Hi, good morning. Welcome to day one of the UBS Health Care conference. It's my pleasure to welcome Amedisys on stage here. We have Chris Gerard, CEO, and Scott Ginn, Chief Financial Officer. Welcome. Good morning. Thank you. Chris, to start, maybe one of the main takeaways we had from the 1Q earnings season was that home health providers seem to be more resilient from a labor and earnings perspective compared to a lot of the acute hospital peers. Why are we starting to see a divergence in the labor pressure now? Yeah. I mean, I think that during the Q1 with the Omicron variant coming on, and I think the hospitals really being desperate for some clinicians and paying, you know, kinda, you know, wages that were not sustainable, we saw basically the competition go up for the clinicians. For us, what we were able to do is offset some of that wage inflation with business per episode. We saw a little bit of a drop in our business per episode that actually kinda, you know, softened the impact of the wage inflation for us. When we look at some of the BLS data that's out there, it actually looks like the supply of labor has increased in home health in recent months. Is that consistent with your experience? Yeah. Yeah. We're seeing more and more, you know, kinda production out of our talent acquisition team. Clinicians coming on, you know, we're hitting our internal place that's not just kind of within the walls, if you will, and people just looking for a little bit more freedom from scheduling and things like that. When you look at the new hires that you've made over the last several weeks and months, how does that new equilibrium rate in home health compare to hires from a year ago? Yeah. From a year ago, if you think about this time last year, we were, you know, we thought we were coming out of the pandemic right before Delta hit. We are seeing a little bit of kind of softening, I guess, if you will, of the incoming, kind of the, I guess, the passive job seekers. But I think it's only off slightly, so, you know, we're still very encouraged by our ability to staff up. Great. Moving on to the volume side. You know, as we enter an endemic state, how would you describe the demand backdrop for home health over the next 18 months? You know, what are the trends that we're seeing coming out of the Omicron wave and into 2Q? Yeah. I mean, we said all along, we felt like 2022 would be a setup for 2023 and beyond. You know, kinda the tailwinds for the industry are still very strong with the aging demographics, as well as more and more care moving into the home. We're starting to see, you know, kinda that volume demand start to reflect in that, in the demand that we're seeing every day. We feel like, you know, this is an industry that's gonna continue to have some strong growth over the next several years for sure. Any color on kind of the trends coming out of Q1? We exited the quarter accelerating in both lines of business. In volume, on the home health side as well as the hospice ADC, we saw a softening of the discharge rate as well. Early on in the pandemic, the home health industry took a lot of market share from the SNF industry. What are the latest trends that you're seeing from the SNF industry in terms of occupancy there and the impact to your business? Yeah, we're still seeing that the SNFs are still down below pre-pandemic levels, but we expect that will actually, build back up over time. It's a little bit higher acuity patient that we're seeing in the SNF. Still, if you think about the lower acuity patients that would typically be in a SNF, they're being diverted to the home. That continues today, and now the SNFs are starting to fill those beds with higher acuity patients. On the last earnings call, you mentioned some of the new home health models that you're trialing or piloting that drive deeper penetration and collaboration with Medicare Advantage plans. Can you help us understand how different these new models are from a reimbursement and risk-taking perspective compared to your typical gain-sharing arrangements? Yeah. If you think about the models today with Medicare Advantage, it's either on a per visit basis or an episodic basis. Most plans are trying to move to a per visit basis and then basically control utilization. That's how they're controlling their cost. That model is not really sustainable. It's not gonna drive our desire to take more of that business. What we're looking at is a new model that's more of a case rate. It's on a per admission basis that allows us to manage our own utilization, drive down business per episode, drive down the length of stay, unlock capacity for the patients to take care of more patients, and then us actually redeploy that capacity to take in more Medicare Advantage patients. With the plans, where it's getting their attention is that this is the first model that we've put out in front of them that says, "Hey, this will make us want to take more of your business. How receptive are the MA plans to these newer models? Do any payer partners stand out as driving innovation here? Yeah. I think that the big national plans are very interested in things that could help them cover their membership in a way that's