Ladies and gentlemen, the program is about to begin. At this time, it is my pleasure to turn the program over to your host, Joanna Gajuk. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us for the fifth annual Home Care Conference that I'm hosting today. And now it's my pleasure to host this session with BrightSpring. They're one of the largest, diversified home care providers in the U.S. And today with us in one room is Jon Rousseau, President and CEO, and also Jennifer Phipps, the CFO, joining us. So thanks so much for joining. And a note to the audience, I have a list of questions, so we're going to jump right into those. But if you want to ask your question, please use the ask question window in the webcast panel, and I'll be more than happy to add that to my list as well. So thanks, Jon and Jen, for joining us. So maybe just let's start with the specialty pharmacy. Clearly, that business continues to price to the upside, right?
The most recent guidance, when you compare it to the initial guidance for the pharmacy segment, right, the biggest segment, is almost like 9% or so higher than the initial guidance. So can you walk us through the sources of upside there in terms of what drove this outperformance? Is there any specific therapies that came in better or just more of these new contracts coming in? So just kind of shed some light on that outperformance.
Yeah, good morning, Joanna. Thank you. Yeah, I would say, you know, in terms of the year in 2025, you know, really surprisingly, already 11 months in at this point, wrapping up the year. But we have been able to realize and execute against really positive and broad-based growth across the preponderance of the company. Specialty has been a business that is, I would say, outperformed the most. But yeah, I would say big picture, we are the most pleased with the progress that we've continued to make across the entirety of the organization in our three pharmacy businesses and then our three main provider businesses in home health and hospice and rehab, in addition to really continuing to focus on operational process and lean and now AI initiatives in the organization.
So the three growth drivers historically of outsized volume growth, efficiency, leveraging the scale of the organization, and accretive M&A, you know, that has very much continued to be themes throughout now our ninth year here. And we expect those to continue into next year. Specialty has been a larger growth driver for us this year. It's been underpinned, as always, by really three things. Number one, you know, the service levels that we've invested in, which have resulted, I think, even in the most recent quarter here: the pulsing of the Net Promoter Score in the industry. I think it was a 96 Net Promoter Score from our customers most recently.
Just continuing to invest into our people and our processes to drive service levels that are at the highest possible levels for all of our manufacturing partners and our patients and the members of the payers and the PBMs that we serve. You know, I would say second, you know, long-standing relationships and partnerships with manufacturers, you know, that in addition to the service levels that we're able to execute against, you know, a lot of features and programs that we have with biopharma upstream that I think are very helpful and valuable to them. And then really third, we've continued to invest in clinical liaisons, several hundred out in the field every day, educating and working with prescribers and patients and families to really pull through the referrals to our pharmacy, you know, to try to give those patients and their prescribers the best possible experience.
And so, you know, those three underpinnings of the business have just continued to drive a very healthy year of partnering with our manufacturers as they deliver innovative new therapies, life-changing therapies to the market, and being able to be a chosen one or two pharmacy in network in these limited distribution networks with the manufacturing partners. I think at this point, there's been some 16 or 17 new drugs that have been launched this year where we've been a partner as an exclusive or one of two pharmacies in those networks. That's been a little bit of an acceleration versus the historical level of launches every year. But that's been good to see and great to see the innovation in the oncology pipeline continue. We do not see that changing in the near future.
I think there's still some $90 billion of drugs at the FDA that are hopefully expected to come to market over the next five-to-seven years. You know, as certain drugs have also gone off of their branded status over time and have converted to generic, you know, starting a couple of years ago, there were several drugs every year that were going to be going through that life cycle. We've continued to see that play out. And we do our best to drive generic utilization for prescribers and families when we see these events happening. And that's been helpful this year as well. You know, I would say too, something that we probably spend less time talking about or get questions on is our fee-for-service business continues to grow. You know, these are a product of something I mentioned before around our programs with biopharma.
But whether it's data agreements or clinical hubs that we're able to offer back to pharma, you know, that's something that we've continued to invest in. And you know, we've continued to grow. I think we're up to over about 15 clinical hubs now. And you know, we have service and data and agreements back with every one of our manufacturing partners as well. And so, you know, that's continued to be meaningful for us. And then our OpEx per script, you know, we've done, I think, a really nice job as the volume has continued to increase some 30% plus a year. You know, we've done a really nice job continuing to execute against an efficient internal process that delivers on really good service levels, but where we're seeing our OpEx per script continue to benefit.
No, thank you. There's a lot of things to unpack there. But I guess the interesting comment around the fee-for-service business and such. So would you say that that was another kind of acceleration this year that you've seen that would explain maybe some of it? I mean, it sounds like there was maybe more than usual in terms of new launches and things in generic conversions. But it sounds like maybe this fee-for-service business is growing also pretty rapidly. So is there some new push that you did this year?
