Robert Ortenzio
Analyst · A.J. Rice representing UBS. Please proceed
Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone and thanks for joining us for Select Medical's second quarter earnings conference call for 2014. For our prepared remarks, I will provide some overall highlights for the company and our operating divisions and then ask our Chief Financial Officer, Marty Jackson to provide some additional financial details before we open up the call up for questions. Net revenue for the second quarter was $772.8 million compared to $756.7 million in the same quarter last year. During the quarter, we generated approximately 72% of our revenues from our specialty hospital segment, which includes both our long-term acute care and in-patient rehab hospitals and 28% from our outpatient rehabilitation segment, which includes both our outpatient rehabilitation clinics and our contract services. The results for both the second quarter of this year and last year reflect the impact of both sequestration and MPPR reductions that became effective on April 1, 2013. Net revenue on our specialty hospitals for the second quarter was $557.8 million compared to $559.4 million in the same quarter last year. In the second quarter we had over 330,000 patient days compared to over 341,000 days in the same quarter last year. All of the reductions in patient days were on our LTAC hospitals and a result of several factors, including two hospitals we closed, three hospitals we experienced some operational issues, and the retooling of our marketing program that we spoke about on our last earnings call. We believe the three hospitals where we had operational issues are back on track and we're making progress on our marketing plans. We expect these new marketing programs will provide additional compliant patients in the near future but will cause some variability in our senses as we implement the changes. Our occupancy rate was 69% compared to 73% in the second quarter last year. Our net revenue per patient day increased to $1,562 per day in the second quarter compared to $1,532 per patient day in the same quarter last year. We generated approximately 82% of our specialty hospital revenue from our long-term acute care hospitals and 18% in our in-patient rehab operations during the second quarter. Net revenue in our outpatient rehabilitation segment for the second quarter increased 9% to $214.8 million compared to $197.1 million in the same quarter last year. The growth was primarily the result of increased patient visits in our existing clinics and the addition of new clinics as well as the expansion of contract management services in our clinics and growth in our contract therapy operations. Net revenue in our outpatient clinic base business increased to $161.3 million compared to $150.8 million in the same quarter last year. For our owned clinics, patient visits increased 5.9% to almost 1.3 million visits compared to the same quarter last year. Our net revenue per visit was $103 in both the second quarter this year and last year. Net revenue in our contract therapy business in the second quarter increased to $53.5 million compared to $46.3 million in the same quarter last year. The increase resulted from new contracts and the expansion of services of existing contracts, which offset reductions from terminated contracts. Overall, adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter was $101.4 million compared to $106 million in the same quarter last year, with an overall adjusted EBITDA margin at 13.1% for the second quarter compared to 14% margin for the same quarter last year. I think it's important to note that during the quarter we incurred 3.9 million of startup losses, primarily on our newly opened LTACs. As we discussed during the last earnings call, we had to accelerate the opening of these startups, due to the recent legislation impending moratorium. Without these startup losses EBITDA would have been 105.3 million with an overall adjusted EBITDA margin of 13.6%. Specialty Hospitals adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter was $88.7 million, compared to $96.4 million in the same quarter last year. Adjusted EBITDA margin for the Specialty Hospitals segment was 15.9% compared to 17.2% in the same quarter last year. Outpatient rehabilitation adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter was $30.4 million compared to $26.1 million in the same quarter last year. Adjusted EBITDA margin for the outpatient segment was 14.2% in the second quarter compared with 13.2% in the same quarter last year. For the outpatient clinic portion of our business, adjusted EBITDA was $25.5 million in the second quarter, compared to $22.8 million in the same quarter last year. Adjusted EBITDA margin for outpatient clinics was 15.8% for the second quarter compared to 15.1% in the same quarter last year. For our contract services, adjusted EBITDA was $4.9 million for the second quarter compared to $3.3 million in the same quarter last year and the margin was 9.2% in the second quarter compared to 7.1% in the same quarter last year. We were very pleased to see another strong quarter of solid growth in our outpatient segment. Our reported earnings per fully diluted share was $0.27 in the second quarter of this year, compared to $0.20 in the same quarter last year. Our earnings per share for the second quarter of last year included non recurring loss on early retirement of debt. Excluding this loss and its related tax effects, adjusted income per common share was $0.27 in the second quarter of last year. I also want to provide a few updates since our first quarter earnings call in May. In conjunctions with our earnings release yesterday afternoon, the company announced that our Board of Directors declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.10 per share and its meeting on August 6. The dividend is expected to be paid on or about August 29, to shareholders of record on August 20th. During the second quarter the company also repurchased approximately 1.3 million shares of stock at $14 per share for a total cost of $18 million. I'm also very pleased with the progress we've made related to new joint venture activity this year. Since our announcement of the Cedars-Sinai UCLA rehab joint venture at the end of last year, we have signed four additional joint ventures this year, including partnerships with the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, Emory Healthcare in Atlanta, Georgia; TriHealth in Cincinnati, Ohio; and, recently, PinnacleHealth in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In addition, we expanded our services at our existing joint venture with Penn State Hershey Hospital expanding our rehab hospital with 22 additional rehab beds, as well as adding a transitional care unit. Over the past two quarters we have also added four additional LTAC hospitals comprising of total of 93 beds and added 21 beds to one of our existing facilities. We have several other LTACs currently in development that qualify in the moratorium on new LTACs and beds, which we expect to open over the next 12 months including as many as three additional new hospitals in the third quarter. These additional joint ventures and new LTAC hospitals provide us with the solid platform for growth in our specialty hospital segment over the next couple of years, as we prepare for implementation of patient criteria in our LTAC hospitals. During the past week, the final fiscal year 2015 CMS rules for long term acute care hospitals and in-patient rehab were released and were largely inline with expectations. There were several positive developments in the final rule compared with the proposed rule. But I should note that none of these positive changes are material this year but a good recognition, the agency does understand our perspective from time to time. For our rehab hospitals, CMS provides a lift – the lift of diagnostic codes used to determine presumptive compliance under the 60% rule. These changes to the 60% rule were delayed for a year giving us more time to comply with the new policy. For LTAC, CMS decided not to implement their new interrupted state policy which they proposed in May and they did eliminate the 5% readmissions policy from co-located providers as proposed. Also for LTACs, CMS decided that the LTAC rate should increase by 1.1% rather than the 0.8% that the agency proposed in May. Of course the big regulatory news on the horizon is the implementation of the new LTAC criteria, which will begin to take effect in the fall of 2015. We continue to prepare for the implementation of patient criteria in our LTAC hospitals, and the tougher, more restrictive definition of what patients are eligible for LTAC reimbursement under the criteria rules. As we mentioned on our first quarter call, this includes the analyzing market specific data around the types of compliant patients in the markets we serve. And determining the best way to ensure, we capture this patients referrals and provide the highest quality most cost effective care to those patients. We are continuing to explore our marketing to ensure we are well-positioned when criteria is fully implemented. While patient criteria implies a more restrictive environment in terms of eligible patient, it also provides certainty and clarity to a segment of our business that needed it. I'll now turn it over to Marty Jackson to cover some financial highlights for the quarter before we bring it back for some questions.