more of a partnership versus a vendor kind of provider relationship. Got it. You mentioned that, you know, the MA model today isn't necessarily enticing you for more of that volume growth. What is the approach to volumes today? Are you just leaning more into the fee for service volumes? Ideally. Yeah, ideally, the fee-for-service is what has the most attractive margin profile for us. But also we can't ignore the Medicare Advantage plans. We gotta find ways to be able to partner up with them, for sure. Got it. Let's move on to the reimbursement side of Medicare home health. There's been a growing concern in the investment community that CMS may implement a behavioral rate adjustment in home health to keep PDGM budget neutral, particularly after the agency just preliminarily cut rates to the SNF industry in April. What was your reaction to that preliminary rate update from CMS for the skilled nursing facilities? Yeah, I mean, you know, certainly, you know, that got everyone's attention. You could see what came out of that, and I think some concern, you're right on that. I think that, you know, where we look at it is there's certainly some significant differences between when we went to our PDGM versus with SNF's new payment model happened. First of all, they did not have a behavioral adjustment. They didn't get a 4.36% cut from the get-go. Certainly that's a big differentiator. It's one of the bigger reasons we think it certainly needs to be looked at differently than us. If you look at their spend year over year, that's gone up. When you think of that in reference to our budget neutrality piece of our PDGM program, we think that the overall spend is down actually year over year. We think there's some protection there. It's always something we gotta deal with, but we're ready to do that from a kind of from our folks that work with folks in Washington. We're teed up to deal with any issues there. I think the industry certainly aligned on it. But, you know, we'll see what happens, but we feel pretty comfortable right now that that won't be an issue. Got it. You're saying because you already experienced an initial rate cut- Yeah. You're probably more insulated. Right. Even you know, typically we don't you know. MedPAC, they even came out and said they wouldn't look at the data till 2026. We think that's supportive, and we would agree with that. Anytime you're in a public health emergency, the data is just skewed incredibly for any. You know, during Q1 when Omicron came back up, we still felt that. We saw more missed visits. The impacts still come through and flow through our numbers and results. I think it's certainly premature to try to look at that data and draw a conclusion around. Right. if we've really changed behaviors. Why do you think CMS was comfortable looking at the data for the SNF industry? I mean, wouldn't the same data quality issues be present with the SNF industry as your industry? Yeah, I think a lot of it's gonna be around there wasn't any adjustment out the gate. I think that you know, probably in hindsight, they maybe thought they should do that. You know, we'll see what. Yeah, I'd add that the SNF spend did actually go up in 2020/2019. Right. Home health, it did not. Got it. That's helpful. After UnitedHealth Group finalizes its acquisition of LHC Group, two of the largest home health companies will be owned by Medicare Advantage plans. What was your reaction to that deal, and how does that impact the competitive landscape for you? Yeah. number one, we weren't surprised by the announcement of the deal. We were a little surprised by the timing, given that the entire industry has been very vocal about 2022 being a setup year for 2023 and beyond. We feel very strongly that is the case for us and the industry as well. The timing, a little, was a little bit baffling. You know, for us, it creates an opportunity near term for us to be able to kind of take market share where we have opportunities and we have overlap with LHC Group, just as we've done with Kindred when Humana took over Kindred. You know, in the longer term, as these plans look to leverage owned assets to be able to take care of their membership to control their cost, you know, as that becomes successful, we think that it creates a good opportunity for us to be more attractive out there to partner with plans. In your overlap markets with Humana and Kindred, did you see a noticeable change in volumes or referral patterns? No. We actually saw opportunity on the Medicare fee-for-service side, and then we saw no decline in the Medicare Advantage side. Got it. Increasing fee-for-service volumes in those overlap markets. Correct. The same could be the case here with UnitedHealth Group/LHC Group. Right. Excellent. On the hospice side, it's been a challenging environment over the last two years due to significant disruption from higher mortality and higher acuity. What's the latest on visibility into length of stay and admission trends? Yeah. If you think about length of stay, we look at it in the discharge rate kinda as a percentage of our beginning at the end of the month, previous month census. We measure that on a monthly basis. We saw that spike in January of this