Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Huron's Webcast to discuss financial results for the third quarter 2016. At this time, all conference call lines are on listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct our question-and-answer session for conference call participants and instructions will follow at that time. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. Before we begin, I would like to point all of you to the disclosure at the end of the Company's news release for information about any forward-looking statements that may be made or discussed on this call. The news release is posted on Huron's Web-site. Please review that information along with the filings with the SEC for a disclosure of factors that may impact subjects discussed in this afternoon's Webcast. The Company will be discussing one or more non-GAAP financial measures. Please look at the earnings release and on Huron's Web-site for all of the disclosures required by the SEC including reconciliation to the most comparable GAAP numbers. And now, I'd like to turn the call over to Jim Roth, Chief Executive Officer and President of Huron. Mr. Roth, please go ahead.

Good afternoon and welcome to Huron's third quarter 2016 earnings call. With me today is Mark Hussey, our Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer. In the third quarter, revenues grew 4.5% over the same quarter of 2015. Our Education and Life Sciences and Business Advisory segments, which represent 44% of our total revenue, continued to perform well while ongoing challenges remained in our Healthcare segment. I will provide an overview of each of our businesses and our outlook on the rest of the year before turning it over to Mark for more details on the financials. I'll begin with Healthcare. During the third quarter, Healthcare revenues declined approximately 8% compared to the third quarter of last year and were down 3% sequentially. The sequential decline was primarily driven by softness in our revenue cycle solutions and to a lesser extent our cost and clinical solutions. On a year-to-date basis, total Healthcare revenues were down 2% and organic revenues were down approximately 6% compared to the first nine months of 2015. When the revenue growth rate of the Healthcare business began to decline in 2015, it was primarily attributable to our cost and clinical offerings. While the sense of urgency to adapt change among some of our hospital clients remains at lower levels than we have seen in prior years, tending and ongoing pressures in the healthcare market make us cautiously optimistic about the resumption of growth in our cost and clinical solutions. There are several reasons for our cautious optimism around our cost and clinical offerings. First, healthcare providers' expense bases have recently been rising faster than reimbursements, particularly due to higher labor costs and capital commitments. At the same time, payments from government-funded programs and commercial payers are either being reduced or are increasingly becoming subject to risk…

Thank you, Jim, and good afternoon everyone. Before I begin, please note that I will be discussing non-GAAP financial measures such as EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net income, adjusted EPS and free cash flow. Our press release, 10-Q and Investor Relations page on Huron Web-site, each have reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures along with a discussion of why management uses these non-GAAP measures. Also, our acquisition of HSM Consulting which closed on August 1 is included in our third quarter financial results in the Healthcare segment. In addition, we now expect the acquisition of the international business of ADI Strategies will close later in the fourth quarter of 2016 or early in 2017 at which time it will be included in our Business Advisory segment. Now let me walk you through some of the key financial results for the quarter. Revenues from continuing operations for the third quarter of 2016 increased 4.5% to $183.4 million compared to $175.5 million in the same quarter of 2015. Revenues for the third quarter of 2016 reflect our acquisitions of Cloud62, My Rounding, the U.S. business of ADI Strategies and HSM Consulting, all of which closed after the third quarter of 2015 and in the aggregate generated $17.1 million of incremental revenues during the quarter. On an organic basis, revenues declined by 5.2%. Net income from continuing operations was $12.3 million or $0.57 per diluted share in the third quarter of 2016 compared to $14.3 million or $0.63 per diluted share in the same quarter of last year. The decline in net income over the prior year period is primarily due to higher salaries, bonuses and related expenses as a percentage of revenue. Our effective income tax rate in the third quarter of 2016 was 37.2%, compared to…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Tim McHugh with William Blair. Your line is open.

Just Healthcare, can you talk about – I think on the last call you had seen incremental weakness but the hope was that you would see based on your pipeline some kind of improvement in the revenue run rate in the second half. So, did trends get worse or did some of these large projects start rolling off sooner than you would have expected? I guess what's the delta versus what you thought three months ago for the Healthcare business?

I think the primary issue with the Healthcare, Tim, has been that we've had the wind-down of the bigger jobs without the ability to replace them with something comparable, is I think probably the main story there. I mean that's really what's driving the declines right now. There remains both in the cost and clinical and revenue cycle, the needs are still there, the demand is there, we are just having a tough time replacing some of the larger engagements as they begin to wind down.

And Tim, the thing I would add would be the sales cycle has proven to be a little bit longer in certain cases and I think that's probably the delta from what the earlier expectations were.

