Good morning. My name is Sarah Conrad, and I'm part of the healthcare services team here at GS. Today, I'm joined by UHS with CFO Steve Filton and Darren Lehrich, who's VP of IR. Thank you guys so much for joining us. I guess I want to start off on the volume and demand environment, which I think has been super topical after a peer report last week. On your recent 1 Q 2026 earnings call, you reiterated a 2%-3% 2026 volume growth framework. At recent conferences, you've articulated that 1 Q volume is roughly in line with the low end of the range after adjusting for flu and weather. Can you help us frame any emerging industry dynamics in the second quarter that we should continue, that we should consider that could influence how Acute volumes are trending in the second quarter and into the second half of 2026 relative to full year guidance? Sarah, I think, sort of consistent with our policy in the last several quarters, we really haven't been commenting on inter-quarter volumes. I think we'll continue to sort of stick to that policy. Just are there any inputs that you can share that you have highest conviction could drive increased Acute volume growth for UHS from here, including like adding capacity, market growth, position alignment, any other factors? I mean, we did talk, in our first quarter call and at conferences subsequent to that, about the fact that we've added, a significant amount of Acute capacity, I think, 178 beds in three distinct projects or discrete projects in the second quarter, a tower in our Lakewood Ranch facility on the West Coast of Florida, a new floor in our Henderson or facility in Las Vegas, and then a replacement facility in Riverside County, California, and some incremental beds. It's a replacement sort of [audio distortion]. Those are projects that, because they're at existing hospitals, should ramp up more quickly than de novo project. We also talked in our first quarter call that the continued ramp of, the Cedar Hill Hospital in Washington, D.C., which we acknowledge got off to a bit of a slow start, but, you know, we think, whose both volumes and earnings are sort of more weighted to the second half of the year. That's super helpful. I guess as we think about the previous, Acute margin path, you had previously outlined a path back towards 16%-16.5% Acute margins, we've seen some shifting industry dynamics. Is it reasonable to assume that your thinking may be evolving on the appropriate long-term margin target? Can any of these headwinds be offset by potential AI or productivity improvements? That margin commentary was made as the industry, we were emerging from COVID when margins had been diminished fairly significantly. I think if you look at our 2025 margins on a same-store basis, taking out the impact of the de novo facilities, I think we were at 15.8%. Pretty close to that target that we had set. I think we effectively had recovered from the COVID pressures with moderating labor costs and lower acuity patients, eliminating those COVID patients who were a significant profitability drag. Obviously, now as we look forward into the next several years, there are some new headwinds, all of which I think have been discussed at great length. This year, there were the ending of exchange subsidies, next year we have the Medicaid work requirements, 2028, we've got the beginning of supplemental payment reductions. We certainly have every intention of trying to counter the impacts of those. To your point, I think technology plays a significant part in that. We have talked a lot about our recent technology investments, AI and otherwise, in the revenue cycle. I think we suggested that those improvements broadly added maybe 50 basis points to revenue per unit in 2025 for the Acute Division. We're undertaking a very similar third-party consulting review of our behavioral revenue cycle this year and into next year. Also beginning to implement some clinical applications, AI applications that I think should serve as an aid in reducing length of stay and increasing productivity, et cetera. Yeah, there's any number of headwinds, as looking to the next several years, but I think there's also a significant number of opportunities to offset those. I think at our recent headquarters visit a few weeks ago, we talked a lot about the AI productivity, which was driving revenue per adjusted admission. Can you give us just a little bit of framing there as we should think about the benefit in 2025 and then into 2026? Yeah. Again, I think, in our 2025 quarterly releases, we've been, I think, estimated that we were enjoying maybe a 50 basis point increase in revenue per adjusted admission as a result of some of the improvements made in the revenue cycle. These, I think, included more accurate coding, both ER and inpatient coding, more effective denials management and denials appeals and that sort of thing. It's a little bit hard to parse it out exactly because it's kind of a fluid environment, and we know that the payers are also increasing their investment in technology, and they're being more aggressive. Clearly, they've seen improvements in their medical loss ratios in the last several quarters. I think we feel at a minimum, we're keeping pace with what's happening on the payer side, but it's sometimes hard to parse out exactly what's due to the revenue cycle improvements, what's due to other changes we might be making. I guess one more Acute follow-up from our visit. You had talked about the growing emphasis on growing your Acute-adjacent outpatient office, including ASCs. Can