year at 39.1%, which was an all-time high for us. It was elevated in 2020/2019. It was elevated in 2021/2020. What we built into our model this year was around the 2020 kinda levels. Came out of the gate this year, January, February was higher than expected. Declined in March, and then actually fell below what we had in our model in April. It's holding at that level so far in May. Those are good signs for our ADC build on the admission volumes that we have. How is the median length of stay trending? I know that's a metric that you guys monitor closely. Yeah, it was 19 days in January. It was 23 days in April, so that's better too. Got it. Just based on the current trajectory, what do you think is a reasonable target for ADC exiting 2022? Exiting 2022, we should be, you know, a significant year-over-year growth. If you look at that over 2021, we were flat for most of the year, and we peaked in November and then started to decline. We're going into growth right now, so we should exit Q2 with ADC growth year-over-year. We should be mid- to high-single-digit%, you know, by the time we exit this year. Right. There's been some differences in the labor components on the hospice side and the home health side. I think you're actually carrying excess capacity on the hospice side. Yeah. Can you speak to some of the excess capacity there and how much volume you can handle? Right. Yeah. We talked before that, you know, based on the ADC, I think at one point, I think after, you know, Q1, we were down still year-over-year, roughly, 400 ADC, and probably we're only down like 40-ish type admissions. Still carrying a fair amount of capacity there. We talked about $12 million excess capacity come out, I think, Q2 earnings released last year and carried that into Q3 and into Q4. As you saw, the ADC decline. It's still out there. It's still gonna be. You know, we look at that globally based on our entire portfolio of care centers, there's gonna be pockets, so that may not be true. We still, you know, we'll be able to carry that excess forward. Certainly, it gets narrower as we're now starting to grow. You know, that's one of the reasons, and we get a lot of questions about, you know, how do you get from where you're running right now from Q1 into Q2 into the back half of the year. We think as that ADC accelerates here into Q2, a lot of that's gonna drop because I'm on a fixed cost model in hospice as that excess capacity gets eaten up, you know, we'll head to that. We think that buys us into Q3 to really have to do anything different around staffing significantly. We used contractors in hospice a lot last year and into the first half. That's probably cut in half by now, right now. I think there's a lot of positive signs on the hospice side. Got it. You mentioned that back half seasonality. Any other earnings seasonality components that are driving kind of a sequential decline and then ramp in the back half of the year? Yeah. I think, you know, a lot of it's, you know, Contessa's losses come down. The ADC acceleration in hospice will be a big piece of that. We do still think, home health continues to build as we go forward. Q1 is generally always the lowest revenue per episode, so we'll get some benefits there. You know, there's now gonna be a, you know, hospice rate update in Q4 that'll be helpful as well. Got it. You just mentioned Contessa. You entered that hospital at home business through the acquisition last year. Can you remind us how reimbursement works for that hospital at home model? Yeah. Right now we get, you know, if you look at it, kind of a risk-based model where it's over an episode of care, and that's generally with Medicare Advantage plans. We also have a complementary hospital at home piece that's lower reimbursement that comes through on the MA and on some Medicare waivers, but we also can get that from some different hospitals. It's generally an episode type, and the higher the risk base is, the higher the reimbursement. Are those rates comparable to the inpatient rates that hospitals are getting? I think they're certainly lower than what the hospitals are getting. I mean, I think we're probably on episode for a full risk type one is somewhere around $7,000 an episode. It's about a 15% discount. Yeah. Got it. What's the cadence of investment and growth for Contessa over the next 18 months? Sounds like you've had a lot of new wins. How does that impact the P&L, and how is that progressing relative to expectations? Yes. It's progressing well. We talked like, you know, the first half behind on revenue. We still think we're comfortable with our targets there. We've had some things, interesting developments, I mean, faster than we thought. You probably heard us talk about palliative care development. That's moving along faster. We're excited about that. A lot of great conversations, and that would be certainly a pretty nice accelerator to revenue as we move forward. We still think, you know, we said roughly losing $26 million in EBITDA this year. Most of that in the first half. That becomes a lower number in the second half of the year. Then you kinda get to year three, where we think we get to a break-even type number at that point in