John Rademacher
Analyst · William Blair. Your line is open
Thanks, Mike, and good morning, everyone. Overall, after initial sluggishness due to the widespread impacts of omicron variant on our team members, customers, and patients, the first quarter proved to be a very productive start to the year for the Option Care Health team. We continue to invest in our future growth strategy, while navigating the challenging economic environment to ensure we provide unsurpassed patient care. As Mike will review in a few minutes, our first quarter financial results were very strong and I am pleased by our performance across the spectrum of financial and operational metrics we use to manage the enterprise. Specific to the first quarter of this year, note that the prior year comparable period was quite soft as we were just starting to see COVID vaccine distribution in the second half of the first quarter of 2021. We also benefited this year from a few one-time expense benefits that helped drive leverage in the P&L that we do not believe are likely to repeat. So while reported growth is very strong in the first quarter, as we anticipated, we believe the comps will balance out in the back half and we anticipate our growth profile normalizing to a greater extent. Nonetheless, based on our momentum coming out of the first quarter, we are raising our financial guidance for the year accordingly as Mike will discuss shortly. As we entered the year, we were in the midst of the COVID resurgence related to the omicron variant. This had a very disruptive impact on our referral patterns and local pharmacy operation. Given the resilience of our teams in the field, we were able to quickly respond after the omicron cases subsided and we saw a recurrence in normal operations by the end of the first quarter. While a few referral volumes continued to lag in certain geographies, we did see a gradual reopening in many of our referral sources. Our chronic revenue was especially strong in the quarter and was driven by our portfolio of chronic inflammatory therapies and newer therapies for multiple sclerosis, myasthenia gravis, muscular dystrophy and others. We also saw a few points of growth from therapies that were in short supply last year are now available including therapies for thyroid eye disease. As we discussed on our prior earnings call, we also entered the year with unprecedented inflationary pressures across the broad spectrum of goods and services we utilize. While the collective inflationary pressures was somewhat muted in the first quarter, we do see an increased impact in the balance of the year. We continued to thoroughly assess our labor competitiveness and we adjust compensation primarily at the end of the first quarter as part of our annual cycle. So the compensation increases are not fully reflected until after Q1. We are also seeing broad cost increases in key procurement categories including transportation, medical plastics and key supplies, business services and others. As always, the team is focused on finding new sources of efficiency to mitigate the inflationary pressures to the greatest extent possible, while ensuring the highest level of quality and patient care. The labor situation remains challenging, but we continue to recruit our team members every day and we are making investments to remain competitive both from a compensation and career development perspective. I believe we will continue to weather the storm reasonably well, while maintaining focus on fielding the best clinical team in the industry. Aside from the dynamics in the first quarter, we continued to invest in future growth initiatives. The team is making good progress on integrating the Wasatch Infusion acquisition, which we believe provides a tremendous platform in the growing Utah market, while also adding the unique patient infusion experience to our portfolio from which we can learn a great deal. We recently also closed on our acquisition of Specialty Pharmacy Nursing Networks or SPNN and we are excited about the national alternate site nursing platform we are establishing with our two recent acquisitions of Infinity Infusion Nursing and SPNN. We continue to believe this clinical platform will not only differentiate our nursing capabilities in the marketplace, but will also help enable future growth, especially amongst our chronic therapies. Regarding the SPNN acquisition, this is a unique team that has created a very robust clinical model to serve a broad array of customers including infusion pharmacies, specialty pharmacies, clinics and biopharmaceutical manufacturers. The Option Care Health team had a pre-existing and very constructive collaboration with SPNN and it was a natural progression for us to seek a stronger integration of our capability. We believe their model is distinct and highly complementary to our capabilities of our Infinity organization and we are just beginning to write the script on our unique national clinical platform take the back to bone. Reflecting back over the past 12 months, the team has executed on four strategic and economic acquisitions that have built upon the foundation we’ve established. Funded solely through free cash flow generation, these transactions have added commercial capabilities to our chronic strategy, help establish a national infusion nursing platform and expanded our infusion suite capability and we are just getting started. With our capital structure and strong cash flow, we continue to focus intensely on attractive acquisitions to further accelerate our growth. With our technology foundation and clinical expertise, I am confident in our ability to find attractive opportunities that will help further expand our presence in the ambulatory settings and post-acute space. So to wrap up my comments, while it is still early in the year, I am quite encouraged by the momentum coming out of the first quarter and the team is on track to deliver a very solid year. Despite a number of variables and risks that we continue to manage, we expect to perpetuate our track record of strong growth and accelerating cash flow in 2022. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Mike to review the results in a bit more detail. Mike?