you frame where you are in the process right now? Just any color you can give us around this initiative. Like everybody else, we certainly have acknowledged that certainly over the last few years and maybe even for longer than that, there's been a continued shift to outpatient. That is certainly a payer preference. They continue to view outpatient, whether it's ASCs or freestanding imaging or whatever, as lower cost settings of care and are encouraging patients or maybe more than encouraging patients or incenting patients, to use more outpatient facilities. I think patients prefer, generally, to be treated in an outpatient facility if it's clinically appropriate. We've certainly tried to participate in that. Probably the most success we've had on the Acute outpatient side is in freestanding emergency departments. We've got, I think at last count, 35 freestanding EDs. We'll have another several more by the end of this year. These serve a great many purposes. They're just another very convenient access point for patients. They've allowed our ED volumes to grow. Patients like the convenience. They tend to be sort of a more pleasant experience for the less Acute, less emergent patients. We also have about a dozen ASCs in our various markets. I think we have at least one ASC in every one of our larger markets. Plan over the next several years to double or even triple the amount of ASCs that we have. I think in both segments, we view the likelihood that outpatient over the next several years will grow faster than inpatient, and we want to make sure that we participate in that growth, having the appropriate number of facilities, properly geographically dispersed, et cetera. I want to pivot over to the Behavioral segment. You recently highlighted that the key drivers to move more deeply into that 2%-3% growth range are the increased labor investment, ongoing shift to more aggressive outpatient strategy. As you think about those two variables, what do you think is more important at accelerating Behavioral Health volume growth, what would be the operational milestones that would give you confidence that the BH segment is moving to a sustainably stronger volume growth tempo? Yeah. I'd repeat the comment that I just made about the Acute segment, and maybe this is, I think, a slightly newer development on the Behavioral side. That is, the shift to outpatient, which I think has been underway for probably 10 years or more on the Acute side, I think is a more recent development on the Behavioral side. Clearly, we've seen, I think payers are reporting increased demand for Behavioral services on the outpatient side. In fairness, we have historically been an inpatient-centric company, and I think have only participated and enjoyed this growth in outpatient demand to a limited degree. I think we feel like we've done a great number of things in the last several years to really increase the focus on outpatient growth in Behavioral. One is, I think we've reorganized to a significant degree. We've created dedicated outpatient personnel, meaning these are folks who are focused exclusively on growing outpatient. They're incented, they're held accountable exclusively on growing outpatient, focusing on those patients who we create, if you will. These are patients who are discharged from our facilities as inpatients, but who need further care, either what we would describe as the most Acute level of care, which we would describe as partial hospitalization or something a little bit less intense and we call intensive outpatient. Somewhere between, I would say high single digits, low double digits, percentage of our patients require that sort of care, but we only capture a small portion of those patients. To your point, what the hurdles there, the obstacles are often geography. Patients may live far away from the hospital, and while they were willing to make that drive or the trip to be an inpatient, they're not willing to do it every day or three days a week to be an outpatient. Geography makes a difference. Sometimes we just don't have the appropriate number of therapists to do that. That's why we were so enthusiastic about the Talkspace acquisition, because what the Talkspace acquisition, when it's closed, hopefully in Q3, will allow us to do, is to offer much more of a virtual alternative, so that if a patient wants to continue in our system and have that continuity, they now have a virtual option that quite frankly, they probably didn't have before. We had some limited amount of virtual options, but not many. The other piece is, Talkspace had this panel or has this panel of 6,000 therapists. Again, this has been an issue for us. They believe strongly that those 6,000 therapists have a significant amount of incremental capacity to treat more patients. That's very helpful. But they also have this infrastructure to recruit more therapists in a way that probably has economies and effectiveness beyond what we have. Yeah, I think focus on outpatient. We are building, through our Thousand Branches branded freestanding facilities, more access points for patients that are not necessarily associated with our hospitals, either geographically or even sort of on a branded basis. I think the opportunity with Talkspace to really build this continuum that goes from sort of the lowest acuity virtual offerings to the highest acuity inpatient that we've for many years, everything in between, which I think is really that in-between space is really perhaps the most significant opportunity. As we talk a little bit more about the