time. No, we're still on plan with the JVs. I don't think the investment plans aren't really heavy. There are some back office as we develop more capacity needs, but it's nothing significant. Got it. Is that year three breakeven, is that end of 2023 or early 2024? How should we think about? I think it's kind of the middle of it. The logical breakeven? If you think about it, kind of the middle of 2023. Got it. Earlier this year, you signaled an acceleration in M&A on the home health side. How would you characterize the current M&A pipeline? Yeah. You know, maybe that we thought yet as sequestration comes off, additional payments due at the end of the year for payroll taxes, we'd like to see some more acceleration there. You know, we're probably having to work it pretty hard. You know, always have deals we're actively working. The big question for us is always getting through diligence. Feel good about it and really interested with what Contessa, as we bring all aspects of our business together. It's, we're having some great conversations around that. Right. How have those transaction multiples trended over the past year and a half? Yeah. They haven't moved as dramatically as kinda we would have thought by now. I think people are still trying to figure that out. I think you've seen a little bit of a slowdown. I think a lot around hospice with ADC. I think people are trying to figure out where that bottom is. We believe we found it, but some other ones, if you were to look at some data we have internally amongst some competitors, they're still having some problems there. I would say from a multiple perspective, you're gonna look at hospice still in the 12x-14x and home health probably 11x-13x. Got it. It's been 2-3 years since you've done M&A at the scale of AseraCare or CCH. Why is that? Is that due to the more difficult operating environment, or is it simply harder to source deals of that size? Yeah. I would say combination of all those. I think that, you know, we certainly talked a lot about we'd spent, you know, almost $700 million in acquisitions on the hospice side. We wanted to pause, make sure we integrated, and then here comes, you know, we did AseraCare in the middle of COVID. We have a lot of work to do internally. We wanna see those ADCs start to return. Doesn't mean we won't look at hospice. You know, that's something that we believe we'd like to see that. We're probably a year and a half behind on where we thought we'd be, mainly because of COVID issues and around what's happened with ADC. Still hunting for a nice size home health deal. They're just, you know, you've gotta get through the diligence pieces, you gotta work those relationships, especially the larger ones I always talk about. We, you know, CCH, which is our first really big one in hospice, we probably did that, worked that relationship for 2-3 years. What happened, you know, AseraCare was similar. It's just it's finding the right ones. We've identified where we'd like to target and just, you know, being patient and, you know, trying to get the right deal done. Nothing we're overly concerned about. We just, we'll keep, you know, pushing it, but, you know, we wanna do the right ones. Got it. Can you give us an update on the AseraCare integration? How is that going after some of the BD losses last year? I think it's going well. You've seen some stabilization in those markets. You know, we're great at doing the technical side of it. It's the people pieces as you talk about that, as you bring in a new organization. You know, we try to be smarter as we do new ones and think about how we do retention type awards and try to hold on to some of these BD and hold on that top line number. I think we're encouraged by it. You're still having this, you know, you're trying to rebuild something during the pandemic, though, and that doesn't make it as easy as we'd like. You know, we've talked a lot in the past about not being able to, you know, we did that entire closure under the pandemic. We did not go out into the field. Chris has talked a lot about that, how that, we think, hurt us in developing our culture, in those care centers and really seeing them. We're able to get out now more, so we feel better about it. You know, we're glad we did it, but it was certainly not the easiest one to do. Yeah. I would say integrating deals during the pandemic is quite challenging. I mean, because if you can't connect, you know, interpersonally with the people that you're acquiring, it just creates kinda this gap in understanding the culture of the organization. That was tough for us to kinda work through. Are you where you wanna be in terms of BD headcount now, or is there still more room to go? Yeah. We're where we wanna be. Yeah. On the share repurchase front, in 2021, you completed about $100 million of share repurchase. Your stock price now is below where it was throughout 2021. How are you thinking about future share repurchase right now? Is that an area where we could see you be more opportunistic? Yes. I mean, we still had in place coming out of the end of 2021 $100 million authorized to spend. Even, you know, pre-pandemic and all the issues, we had kind of started a plan to try to spend