Brian Tanquilut : Good morning, guys. Chris, maybe I’ll follow up with one of your comments that you just made about remote. Obviously, an area or part of your business we haven’t talked a lot about since COVID. So just curious how we should be thinking about your strategy on integrating remote to your workflow and the investments that you need to make to really take advantage of that, especially as we stare down this Medicare rate cut.
Christopher Reading: Yeah, so remote therapeutic monitoring codes that was introduced this year. We’ve rolled it out. It’s been a little bit painful for a lot of companies, just because the companies who have the infrastructure that we’ve all used to be able to perform these additional codes, oftentimes are set aside and set alone on the infrastructure that exists in our Billing and EMR systems. And so that is and has been very recently addressed. I think, by the beginning of the year, we’ll be positioned where all of our Medicare patients will be enrolled, auto enrolled on our Raintree system, which is covers about 90% of our company. That integration is completed. We believe that will be done and effectively out by the first of the year.
So that we’ll have a much greater percentage of our company that is able to efficiently address remote therapeutic issues. Then beyond that, from a digital perspective, I think there been a lot of companies that have come out, that have had some really nice additions. We’re not there yet on a fully digital basis. But we continue to work directionally to evaluate that opportunity and make decisions. As we move forward we expect at some point to have the visual offering working on some of the high priority things at the moment. But that’s certainly on the list.
Brian Tanquilut: Got it. And then Chris, maybe since we’re talking about workflow, as I think about your IIP business, are you seeing anything that’s changing in that world, as some virtual offerings emerge in the market?
Christopher Reading: On the prevention side, not so much. We see continued adoption among and across companies. Of course, companies go through ebb and flow. Uber is a great example, company that at the beginning of COVID, we had a very large contractor rollout with them. And that got paused. And then over the next couple of years, it rolled out and became substantially bigger than we originally envisioned. Then as an example, it kind of paused again, not completely. We still do a lot of work there. They are one of our bigger customers, but then their outlook affected what — how they viewed the coming year, the year that we’re in right now. And actually, we’re hopeful that we can continue to expand that relationship, as things again, normalize.
So I don’t see on the prevention side, a lot of major technological changes. Again, we’ve added recently software deployment for ergonomics, which companies that want to control and to roll out their own ergonomics program, can now do on a guided basis with our software. That’s a new offering for us. This is really still an embedded model where people need to be on-site, and evaluating individuals. Certainly, we can use technology and video monitoring and certain aspects of evaluative techniques we can now use, with cell phones and other forward camera devices to take measurements and do things. And I think that’ll continue to evolve. We’re using some of that now. But nothing that we see as disruptive to the core business.
Brian Tanquilut: Got it, and then maybe Carey or Graham, as I think about just tying it back to the core business, how much productivity opportunity do you think there’s left in terms of driving the visits per clinic rate or per clinic, yeah, percentage per day?
Christopher Reading: Let me address part of that. And then I’ll let Eric or Graham address the other part of what we really think of as productivity. But on the visits per clinic per day, there aren’t any real constraints that we generally bump into that. It’s a factor of additional staffing, oftentimes when we’re if we’re currently staffed where we need to be. So in order to grow, we’ve got to hire some increment on a part time basis for additional staff. Generally speaking, our facilities can handle it. It’s grown this year about as we expected it to grow, all things considered. I think it’s been pretty good. I guess you guys refer to that as productivity out. I think of productivity really as the amount of people that our clinicians can see. And Eric, you might want to speak to that part.
Eric Williams : Yeah, Chris, I think you summarized really well. Our turnover’s at all time low. It hasn’t been this low in years. And so I think our partners have done a really, really good job of hanging out the staff. We’ve had incredible growth. When you take a look at the de novos that we opened up last year, and the 32 facilities, we’ve added this year, de novos and tuck ins, that has been challenging to fill those growth positions for us. And so to your point, I mean, there’s not a cap here. I mean, you look where we were two years ago. We hit the 30 mark for a couple of quarters this year. We got a record first quarter, second quarter and third quarter. So we still continue to see growth opportunities in front of us.
We’ve invested a lot of resources in recruiting. We have eight recruiters at work for us. We really leverage social media as well as our relationships with the various school programs. I think there’s 210 accredited PT schools out there. We have clinical affiliation agreements with 155 of them. So we’re continuing to play the short game and the long game as it relates to staffing. The long game being developing these relationships with the school. So as these kids come out and do their clinical rotations, which is part of the program, they’re more likely to end up working for us having done rotation. So that’s a big investment for us. And then on top of that, just throwing more resources as it relates to reaching licensed staff out there. But the volume and demand is there.
Staffing is what us and everyone else in the industry has got to solve for in order to continue to grow at the rate we’ve been growing.
Brian Tanquilut: Awesome, thank you, guys.
Christopher Reading: Thanks, Brian.
Operator: We’ll take our next question from Larry Solow with CJS Securities.
Christopher Reading: Good morning, Larry.
Lawrence Solow: Hey, good morning, Chris. Thanks. Thanks for all the color. Just a couple of thoughts. I know you’re not ready to give guidance for ’24. But just from a high level, as you think about sort of the components, pricing — price we will end up down this year, 1% is going to be a little bit more than that. And pretty well documented it’s a Medicare cut there. But it feels like you have some good momentum in the commercial side. As you mentioned, you’re on average getting, looks like mid-single digit annual increases on a lot of these negotiations. So I suppose some of them haven’t actually hit your — hit the P&L yet. And I suppose there’s a lot more in the queue that you could start turning over. So it’s fair to say that just from a high level, you think pricing could actually all-in go up next year, even if the Medicare rate is not changed by Congress.
Christopher Reading: Maybe Carey, you want to address that one?
