Samuel N. Hazen
Management
Well, I think, clearly, the leverage, the operating leverage of the company will showcase this quarter with a significant margin expansion given the revenue that we had. So our clearance on that incremental revenue was very positive, A.J. Underneath that, though, I'm proud of what our operating teams are doing to drive efficiencies, recognizing that that's just a core responsibility of our team, and we have numerous agendas, as I've mentioned before, where I think we're continuing to find opportunities in our supply chain. We continue to find opportunities. For example, we're expanding aspects of our supply chain into pharmaceutical distribution and pharmaceutical warehousing, where we think we can gain a better control over our drug inventory and our drug distribution within our systems. That frees up our pharmacy managers to work with our physicians on better formulary management and so forth, on our clinical excellence agenda, where we are moving on certain service lines to improve really the performance of the service line. We're finding opportunities to create clinical processes that are more efficient, more effective for our patients, and at the same time, producing cost results. And I think we've gotten smarter about a couple of other agenda items inside the company, and that's helped us manage the cost trends. And in particular, that's with our physician strategy, where we've been able to come up with some creative ways to accomplish our physician initiatives and our overall engagement there, and the combination of all that has been powerful. And then obviously, on labor, I mean, labor management is a day-to-day thing. Our teams are incredibly well-equipped and capable at executing on that. And you saw a very effective deployment of different elements of our labor management strategies to drive margin expansion on that front. And then the final thing I would say is, and I mentioned it a couple of calls ago, where we have deployed our process improvement teams from the corporate office into each of our divisions. And I think that's going to be a very innovative organizational solution for HCA, where it brings expertise in different areas. It puts our process improvement teams more closely aligned with our operating teams in the field as opposed to the episodic approach that we had in the past. And that structure is going to assist us with finding new opportunities, in my estimation, in helping us maintain our cost.