Bruce Caswell
Analyst · David Styblo with Jefferies. Please proceed with your question
Thanks Rick and thank you for joining us this morning. MAXIMUS delivered solid first quarter results with good performance in our U.S. Health and Human Services segment and as Rick noted, we remain on track to achieve our fiscal year 2019 guidance. We continue to make meaningful progress as we transform the customer experience with digital tools, expand our clinical related services and extend our reach into new markets and customer areas. Let's start off today with U.S. federal market, which continues to be a priority long-term growth area for us. First, as Rick noted, less than 1% of our federal business was affected by the partial shutdown. This illustrates the critical nature of our business and service offerings in support of essential citizen services and safety net programs. Part and parcel to this are the U.S. federal contracts we acquired in November. These contracts include the primary support vehicle for several of our nation's most critical programs, including the Federal Exchange and Medicare. We successfully transition these operations to MAXIMUS during the health plan open enrollment period, which is when the contract is running at peak capacity. I'm very proud to say that there were no disruptions to service and, in fact, customer satisfaction for this open enrollment period improved on these two programs over an already impressive score. Through the transition, I visited some of our newly acquired sites with Tom Romeo, General Manager of MAXIMUS Federal. I can attest to the incredible people we have welcomed to the MAXIMUS family and that culturally it is an excellent fit. They are passionate about serving our clients and beneficiaries to our citizen engagement centers and equally dedicated to supporting the communities in which they live and work. I've seen the resilience of our people in Lynn Haven, Florida following Hurricane Michael. I was excited to hear about our successes in Phoenix, Arizona and we look forward to continuing our site business to welcome our newest employees to MAXIMUS, all in all, the integration is progressing smoothly. Our efforts to expand our clinically related work are also gaining traction in our Federal segment. Recently, we began servicing a new federal agency with subcontracted clinical assessments, while still in the early stages, this required building a network of clinicians and certifying them to perform appraisals. Separately, we took on some new program work as a subcontractor, performing medical record indexing and provider outreach and engagement services. We continue to build capabilities and develop opportunities to leverage our independence and clinical skills in the federal marketplace. Our federal team is also pioneering many of our efforts with respect to our digital transformation strategy. The team is developing new solution sets where we can achieve additional operational and cost efficiencies through techniques such as cloud migration services, artificial intelligence or AI, robotic process automation, RPA and machine learning. With our increased capabilities, we're implementing new digital innovations within both business process management and as direct service offerings. This will continue to enhance our portfolio of citizen services and federal capabilities. For instance, MAXIMUS offers advanced natural language recognition and are federally certified intelligent virtual assistants, providing interactive conversational speech to beneficiaries. Our technology now deployed for initial customers meet stringent federal security requirements and standards. Successful department certification of that new solution opens the door to further agency deployments. Additionally, we continue implementing our RPA in our projects to enhance efficiency and scalability. Our automated portal for certain clinical related services, streamlines the independent medical review experience for citizens and doctors. It allows for document upload, AI search capabilities, transparent feedback and results. The portal is an ever learning machine, as a result it continues to improve its capabilities, making the experience more seamless. It has driven efficiency, enhanced quality and improved the overall citizen and physician reviewer experience. We're also actively working with many of our state clients on how digital initiatives can improve the user experience for programs like Medicaid. We recently launched the Virginia Medallion mobile Medicaid enrollment appropriately, which is made an impressive and immediate impact on our digital adoption. Since launched in December, this app has pushed digital to new heights in Virginia, where more than 40% of enrollments are being completed via web and mobile. I'm pleased that our digital transformation is well under way. Mobile has already surpassed our early estimates and is currently making up 26% of our overall digital volume in Virginia. Overall, digital adoption continues to grow across our clients, proving that Medicaid beneficiaries will gravitate towards great web and mobile experiences, where they are available. Our digital efforts are maturing across our geographies. Our MAXIMUS Canada enterprise, omnichannel contact center, now allows us to offer a full range of engagement options to our Canadian customers. This includes video chat capabilities, agent facilitated co-browsing to help citizens navigate online digital services, text and web chat, as well as, the more traditional voice, email and physical mail channels. The channels help deliver optimal customer satisfaction and efficiency. The omnichannel solution is available to be adopted by all of our Canadian clients. The first to start using these features is our service PC contract. service PC is a centralized government unit that provides citizens services on behalf of various agencies through consolidated contact centers. This contract has financial incentives for meeting or exceeding citizen satisfaction targets. Our new digital offerings to this client will begin next month. These types of visual enhancements are instrumental in transforming how citizens engage with programs and will continue to drive our success. More importantly, our government clients value our ability to leverage these digital capabilities to improve quality and service delivery. Moving on to awards and pipeline metrics. For Q1 of fiscal 2019, year-to-date signed awards total $224 million at December 31, 2018. We also had an additional $743 million and awarded, but unsigned contracts at December 31, 2018. As we reported in our last earnings call, we have adapted our pipeline reporting to better reflect the market realities of our current long-term BPO book of business. We implemented three modifications starting this quarter. Included in the appendix of our presentation is a crosswalk of the changes from the old methodology to the new methodology. But as a reminder the three main updates include; first, reporting total contract value. We believe this change is more reflective of the long-term nature of our contracts and client relationships. Second, we're updating the time horizon for opportunities we report in our pipeline. We will now capture opportunities that are expected to be released within the next two years, reflecting the realities of our procurement cycles. And third, we are no longer capping new work opportunities. While this will create more fluctuation in the pipeline as a result of maturing RFPs during the procurement process, this methodology will be more accurate and reporting anticipated values overall. Under the new methodology, our pipeline at December 31, 2018 was $19.9 billion of which 78% is new work. In order to provide you with a relative comparison, if we reported pipeline under the old methodology, it would have been just over $5.0 billion at December 31st of which 76% would be attributable to new work. Of the $19.9 billion pipeline, approximately 60% are U.S. federal opportunities. We are seeing some positive traction on the measures we took last year to amplify our sales and business development efforts in the U.S. federal segment. The team is keenly focused on opportunities driven by emerging customer priorities, including new departments and agencies. We are now implementing similar initiatives in our Health and Human Services segment here in the United States. And before I finish up today, I would like to thank John Haley to stepped down from the MAXIMUS board last month. As CEO of Willis Towers Watson, John provided key market insights and thought leadership to our board. In addition, directors Russ Beliveau and Paul R. Lederer will retire in the spring of 2020 and we sincerely appreciate their dedication and service to MAXIMUS. MAXIMUS has a proven track record of solid operational delivery, a dedicated team of seasoned professionals and a portfolio of business that generates meaningful cash flow. We remain committed to using acquisitions as a platform to further drive organic growth. This includes strategic targets in new and adjacent markets, as well as, clinically related and digitally enabled services in existing geographies. Our digital initiatives are enabling us to broaden our BPO business with a more enhanced set of core capabilities. We have earned reputation as a trusted long-term partner, delivering outcomes that matter and we continue to build on this foundation. Governments will continue to focus on creating an even better citizen experience with Corp programs through the prudent additional of digital technologies. We are well positioned to achieve outcomes that matter by remaining keenly focused on providing services that are flexible, scalable and efficient for our government partners, without losing sight of the citizens we serve. With that, we’ll open up the line for Q&A. Operator?