somewhere around $100 million a year. You know, impact the dilution just from our internal type of stock awards. You'll, you know, our intent is to spend that money during the year. Excellent. Late last year, you made a $5 million investment into connectRN. Can you speak to that investment? You know, what did you find attractive about that opportunity, and how is that investment and relationship progressing? Yeah. For us, I mean, staffing, we've been very clear for the last couple of years that having clinical capacity is gonna be the biggest barrier for our success. You know, it starts with our retention, our hiring and recruiting, our ability to build our own kinda workforce. But at the end of the day, you still have to have some access to kinda staffing on demand. Historically, what we've worked with is kinda more contract staffing to where you're signing up for a 12-week commitment with a clinician that also, these are just kinda traveling nurses that will also work in hospital settings and SNF settings and other settings out there. What we saw happen with that is that things like with Omicron came on, and hospitals being really desperate for those clinicians drove up the actual price point for those clinicians in demand, as well as we were locking ourselves into these kinda longer term commitments, even though our clinicians were only on quarantine for about five days. You look at a connectRN, and it's actually really more of a tech-enabled kinda staffing on demand model so that we can actually have a shift come available and post it out there for clinicians to be able to basically, you know, accept and take, and they will already be credentialed into our system and able to go out and see patients, of course, the very next day or even the same day. You know, to be able to unlock a staffing on demand that doesn't come with long-term commitments, like 12-week commitments with our clinicians that we're doing typically today, you know, we think that that is just a more kinda, you know, variable cost model for us, allows us to flex when we have some challenges in our markets. Co-developing with them this tool, I think, is gonna help us, you know, kinda create additional clinical capacity that we didn't, you know, see access to before doing this investment. You know, if you think about kinda how we've done these side-by-side investments, like we did with Medalogix, and we helped co-develop them, with them tools. They helped us be a better organization. This is another one that we think can actually help us be a better organization and also become commercially available out there that we can, you know, get some, you know, economic, you know, benefit from as well. Got it. On those contract labor arrangements, what have you seen in terms of contract labor rates? How have those developed over the past 6-8 weeks? Yeah. They've certainly gotten much better. We saw another peak again during Q1 as Omicron, and we had roughly 7% of our clinicians on quarantine. That impacted us. You know, we've really pushed the field to look a little bit harder about it. I think there's some nervousness anytime you start seeing some quarantines out there, and they'll, you know, reach out to a contractor. You know, we're looking at all of our agreements with them. You know, before we talked about, look, we gotta lock in for 13 weeks once you have them. You gotta think about that because the, you know, the first 2-ish weeks are very expensive to get them trained if they haven't used our system, getting the technology in their hands. We're, you know, trying to be smarter about how we're using it. We think now, you know, the quarantine periods seem to be a little bit shorter as well. We, you know, we feel better about how we're managing going forward into the year. We have seen some stabilization in some of the actual unit cost of the contractors. Can you walk us through that cost benefit of hiring contract labor? It seems like labor is a constraining point to volume growth across the industry. What's the calculus there when you kind of look at the cost of contract labor, marginal cost of labor versus volume growth? Yeah, I think that we want, you know, our view of it is, you know, if we have a patient out there that needs our services, we wanna take them in. I mean, it's a hard decision to turn around. Our referral sources are expecting us to take in the business. You know, we'll probably continue to use it as needed. We still think it comes back down. I think our focus is to get staffing in. I mean, Chris talked about the connectRN use, how can we develop that with our own PRN utilization. We can get those up. That'll be helpful to us. You know, we look at economics of it, but it's very important to get the patient in and take care of our referral sources. we think there's some things internally we can do to mitigate that cost. Got it. What sort of impact are you seeing on the underlying workforce in terms of wage inflation? Right. I think you're running around 4%-5% this year. What are the expectations there in terms of stabilization and looking ahead to 2023? Yeah, you know, I think it'll right now if we look at kinda what we're paying, and we always come back as a