timing from a pullover from last quarter, but actually better enterprise sales. How do we reconcile the weaker hospital macro versus that kind of reprioritization of these IT projects?