No, I mean, that's just something that we've been really trying to build out over time. I mean, that's probably seeing, you know, sort of 40%, 50% growth this year in GP. It's still comparatively significantly smaller than just the core revenue in GP on any of the therapies. But that has been very much of a specific focus for our team and trying to build out as valuable a set of service offerings as we can for all of the manufacturing partners upstream and trying to differentiate in that way. So it has been a focus. And we've probably seen growth in that area, albeit smaller part of our business. We have seen growth in that area be a little bit higher than the growth in the total business. And that's something that will stay front and center for us.
Right. And to that point, the specialty pharmacy revenue has been growing, like you said, 40% or so year to date, and on top of 40% last year and 30% in 2023. So essentially, the question is, you know, how much longer can you grow at these levels, at these percentages, I guess?
Yeah. Look, I mean, that's, you know, obviously really been a function of, you know, when you look at that growth rate versus the growth rate of a therapeutic category in specialty writ large, you know, it is higher. But you really have to break down the different segments, I would say, of the industry and the value chain. You know, about half of specialty products go through hospitals, and about the other half goes through the specialty pharmacy, the SP segment where we are. And then you really have to ultimately go therapy by therapy.
And so, you know, based on the investments that we've been making and our commitment to service levels and programs, you know, when new drugs have been coming to market and, you know, we've been really honored to win the preponderance of those in limited networks, you know, that's obviously having a disproportionate effect on market share in terms of the flow of innovative new therapies coming to market and participating in those comparatively. You know, that's having a positive effect from a market share perspective. You know, also good for everybody are generics. And as generics have converted, we really do our best with our sales force out there every day to educate and help be a quick partner to bring those therapies to offices and their patients and families.
And so I think those are the things that have been helpful in driving a growth rate that's been higher than the industry. You know, look, I think, you know, as we look out to some more of the brands converting to generic in the future, we continue to see a very steady and healthy stream of innovative new products coming to market. So I don't know that we see any fundamental changes to therapies and LDDs coming to market. But I would say some of the brands that have converted to generic, you know, when you look back, you know, historically, you know, have been some of the more significant brands. And, you know, while there are more brands converting to generic in the future, you know, I don't know that the magnitude of them might be quite as significant.
So, look, part of it too is just that the math, you know, as a business continues to scale, you know, are you able to grow at certain rates? I mean, you know, if you look at the history of health services, frankly, anything more than 5%-6% growth rate and you were kind of a hero, particularly at size. I think when we were going public, if I'm remembering now, flashback, I think all of our advisors told us that there was one other company that had been north of $400 million of EBITDA that had a, you know, that had a three to five or seven-year CAGR that was higher, that was in double digits. And so, you know, it's, you know, certainly not only growing at our historical CAGR of 15% when we went public. Now that's been elevated based on the last couple of years.
You know, we already thought that, you know, that was pretty strong performance and in rarefied air to begin with. You know, being able to grow at some of the rates here over the last two years and into the 30s this year, you know, I just think from a scale and a math perspective, that becomes extremely difficult, you know, as you continue getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And I don't even think that that would be expected. But, you know, for us, continuing to target our historical CAGR, you know, at 15% a year, you know, that's exactly what we want to do, driving the opportunities we have across many of our businesses where we operate in huge markets that are still very fragmented.
You know, our focus here is just continuing to deepen in every one of our markets and every one of our businesses and then continue to expand into adjacent geographies. And when you look at our businesses and the size of these markets, you know, that takes you a really long way. I mean, we look at a lot of our businesses and think, you know, most of them can be double or triple where they are now in five to seven years. And that's our focus. And that's what we keep trying to execute on through investments in people, technology, and quality and sales and marketing. So, you know, as we sit here today, you know, barring anything unexpected, you know, we see our current performance in Q4, you know, being consistent with earlier parts of the year. And we don't see that changing into next year.
But as you look out beyond next year and three to five years from now, you know, it just gets very difficult. And there's just a lot of unknowns, obviously, in the world, you know, where we're reticent to sort of, you know, make those sort of long-term projections, you know, vis-à-vis current growth rates. But, you know, we are committed to and feel good about growing at our historical CAGR, you know, into the future. And I think our scale has been very helpful from a cash and a leverage perspective. We're excited about that going forward. And, you know, we will always continue to try to do our best. And if we have years where we have more elevated growth rates, that's great. But we're, in addition to being able to grow, what we've done more than anything this year is continue to try to table set, right?
We're investing heavily into IT and AI. We continue to invest in key positions and people, you know, to try to grow, you know, three, five years out.