Talkspace acquisition and the Thousand Branches program, I think one of the more interesting points from our headquarters visit was that only a low single-digit percent of discharged patients transition into UHS's own step-down programs today. What are the biggest barriers to improving conversion, and where do you think we could go? I think this is what I touched on before. A couple of things are important. When a patient is being discharged, number one, we've really got to be focused on that discharge planning, and I think historically, we may not have been as focused as we should have been. We were so focused on the inpatient part of their stay and others' stays, we didn't always necessarily focus on their, I'll call it aftercare. We're, I think, way more focused on it today. That's part of it, just the focus part. Secondly, we've got to make sure we have the therapists. We continue to invest in hiring. Also, again, one of the, I think, exciting things about the Talkspace acquisition is this significant incremental availability of therapists that we'll be able to access once the deal closes. Just that virtual option that some patients prefer. There are some patients who actually prefer face-to-face care. There are some patients who prefer virtual care. Having Talkspace sort of, if you will, under the UHS tent, will allow us to really offer patients and offer payers to provide care in the setting that makes the most sense, both clinically and financially. Okay, I want to pivot a little bit to the policy side. This year, we have the expiration of the ACA enhanced subsidies. You framed this ACA issue as more of a payer mix collectibility issue versus volume. Now that we are into June, can you give us any update on the volume progression that you've seen? Just as you look towards the markets, can you frame how important is the absolute total volume of exchange patients versus that metal tier versus utilization of these patients, and how we should be thinking about this transition? The reason we made the assumption that the lapse of the exchange subsidies, the impact was likely to be felt on payer mix, and I'll call it bad debt or uncompensated care rather than on volume, is when we looked at that exchange population, they tended to behave in a way that we would say was very similar to our Medicaid population. That is, they were very ER-centric, meaning most of the care that they sought was through the ER. That's sort of where they began their treatment process. They didn't necessarily have their own private physicians, et cetera. Our notion or our assumption was that even if they lost their coverage, they would continue to come to the ER in the same patterns and use the same utilization as they had before. The issue was now they would be coming without coverage, and that would create an uncompensated or bad debt burden for us. What we said in our assumptions was we thought that 25%-30% of our exchange population would lose their subsidies, would lose their coverage as a result of the subsidies lapsing, and probably 80%-90% of them would not be able to get other coverage. Like other providers, I think we commented in Q1 that we weren't seeing the loss of exchange patients at that full rate that we expected for the full year. I think that was always our expectation, in part because we have this view that we're going to continue to learn more holistically, I think, how many patients have really lost their coverage because we still have patients who come to the hospital with an exchange coverage card or whatever, but we'll find out later when we go to bill or we go to verify or whatever, that the patients have not paid their premiums, and as a consequence, they really don't have coverage. I think what we and I think our other peer providers said in Q1 was we still needed another quarter or two to really gauge whether our assumptions were correct or not. I think at this point, we continue to believe our assumptions seem reasonable and that that impact will sort of grow as the year goes on. I think we continue to feel like we've estimated it reasonably accurately and shouldn't be materially short in any event. Okay, that's super helpful framing. I think the other thing we've been very focused on is regarding the Medicaid State Directed Payment reforms. There was a recently announced proposed rule where CMS expanded SDP reform to cover nearly all Medicaid services, including BH, and they cite total savings north of $700 billion. What's your initial interpretation of the proposal and how it impacts your business and the industry overall? Yeah. We didn't really, as we read the proposal, view it as containing anything terribly new or significant. When we estimated, and we've been very transparent, both in estimating what our benefit is from the DPP payments and how our benefit is likely to be reduced based on the provisions of OB3 beginning in 2028. Those assumptions have always included our Behavioral hospitals and the DPPs that our B ehavioral hospitals are receiving. Yeah, I think in the context of how does this make us think about our overall DPP payments and the estimates that we've made about the reductions that begin in 2028, not significant. I think one of the more significant, what I'll describe as administrative or mechanical parts of the proposal are, CMS is suggesting that the states and the payers really have to adjudicate these DPP claims on an individual claim basis, which they don't really do now. That's, I think, an administrative burden that I think will be commented on, I'm