reminder, we pay all of our home health nurses, and we'll start there with on a per visit basis, right? We have standard rates. They're still year-over-year only up about 3%. The additional cost has been we've used sign-on bonuses with a retention element of that to attract people and help us offset that and not really permanently impact our wage base. That's worked well for us. Still you can see in our cost numbers that that's driven up. Chris talked about, you know, and I'd said before about every 0.25 basis or 0.25 reduction in visits per episode is gonna reduce our inflation on that cost for visit line by about 2%. That's helped us mitigate that. You know, we still think there's opportunities for us to reducing contract utilization. We've brought in a lot of new clinicians, which we pay them new-hire rates. They're basically salary based. Those things have elevated our numbers, but we think those come back down to some more normal rates as we move forward. Got it. You mentioned VPE as a cost offset to that wage inflation. I think VPE in the latest quarter was around 13. Where ultimately do you think VPE can go, just on your current volumes today? Yeah. We think 13 is probably the right number when we think for this year, 13 to 13.25 is kinda where we'll be. Again, the Medalogix data suggests that the, you know, the optimized number is around 12.5 based on our acuity of patients today. You know, getting to that level of fine-tuning is not necessarily, it's not very practical because about half of our visits are done by nurses and half are done by therapists. You know, we think that we're right where we should be in terms of VPE. Now, there are some new tools from Medalogix that are coming out that also could help us even optimize further in terms of, giving us intra-episode updates on our patients and stratifying them based on hospitalization risk. We may find some opportunities in there where patients are actually progressing faster than we expect, during the episode, that they may be ready for an earlier discharge. It creates clinical capacity for us. That would also drive down VPE, as well as find opportunities for us to intervene on kinda the higher risk patients to prevent hospitalizations. You know, I think in terms of just VPE, you know, I think 13 to 13.25 is where we should kinda continue this year, but there could be some other opportunities as we exit this year. Got it. As you drive that VPE lower, is there a trade-off in terms of cost per visit, or are you able to maintain that cost per visit and drive that VPE lower such that it's creating real cost reductions at the system? Yes. Certainly, that's why we kinda talk about the cost per episode approach to it because there is the cost per visit metric because there are health insurance, other fixed type costs within there. As you take out visits, your most expensive visit is the discharge, the start of care and the discharge, right? Which has to be done by an RN. It's a heavier weighted. We weight visits. For us, a 1, even though we report visits just to count the visits, actually a clinician, for example, in the start of care is gonna get paid 2.5 times or get credit for 2.5 times like that. That's the most expensive. As we've taken out visits over the years, it's actually impacted our cost per visit metric. Anything we pull that back. The total cost per episode will come down. Yeah. Simple math here. A routine visit by a nurse is roughly about $60 for us. We have to do an admission with an RN, and that costs us about $150. You have to do a discharge that costs you about $100. The only types of visits you can take out are in the middle. You're gonna carry those heavier weighted kind of, you know, visits on the front end and the back end that drive up, that are gonna keep the cost per visit up. Got it. I wanna go back to the contract labor and costs there. You know, as COVID cases are picking up again now, are you seeing any sort of creep in terms of contract labor rate or usage tick back up with COVID cases? We actually have not. I mean, we, you know, we kinda manage our quarantine numbers. We could see some small movements there, but nothing of anything significant. We're still pulling back our utilization numbers still are below 4 now, which is, you know, been a pretty good sign and are coming back down. We're watching it closely, but I think that, as I said earlier, I think we're just much better at managing that and being smarter about the capacity. I think more discipline around, you know, just knowing that even though you're having quarantines, the quarantines are typically 5 days or sometimes even less. You know, just we used to default to go into contract labor when we had staffing constraints, but now we're trying to get more creative at the local care center level to make sure that we don't have to go out and lock in these 12-week contracts, and we can actually utilize our staff to cover the volume. Right. Even outside of COVID, it seems like there's some disruption or shifting of labor from permanent to more temporary arrangements. One, have you seen that in your markets? Two, what impact do you think that could have long-term? Yeah, we've seen that. We saw it, you