And I guess when it comes to, like you said, going faster in some of these end markets, so is there any speculation who you're taking share from? I mean, it's highly likely the smaller guys, but any kind of indications of where you, I guess, taking share from? And I guess to that point, there's, you know, obviously interest in oncology from others too. And I guess the question is, you know, would you be interested in, say, owning oncology clinics at all?
Yeah, you know, you know, we just continue to try to keep our head down from a service level and a programmatic standpoint, partnering with, you know, everybody across the value chain, and you know, as we continue to be hopefully a value-add partner as new therapies are coming to market, you know, that's really been at the core, I think, of our growth rate along with, you know, being able to try to bring new generic therapies to patients and families as fast as we can, and you know, that's really been the function there. You know, in terms of, you know, the oncologists out there, obviously, that's been an active space among, you know, some of the wholesalers and others.
You know, for us, I think we really just view that as being the best partner we possibly can, you know, from a daily education, daily support perspective, hundreds of our liaisons out in thousands and thousands of offices every day. You know, we've got 10 to 15-year relationships or more in most cases, and you know, can we be the best possible partner to help all of those prescribers, you know, achieve their goals and their outcomes, objectives? That's really our focus today.
And maybe you mentioned a pipeline of new drugs, the $90 billion or so. So kind of, you know, can you help us also understand the two forces? Like you said, there's the new pipeline of drugs, but there's the generic conversion. So kind of when you put those things together, how should we think about the revenue, I guess, you know, squaring those two forces, right? And also can you, yeah, maybe talk a little bit more about these generic conversions? Sounds like you're thinking that the kind of the dollars in terms of the branded conversions are kind of maybe smaller than maybe what you experienced the last couple of years.
You know, it's, I guess, just, you know, very healthy, you know, in pharma that, you know, you always, you know, in any therapeutic category and, you know, just the history of pharma has been, you know, there's a ton of innovation. It's the same thing for, you know, other parts of healthcare. There's just a ton of innovation that continues to occur, thankfully. And there's, you know, there's patents for that. And then over time, you know, those will expire. And then things convert generic. So, you know, that's going to continue to play out. And, you know, it'll just always create this complementary dynamic of new innovative therapies coming to market with older brands rolling off. And, you know, that will just continue, you know, out, you know, into the future for, you know, a long period of time. That's how the industry works.
You know, we are seeing biopharma, you know, continue to be even more innovative and more specialized, a little bit more niche in the therapies, you know, for target patient populations that they're bringing to market, and you know, there's some really interesting rare and orphan therapies that are coming to market that, you know, are incredibly impactful for these populations of individuals with these conditions, but you're seeing a lot of that and just more and more innovation, you know, upstream in biopharma, so you know, that's exciting. It is a little bit more niche in the approach, but you know, but we will continue to try to do everything we can to be, you know, a partner in all of these areas, even things like cell and gene therapy.
So, you know, always trying to, you know, stay ahead of, you know, what's happening next, looking out three, four, five years. And, yeah, some of the generics in the past couple of years that have launched have been, you know, some of the really big brands. But, you know, you look out even five years from now, Imbruvica, you know, is a huge brand drug that will convert even five years out. So there, you know, there will be continued conversions well out into the future. And I mean, look, it's just natural, you know, some drugs that are launching are bigger and smaller. Some drugs that are converting are bigger than smaller. You know, so your growth rate's going to bounce around. But the fundamental underpinning of the dynamics of the market, you know, I think is really interesting for, you know, for a long time.
I guess when we talk about these generic conversions and such, we can see the other metric you mentioned, the OpEx per script, but gross profit per script, right, has been growing very nicely. It sounds like that's benefiting from that generic conversion you alluded to. Can you walk us through, you know, how quickly gross margins percentages improve after a conversion and kind of any other dynamics around these conversions in terms of how we think about the timing of, you know, when those things flow through into your economics?
Yeah, I mean, and I think part of the GP, you know, you know, I think maybe it's been about a point over the last year or two. I mean, part of that has also been from some of these fee-for-service programs and offerings that we have. So, you know, that's in that number two. And we've been real focused on that. But.
I think as well the mix of specialties, so specialty has grown at a faster pace than, for example, our home and community pharmacy, and as that has grown at a faster pace from a script standpoint, from a percentage, that does impact as well just from a mix standpoint, just like the revenue growth as well has skewed higher. That has been a function of higher specialty growth.
Yeah. And part, I guess, of your specialty is also infusion, right? Sounds like that's the next area of outsized growth that you expect. I mean, I guess you're starting with a smaller base, right? Can you walk us through kind of how do you envision that? And does this require more investments to really kind of execute on that 20% growth that you alluded to, that you expect in EBITDA and that piece?
