Tim Hingtgen
Analyst · Nephron Research
Thank you, Ross and good morning everyone and welcome to our fourth quarter and year-end 2020 conference call. 2020 was a year like no other. COVID-19 has had a prolonged impact on our lives and the pandemic as certainly impacted the health care industry. I'm incredibly proud of the essential care provided for the communities we serve, the professionalism and compassion of our front-line health care workers and for the leadership resourcefulness and considerable efforts of our hospital and corporate teams that support them. We were laser focused on managing COVID throughout 2020, but we were also able to move other important strategic priorities forward. Because of this, we entered 2021 with meaningful opportunities in front of us and a sense of excitement regarding the future. Let me start with just a few comments about our experience during the pandemic. We provided care for more than 25,000 COVID-19 inpatient admissions last year. The majority of those patients were in our hospitals during the back half of the year, with more than 14,000 COVID inpatient admissions in the fourth quarter alone. COVID volumes increased each month throughout the quarter, potentially peaking in January. In turn this negatively impacted elective volumes and non-COVID health care demand as well as certain expense categories. During the course of the pandemic, in addition to supporting the CARES Act for hospital industry, we believe our ability to recover from the negative impact of COVID-19 has been due to three factors. First, we implemented a dual track operating philosophy in which we prioritize care for COVID-19 patients. But we also committed to rapidly restoring and maintaining other essential health services. Our hospital teams were very proactive regarding the reopening of services, balancing the demands of both COVID and non-COVID patient care in a safe and effective manner. Second, we are continuously monitoring adjusted operational activities throughout the year in real-time to ensure effective cost management. And third, we worked hard to provide the necessary support and resources for our medical staff and employees who again have been very courageous and committed during the challenges of the pandemic. Additional alignment was particularly important this year and we are grateful for strong partnerships between our hospitals and their medical staffs and they work together to care for patients, especially following various shelter-in-place orders, required shutdown in certain medical services. While managing the pandemic, we also continued to execute across our most important priorities and strategies throughout the year. We completed our formally announced divestiture plan with proceeds coming in above our expectations. Investments in our core portfolio showed promising returns and we identify more opportunities for network expansion. Many of our company-wide initiatives continue to add value. For example, our Accountable Care Organizations or ACOs continue to perform very well and partnership with nearly 5,000 providers across our market, we care for approximately 250,000 Medicare fee-for-service patients with the focus on quality and value. We have continued to increase our shared savings from the program each year since its inception. Our telehealth program continues to provide convenient virtual access to our providers with more than $500,000 telehealth visits in 2020. And our transfer center expanded again delivering more admissions from non-CHS hospitals as patients requiring higher levels of care are transferred into our facilities. Our strategic margin improvement program produced strong results and significant savings and we are confident it will generate incremental results going forward as well. And in 2020, we significantly improved our capital structure due to a number of successful transactions. In summary, as a result of our focused execution across both operational and strategic priorities, the company had a strong finish to the year. Our 2020 fourth quarter same-store net revenue increased 4.5%. Adjusted EBITDA was $614 million in the quarter, up from $447 million last year. Excluding pandemic relief funds, adjusted EBITDA was $461 million, up 3% over the prior year quarter. While showing sequential improvement in admissions and adjusted admissions, COVID continued to impact our volumes during the fourth quarter, particularly on the surgery line as more patients deferred care as COVID cases indirectly [indiscernible]. Looking forward via strategic opportunities that should produce growth on both inpatient and outpatient side of the business. Our portfolio of hospitals is now primarily concentrated in Sunbelt state with attractive demographics, higher population growth and economic opportunity. Our stronger portfolio coupled with high return on investments positions the company for growth going forward. Across our core portfolio, we are continuing to utilize a detailed planning process in each market that leverages multiple data sources along with market intelligence to pin-point and then prioritize the most effective investment strategy within each particular market. This enables effective allocation of capital and other resources to drive growth. Through this process, we've added 250 incremental beds towards [indiscernible] over the past few years and 50 new surgical and procedural suites. This capital investments that help meet demand and bolster positive volume trend in markets like Birmingham, Tucson, Naples, Knoxville, Northwest Arkansas, Fort Wayne and others. In 2020, we opened a new micro hospital in Tucson and a replacement hospital in La Porte, Indiana. We will open another replacement hospital in Fort Wayne later this year and add another de novo hospital in Tucson in early 2022. We continue our emphasis on the development of service lines, thereby further increasing our acuity levels on the inpatient side. And our investments on the outpatient side are designed to expand entry points into our networks, providing a more convenient out-of-hospital care environments that satisfy evolving consumer expectations about the availability and accessibility of health care services. In 2020 we opened three new ambulatory surgery centers and three new freestanding emergency departments. More ASCs, freestanding EDs, urgent care centers along with further expansion of our physician practice locations are in the pipeline and under active development. With our stronger portfolio, we are on a path to successfully developing growth both acute care services and our ambulatory networks moving forward. Health care consumers continues to be in sharp focus and in development area for the company. We continue to implement digital tools that help us interact with our patients and these interactions help both gaps in care, elevate capital deployment rate and improve patient-communication and experience as well as quality. And telehealth, which I mentioned before, continues to be an opportunity for further development. We have also been focused on leveraging processes and technologies, expectations from one care setting to the next, which helps to navigate across network services and further builds brand loyalties. Going forward, our hospital leadership teams are enthusiastic about the opportunities in their markets and our corporate team continue to support strategic, clinical and operational initiatives designed to enhance patient care and increase market share, so that we continue to provide enhanced value for our patients in the communities we serve. We are focused on driving incrementally higher net revenue, EBITDA and EBITDA margin and improving positive free cash flow and lowering our leverage. In the medium term, we are targeting 15% plus EBITDA margins and reducing our leverage below 6 times. As we've seen all of these strategies in 2021, we are doing so as a stronger an even more resolute organization. Our portfolio is strong and our entire organization is excited about the future. I could not be more proud of where CHS is today, responding to the needs of the patients throughout this pandemic, while also achieving marked progress on a greatest strategic and operational priorities throughout the year. As a result, I remain confident that we are continuing to position and strengthen the company to build long-term value for all of our stakeholders. With that, let me turn the call over to Kevin.