sure, by payers and providers and the states pretty extensively in the comment process. As far as sort of the ultimate impact, I don't think we felt like the rule had a significant different impact than what we had already been estimating. Staying on that SDP, you recently got visibility into the 2025 retroactive Florida SDP approval. You disclosed an expected approximately $100 million retroactive benefit in the second quarter. We're still waiting for that 2026 program to be approved. How should we balance thinking about this and the benefit to 2026? I think one of the challenges we've always had is predicting with any sort of accuracy or specificity when these programs will be approved. CMS kind of moves at their own pace, and it's difficult to predict. I think it's worth noting, and I think, generally, whenever we express a point of view about a program and its likely approval, we're really just echoing what that specific state has told its hospitals. In this case, Florida says, as we all know, that the 2025 program has been approved. We believe the 2026, or they believe the 2026 program will also be approved. We don't have enough knowledge of the specific elements of the plan to know exactly what that impact would be on us, or we certainly don't know when the timing would be. Have an expectation that at some point, we'll also be recognizing the benefit from a 2026 Florida program. I want to talk a little bit about your AI initiatives. You've provided a lot of visibility into some of your AI investments and key initiatives. You cited roughly two dozen active projects and a further pipeline under evaluation. Can you talk a little bit about what you're most excited about in development or being deployed today? Also, relative to how the current market is thinking about your Acute and BH businesses, where do you see the most upside opportunity from AI? I think, we've talked about, as you said, a couple of dozen projects where I think we've been specific about several. We've used an AI application from a vendor for coding of emergency room patients. Coding for emergency room patients, as you might imagine, is a more streamlined, less complicated exercise in coding for inpatients. There are hundreds, close to 1,000 different DRGs for inpatients. There's a handful of essentially acuity codes for ER patients. We've found that AI can code more accurately. We've gone through a significant sort of, I'll call it parallel measurement period, where we'll code manually and we'll code through the AI application, and we'll compare the two and find that the AI application is more consistent, more accurate. That's been a benefit to us. We've talked about doing a number of things elsewhere in the revenue cycle. We know that payers have been using AI to generate denials and denial letters, et cetera, for a number of years. We've started recently to use AI to write those denial appeal letters. We find that, now a nurse, or another clinician who used to spend an hour writing an appeal letter now spends five minutes reviewing a denial appeal AI-generated letter. Driving efficiency in that regard. We have found on the Behavioral side that AI is helping us in the intake process. A lot of times when we are referred a patient by an Acute care emergency room or a community mental health center, et cetera, they will send us over an extensive medical record. Sometimes it could be 10, 50, 60 pages long. Historically, a nurse or a psychologist, somebody is having to review that. Now we've got an application that is summarizing that in, I'll call it sort of in an executive summary. Now a clinician is reading a page or a page and a half, which is really accelerating the intake process, and reducing the amount of time we have to spend on the intake process. Again, just another example, we've been using AI to make follow-up calls. When a patient is discharged from an Acute hospital, they'll generally receive a post-discharge call 24, 48 hours after they're discharged. They're going to be asked how they're doing, whether they've made their follow-up doctor's appointments, whether they've filled their prescriptions, what their pain level is. That has generally been an effective tool in reducing readmissions and increasing patient satisfaction, et cetera. We've found that now 40% of those calls are made by AI agents. Patients are notified upfront that there's an AI agent on the phone. About 40% of them continue the call. Interestingly, those that do, for the most part, tend to be very satisfied. The AI agents have more patience, I think, sometimes, than our own clinicians. They're willing to stay on the phone longer with the patient, and the patients like that. I think, again, just another example of how we're driving productivity through AI. I'll just offer one more, because you talked about productivity, or we talked earlier, productivity improvements. One of the productivity improvements we see on the Acute side in the next several years is continued reduction in length of stay. Length of stay in the Acute business rose dramatically during the pandemic. It's come down significantly since then, but I think we believe there's still opportunity to improve it even more. Interestingly, historically, we sort of measured our effectiveness on length of stay post-discharge, meaning we would look at what a patient's length of stay was compared to what the was. It's called the Medicare Geometric Mean Length of Stay. Today, we've got an AI application that at the beginning of a patient stay, based on their diagnosis, based on