So, is the decline in these large projects as you expected and how much of a headwind are we looking forward from it at this point, are there still significant rundown to happen that you mentioned through early 2017, help us size what type of incremental headwind from the run rate we're kind of looking at today for Q4?

So I think the expectation right now, if you look it with the guidance that we've laid out today, we would expect actually sequentially a pickup from where we were in Q3 in the fourth quarter. The headwinds coming into 2017, again this is reflecting the fact that we haven't had replacement projects, you're probably looking at in the early part of next year kind of a low single-digit percentage point headwind on revenue related to the remaining part of the large projects that have not wound-down.

Is that a low single-digit percentage of total revenue or Healthcare?

Of Healthcare.

Okay, and that's the ones that are still running in Q4, so 2%, 3%, 4% headwind you still have to overcome in next year?

Yes.

All right. And then can you just, Studer I think you qualitatively said it did okay, but can you give us I guess what was the revenue and kind of the growth rate from that? And then secondarily, what is the – there is a comment in there about increased competition. I didn't think of a lot of things being in direct competition with what they do. So can you elaborate on that?

So with respect to Studer, again we have talked of them being in the range for the year of mid to upper single digits, and that continues to be the case in the quarter and that still continues to be our outlook for the year. I think from a competitive standpoint, I think there are, without naming names, others in the space that would like to expand into the patient engagement area, and it's just one that – again, it's something that we watch very carefully just because of the competitive environment.

I mean are there direct client losses that are happening because of that, or is this just something you think you're watching?

It's Jim. I mean there are – we don't win everything that we're competing against. I just think that we've been very successful in this business and we continue to be successful, and not surprisingly, as we've seen in frankly all of our businesses, you get to be more successful, you get competitors. And so that's what we're seeing and I think it's not a surprise to us. We're still comfortable with the trajectory of the business, but like in any other successful business, you're bound to get more competitors and that's what we're seeing right now. I will say though that despite the more competitive environment, the market remains very focused on the issues that the Studer Group is providing, and I think that's a benefit for us in the longer-term, but we've always had competition, we just have a little bit more of it.

Okay, thanks.

Our next question comes from Randy Reece with Avondale Partners. Your line is open.

Ben Flox in for Randy Reece. Just real quick a maintenance question, can you give a number for consulting headcount in Healthcare excluding the acquisition in the quarter? And then also, did you give a performance-based fee number for Business Advisory? I may have just missed it.

We did not give one for Business Advisory. I think it was not really particularly material in the quarter. We can certainly get back to you with that. And then with respect to headcount excluding the HSM acquisition, we were somewhere around 930 range.

Okay, great. And then can you give a little commentary as far as budgets go on the provider side, kind of what you guys are seeing? I know you had touched on the sales cycle taking longer with some of your engagements, but some of that may speak to the size of them as well. I'm just kind of curious what you're seeing in the marketplace in terms of how willing these guys are to spend right now.

This is Jim. It's a complicated market right now for all the reasons that we probably read about every day. I wish there was one or two simple and clear reasons for the market dynamics, but there is not. We see, as we indicated in the call, there's a lot of M&A activity taking place right now which puts a lot of pressure on our clients to be better on the cost and quality side of things. We know for a fact that labor cost have been for the most part outpacing reimbursements, and that's both from the federal programs and the commercial programs. I actually think that is the underlying trend that's probably for our clients is probably the most concern, and that is the reimbursements are not matching the increase in labor costs to support any type of increase in volume. So that's a major issue. And then I think you've got other issues that are affecting both the pace at which our clients are making decisions, I suspect there's a little bit of uncertainty about the way the Affordable Care Act is evolving, I think there is uncertainty as to how much if at all they should be embracing the non-Medicare risk-based programs, I think there is probably some uncertainty around the elections. So, we got all these dynamics taking place and we talk to our clients from the market every day at numerous places, and so it's not as though these issues have gone away. I made a comment that it's really hard to kind of look very far into the future and find a period of time where they are financially stable. They are not. I think they're really waiting. A lot of these places have gone through substantive change already and are probably a…

All right. Thanks a lot for the color. That's very helpful.

Our next question comes from Tobey Sommer with SunTrust. Your line is open.

This is Kwan Kim dialing for Tobey. Real quick in the ELS segment, out of the 9% year-over-year growth, what proportion of that would you attribute to one-time transformational type projects versus repeatable work?

