Robert Ortenzio
Analyst · RBC Capital Markets. You may begin
Thank you, operator and good morning everyone. Thanks for joining us for Select Medical's third 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 Marty Jackson to provide some additional financial details and then we’ll open the call up for questions. Net revenue for the third quarter was $758.1 million compared to $722.8 million in the same quarter last year. During the quarter, we generated approximately 73% of our revenues from our specialty hospital segment, which includes both our long-term acute care and in-patient rehab hospitals and 27% from our outpatient rehab segment, which includes both our outpatient rehab clinics and our contract services. Our results for both the third 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 third quarter increased 4.5% to $556.3 million compared to $532.6 million in the same quarter last year. In the third quarter we had a little over 332,000 patient days compared to 336,000 days in the same quarter last year. The majority of the decline in patient days was related to two hospitals that we had closed. Notwithstanding these closures, admissions in our specialty hospitals were 13,787 in the third quarter, consistent with the 13,778 admissions we experienced in the same quarter last year. Our net revenue per patient day increased to $1543 per day in the third quarter compared to $1471 per day in the same quarter last year. We experienced an increase in both our Medicare and non-Medicare net revenues per patient day. We generated approximately 82% of our specialty hospital revenue from our long-term acute care hospitals and 18% in our inpatient rehabilitation operations during the third quarter. Net revenue in our outpatient rehab segment for the third quarter increased 6% to $201.7 million compared to $190.2 million in the same quarter last year. The increase was the result of growth in our patient visits, expansion of our contracted management services in our clinic business and revenue growth in our contract therapy business. Net revenue in our outpatient clinic base business increased to $154.3 million compared to $147.3 million in the same quarter last year. For our owned clinics, patient visits increased 3.6% to over 1.2 million visits compared to the same quarter last year. Our net revenue per visit was $103 in both the third quarter this year and last year. Net revenue in our contract therapy business in the third quarter increased to $47.4 million compared to $42.9 million in the same quarter last year. The increase resulted from new contracts and expansion of services of existing contracts, which offset reductions from terminated contracts. Overall, adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter was $86.8 million compared to $80.4 million in the same quarter last year, with overall adjusted EBITDA margins at 11.5% for the third quarter compared to 11.1% margin for the same quarter last year. Specialty Hospital adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter was $81 million, compared to $75.3 million in the same quarter last year. Adjusted EBITDA margins for the Specialty Hospital segment was 14.6% compared to 14.1% in the same quarter last year. I also wanted to note during the quarter we incurred $3.9 million of start up losses in our newly opened LTCHs and incurred an incremental [Indiscernible] $1 million losses related to a recently closed LTCHs. Outpatient rehab adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter was $23 million compared to $21.6 million in the same quarter last year. Adjusted EBITDA margin for the outpatient segment was 11.4% in both the third quarter of this year and last year. For the outpatient clinic portion of our business, adjusted EBITDA was $20.9 million for the third quarter, compared to $19.1 million in the same quarter last year. Adjusted EBITDA margin for our outpatient clinics was 13.6% for the third quarter compared to 13% in the same quarter last year. For our contract services, adjusted EBITDA was $2.1 million for the third quarter compared to $2.5 million in the same quarter last year. The decline in contract services adjusted EBITDA was primarily related to an increase in bad debt expense, which is the result of a customer bankruptcy. Our reported earnings per fully diluted share was $0.20 in the third quarter of this year compared to $0.17 in the same quarter last year. I also want to provide a couple of updates since our second quarter earnings call in August. In conjunction with our earnings release yesterday afternoon, the company announced that our Board of Directors declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.10 per share at its meeting on October 29. The dividend is expected to be paid on or about December 1, to stockholders of record on November 19. I would also like to provide an update on our rehab joint-venture development activities. Renovations on our 138-bed rehabilitation hospital joint-venture in Los Angeles with UCLA and Cedars-Sinai is progressing and we expect opening in late 2015. Our joint-venture with Cleveland Clinic, which was signed in the second quarter is progressing well and we expect groundbreaking on a new 60 bed rehab hospital sometime in the fourth quarter. Our joint venture with Emory University closed July 1, and we have had great success integrating our outpatient and LTCH operations with Emory’s LTCH inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation. Our joint-venture with PinnacleHealth Systems in Central Pennsylvania, which we signed in the third quarter of this year, should close during the fourth quarter after regulatory approvals and we have begun integrating their 55 bed rehab hospital and eight outpatient locations with our 15 outpatient locations. Overall we feel good about our progress and growth in this area as well as our pipeline. Also the previously mentioned our expectation to add 284 additional LTCH beds through expansion projects in new hospitals. We now expect this to be 250 new beds in total, which are in part offset by closures we mentioned. We still have one additional LTCH we plan to open this year and one in the second quarter of next year. Finally I have got to offer this update on government affairs. On October 10, CMS released final instructions on how the agency plans to enforce the LTCH moratorium, which was contained in the December criteria legislation. The CMS regional offices and their intermediaries use these instructions to process exceptions to the LTCH moratorium. The instructions generally restated what we already knew based upon earlier guidance and rulemaking. However, CMS is also using this final instruction to introduce one new interpretation of the law, which has the effect of expanding the LTCH moratorium in one respect. The new moratorium policy announced by CMS will require that new beds at new satellite facilities come from existing complement of LTCH beds, i.e. this new – this is a new interpretation with CMS now saying that we will prohibit any increase in beds even though a site might otherwise meet the criteria for a moratorium. As a result, an LTCH hospital that has established a new satellite must reduce beds elsewhere in the LTCH hospital in order to have beds at the new location. We disagree with this policy and believe it was not contemplated by the legislation. While we are questioning the policy with CMS, the implication is that some of our new LTCH projects that were planned to open as satellites may need to open as new independent LTCH exceptions to the legislative moratorium, and incur losses during their start-up period. We estimate the additional losses would be approximately $3 million in the fourth quarter with additional losses next year. I'll now turn it over to Marty Jackson to cover some additional financial highlights for the quarter before we open it up for questions.