know, kind of at an elevated level in Q4 and Q1, you know, which is basically the attractive wages for this traveling nurse environment out there. I think that that's already starting to fall back significantly, and I think that the allure of that is starting to decline. You know, clinicians, I think, you know, for a moment, were able to go out and actually, you know, kinda name their price, which is, you know, good for them and I think that that was, you know, they're the front line workers out there trying to work through this every day. Also, you know, I think the reality of having that is stable, that is gonna be here, you know, to support me and give me the tools to be successful. I'm feeling, you know, like that's actually, you know, kinda was a flash, and is starting to actually kinda revert back to a little bit of a more normal kinda setting. Got it. Just a reminder to everyone in the room, you have the ability to submit questions through the QR code, that's on your chairs, I believe. In the meantime. Huh? Any other areas of investment that you're making that will help competitively position you for the future? You mentioned the investment in connectRN, Medalogix, things like that. Any other items or verticals that you might find attractive over the next few years to drive that innovation? Right. I mean, we talked, you know, as you talked about Pulse being expanded, and we brought in Muse now to run across our hospice. All those are certainly helpful to us. I mean, we'll continue to look for other areas that we can kind of bolt on to us. I think we're very interested in how to get more efficient in the backside of the back office side of our business. Really, how do we impact this G&A line as we know? Look, we're, you know, gross margin's certainly under pressure between labor issues. As we work with Medicare Advantage more and more to get different type of contracts, as that line is impacted, how do we offset that to maintain EBITDA margin? We think there's opportunities in the G&A side of the business. I think this whole industry's, you know, I would say, behind from a lot of automation opportunities. We're gonna look to continue to do that. Any tools that can help us with that from billing and collecting, look for more centralization out of us coming forward, we think there's opportunities. Any investments we find that can help us be more efficient, that'll is something that we're kinda got our eye out for. Yeah. This industry's typically been a little bit behind the ball in terms of just advancement and utilizing technology, and it's a very decentralized model. You think about us, we have 520 locations. A lot of functions are happening in a decentralized format by individuals that are dedicated FTEs at those care centers that can truly actually be centralized and create a lot more efficiency. We think there's a significant opportunity for us to take a number of functions right now that are happening at the local level and pull it into a centralized area, and then we'll actually gain G&A opportunity as well as actually better revenue protection and just better quality of our management of our care centers. Yeah. We'd like, you know, we think it's a good opportunity for us to get more efficient there and, you know, maybe put some more dollars to the cost of labor line in order to really differentiate us from, you know, what are the other benefit-wide things we can potentially do for our clinicians to make us the real employer of choice. I think it gives us a lot of opportunities to both help EBITDA and help our employees in total. Excellent. Well, I don't see any questions from the audience, so and we can end it there. Any last comments that you wanna make or leave the audience with today? No. I mean, I think that, you know, for us, we still feel like you look at the secular tailwinds for our industry. You know, we have a long history of basically operating, you know, at a very high level and being excellent at what we do every day. The home is still gonna be where care is gonna be delivered more and more as we move into the future. You know, we feel like we got the great core assets in our home health and our hospice business. We see, you know, some emerging opportunities around Contessa in expanding that capability of the home and scaling that. We will continue to look for other areas that we can do to, you know, kinda offer a broader range of services in the home as well. You know, we feel like, if we're able to, and we're confident we will be able to partner with plans out there to be able to say, "We want to take more of your business," as soon as we're able to actually kinda cross that finish line, that's gonna unlock an additional, you know, organic growth for the organization that we've never seen before. You know, we're excited. We think it's, you know, 2022 has been a choppy year. You know, we knew it would be. Coming out of the pandemic, difficult labor markets. The good companies actually survive and thrive through these situations, and I feel like we're gonna do the same. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for that, and we can end it there. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you.