their condition, et cetera, projects what their length of stay should be, and we can sort of measure our effectiveness in real time, how we're doing against that, et cetera. Again, all these things are sort of tied to other issues. One of the challenges we've had with length of stay over the last several years is we've got patients who are being or need to be discharged to some other setting of care, skilled nursing, nursing home, rehab, et cetera. Often patients are sort of held in the hospital because there's not an available bed in, or capacity in one of those places. That's not something we can necessarily control. That's a challenge. Also, in many of our emergency rooms, we've got a backup of patients who are holding, waiting for a bed. To the degree that we can add capacity where it's appropriate, we talked about some of those examples earlier, we can help that throughput, and I think that helps length of stay as well, because patients who are being held in the emergency room are probably not getting the same level of diagnostics, et cetera, that they'll be getting once they get to the floor. You've been very careful to frame AI as a multi-year margin opportunity. You've noted a couple areas we should be watching, including length of stay, and I assume revenue per adjusted admission as well. Are there any other important milestones that we should be watching to see these AI investments trickle through the P&L? Yeah, I think the other sort of obvious one that we touched on is labor productivity. In a couple of the examples that I gave, the denials management, the preparation of denials appeals in the post-discharge calls, we're eliminating or at least reducing dramatically the amount of human time that has been devoted to that. I think over the next several years, as we look to drive productivity, to drive efficiency, a lot of that will be AI or technology-generated or technology-initiated. I want to talk a little bit about capital deployment. The Talkspace acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026. You've talked a little bit in this panel about continued investments in de novo and outpatient assets. Just as we think about capital deployment, potential ongoing buybacks, how are you thinking about the relative returns from deploying capital into organic Acute assets versus Behavioral outpatient expansion, repurchases at today's valuation? Just any framing would be super helpful. Sure. Once the Talkspace deal is completed, again, we hope in early Q3, our leverage level should be in the low twos. It's still at the low end of a range that we've talked about for a long time, in that two to three range. We certainly have the ability to continue to deploy capital in all the ways that you suggested, including continued CapEx investment, which I think will be skewed towards outpatient in both segments, selective M&A, where it makes sense, and continued share repurchase. Probably goes without saying, but we view our current share price as fairly compelling at this point. We've been a very active acquirer of our own shares for many years now. I think over the last 10 - 12 years, we've repurchased about 40% of the company shares. I think we would anticipate continuing to be an active repurchaser, I don't think our leverage levels, I don't think they'll prevent us from doing that, but I think, honestly, they'll provide us an incentive to continue to be active. I want to talk a little bit about the capacity ramp with your new Florida hospital that's now opening. Additional beds are coming online. Can you talk about how we should think about the ramp of these assets towards your total company margins? What are some of the key variables that we should be considering? Yep. Most new hospitals take somewhere between 12 and 18 months to ramp up to divisional averages of occupancy and margins, et cetera. I would think our new Florida hospital would be the same. I think the only time we've seen hospitals ramp up faster than that tends to be in the Las Vegas market, where we found West Henderson was literally profitable in its first quarter of operation, which was really extraordinary. Yeah, we're very excited about the new hospital, which is about two hours north of here in North Palm Beach County, in a very desirable demographic area, growing area, very well-situated. Darren and I both were at the opening of the hospital just a little over a month ago, so we're very enthusiastic about that. We certainly know, and I think embedded in our guidance for the year is the notion that this year it will be a bit of a drag. We would think by the end of next year, it should be closing in on more like divisional performance. Okay. We've got just about one minute left. I just want to ask on 2Q volume modeling. In the first quarter, we had a few one-timers. We had flu, we had some seasonal dynamics, spring break timing. Are there any lapping dynamics or one-time items that we should be considering? Yeah. We aren't providing inter-quarter commentary. As Steve mentioned, I think from a seasonality perspective, the only thing that I think we'd want to just call out is what Steve was just talking about as it relates to the opening of our hospital in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. That did open in May. As you would expect a new hospital to have some drag on overall profitability as it ramps. That'll be in the Q2. As it relates to your volume question, not commenting. Yep. Had to try. With that, we're at time. Steve, Darren, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you.