This is Jim. The ELS business is really much less reliant on larger engagements, and even though we have some sizable engagements going on, I'm not even sure how we would answer that question because it is not really the way we look at things internally. We had a very broad-based contribution among all of our practices in the education sector that contributed to that 9% growth. And so that was really across our technology and our strategy and operations and our research businesses, and so they have all contributed in a very solid way, and I don't think any of them, any of the overall growth rate would specifically be attributable to one-time versus something else. In the education practice, we've got a pretty long history of working with clients for a long period of time on multiple types of engagements. We've had some clients we probably have been working at for coming up on 10, 11 or 12 years straight and on just a variety of projects. So we view it differently and it's much more of a longer-term relationship than we've typically had in healthcare. I will say, as we try to transition, as the healthcare needs transition, as the healthcare market transitions, we are trying to build the same type of relationships in the Healthcare segment that we've typically had in higher education, but that just takes some time.

Got it. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Kevin Steinke with Barrington Research. Your line is open.

So, last quarter's call as well as this quarter you talked about that within Healthcare you've made some adjustments to your sales and service delivery models as well as your go-to-market strategy in order to kind of differentiate yourself in the market and be reflective of client needs. You talked about some expanded Healthcare services in this call. So I'm just wondering if at this point you feel like you have the right go-to-market strategy, the right set of service offerings out there for your clients' needs and that it's just a matter of clients making decisions and moving forward, or do you feel like you have to do some more tweaks to your model or your strategy?

Kevin, this is Jim. I may respond to that in a couple of ways. First of all, I think we are always making tweaks to our go-to-market strategy. I think that's the thing that's critical for a consulting firm to survive. Every one of our markets changes and we have to not only be responding to the changes in the market but we've got to be anticipating them hopefully in advance and then making changes. So, I would say that we have made a very conscious effort over a long period of time to continue to be evolving new products and service lines within each of our practices. And so there's a couple of things that I guess I would point out as it relates to how we are viewing our go-to-market strategy. Number one, we've mentioned in the call a couple of things that we have really begun to focus on a lot more over the last two or three years. Number one was our physician practice. As the physicians got more and more employee, we knew this was going to put a different kind of – create opportunities but also different pressures for our clients, for our hospital clients. So we vastly bolstered up our physician services. Our technology solutions practice has really also ramped up quite a bit. We're in a much better position right now to help our clients find a return on investment on the very substantial investments that they've made on a lot of their electronic records systems, and that to us has been and will continue to be a very good offering. We have obviously, as we've indicated now for the last year or so, as we've begun to see a wind-down in some of our larger projects, we have recognized the fact…

Okay, very helpful. And you referenced broadening your sales footprint. I'm just wondering what that involved or what it is involving in terms of, I mean you're hiring more of a kind of direct sales roll or just you're consulting skidding out and meeting with more people or how does that process work in terms of broadening the sales footprint?

Kevin, I think there's a couple of ways. I mean first of all, we have some very bright and experienced people. So, in the old days, again like probably a year or two years ago when we could have a limited number of people actually pursuing what were really larger sales opportunities, we didn't need that many people out in the market that were really fully focused on sales. I think in this current environment, because we've had so much experience really not just at our managing director level but even below that, we've had a great opportunity to have more and more people get engaged in the sales process. And I think it makes it a little bit easier to sell an engagement when you're trying to sell something smaller than when you're trying to sell some large integrated project. So there's no question that if we had a large integrated opportunity today that we would be pursuing it with our most experienced salespeople. But for the simpler, more point specific opportunities, we actually have a very experienced base of people that are quite good at what they do and we're finding that they are fully capable of going out and beginning to promote our services and start our work. So, it's a transition certainly for us because we have to be selling to a lot more places. We certainly have to have more people engaged in the market. But having said that, I think we are well-prepared on that path and that we just know that our efforts right now are continuing to focus and organize our sales effort to make sure that that's as coordinated as it can be.

Okay, that's helpful. And as we look to 2017, how should we think about the Education and Life Sciences margin, now that you've made the investments in cloud-based implementation capabilities this year? I mean should we start to see some leverage of those investments as we move into 2017?

Kevin, this is Mark. So, I think at this point, given where we are in our budget cycle, it is too early to tell. I mean, I think there are always things that are out there, but certainly as we look at how the cloud has transpired, we feel like it has met our expectations both on the top line and the bottom line. I think we'll have more to say about that, but collectively it's likely to be right within the ranges that we expected when we announced guidance earlier in the year. So, I think more to come but probably not until we really get a little bit better look at what the opportunities are in 2017.

Okay, fair enough. Thanks for taking my questions.

Mr. Roth, we have concluded the allotted time for this call. I'd like to turn the conference back over to you.

Thanks for spending time with us this afternoon. We look forward to speaking with you again when we announce our year-end results in February. Good evening.