Yeah. No, it's a great question. Infusion is a business that we are enthused about. You know, we've talked a little bit about how that one's been a little bit more sideways in the last two years. And as we've gone through, I guess I would call it, you know, a re-engineering of the business, if you will. Maybe for those who, you know, haven't heard that story, you know, infusion, always a great reputation, good business, good quality, 95% customer satisfaction, patients finishing their therapy with us, really good quality. But when we came together with PharMerica, hard to believe, six and a half years ago, you know, that was just, you know, one of the businesses that we kind of rolled up the sleeves, you know, as we just worked through an order. We just got to at the end of the line a couple of years ago.
For 30 years, they had just set up their pharmacies locally, and they were all operating kind of their own way. You know, just in terms of being able to scale, and that, you know, in a lot of ways, that's productive. I mean, you have to have a local approach, but, you know, you can very much also standardize around best practice. That's what we wanted to do immediately and to be able to scale the business just faster. Because the volume growth was there, but the costs were really increasing too. Getting more control, getting more standardization was the focus. You know, as you may be able to imagine, you can't just snap your fingers and, you know, change a process that's been in place for 30 years across 35 locations. That's been about a two-year effort.
But I can say right now, you know, it's gone well in terms of where we are today. Their third quarter was a very good quarter. We're starting to see it finally flow through the financials in terms of not only good volume growth, but now that volume growth, you know, being executed against in a more efficient manner. Q4 will be another good quarter. I mean, we're going through, you know, finalization of budgets here. But look, they're down in the budget to be growing, you know, well over 30%-35% next year from an EBITDA perspective. Now, you know, it's on a lower number, but we have, you know, very ambitious goals for that business. We're looking at both acute and specialty.
You know, a lot of folks in the infusion world, probably with the exception of the big public player who we have a lot of respect for, a lot of folks really just focus on a handful of niche therapies or specialty and chronic drugs. You know, we really want to also focus on acute as much as we can. That's a huge market. You know, acute therapies, there won't be a lot of change with them. You know, they're nowhere on the radar screen. There's no, you know, from a pricing perspective, there's no biosimilar risk there. And so we continue to want to go deep on acute while we also, and that's where our history has more been.
And so, for us, you know, when you look at the chronic specialty side, you know, where, you know, a lot of the smaller companies have really tried to focus on, you know, we haven't had as much history there. So we are focused on building out some of the chronic therapies as well. And we're excited about both of those worlds, acute and chronic and specialty. You know, we are sort of reinventing, if you will, you know, 30 of our AISs, some of the clinic and suite settings, making them, you know, more consumer-friendly. But we want to have many, many, many more of those over the next five years. So for us, we're taking an approach of acute and chronic in the home and in suites. And we think that gives us the biggest addressable market. We think that gives us the most relevance with payers.
And, you know, we have a really great team in there, really, since the early part of end of Q1 of this year. That's doing a really nice job. So super excited about the business. We think infusion is a great market, provides incredibly valuable services. At some point, Medicare patients, that Cures Act, I think will get remedied and fixed so that more Medicare patients can be seen in the home like they should. And we're seeing some good momentum in that business. We've had just a real focus on operational process around a model. And we're probably in the seventh inning of that, but some good momentum there. I think in a lot of ways, that could be one of our highest growth businesses here, if not the highest growth over the next five to seven years.
And I guess in order to do that, I mean, it sounds like you have a nice footprint when it comes to pharmacies. So do you anticipate, you know, the need to acquire more assets or will this be more de novo? And I guess on labor, is your model in terms of employing the nurses that go into homes or you use the third-party staffing?
Yeah, I think it'll be consistent with what I said before, you know, both penetration of where you are. I mean, there's some states where, you know, we could have 10 times the share, like, you know, where, you know, we're scratching the surface. I mean, we've got six or seven states in particular where we're pretty deep, but we can do a lot more where we are. And then we will absolutely look to expand probably to six or seven more states in particular. You know, there's some really big states out there where we don't have a presence yet. So it's both a go deeper and go broader strategy, like for all of our businesses. And that's exciting. And from a labor perspective, we're 90% our own nurses. We try to contract as little as we can.
I think that's helpful, and I guess on the other piece of your pharmacy business, right, the home community pharmacy, a couple of, you know, headwinds, I guess, this year from the bankruptcy of Genesis and such, but, you know, should we expect a little bit of overhang into next year from that? And also, can you talk about the core growth in that business?
Yeah, that and obviously IRA are the headwinds in that business. You know, outside of those two things, the business is doing awesome. And so, so look, we just continue to focus on controlling what we can, trying to work with the good guys out there and making sure that we ultimately, you know, have the most cost-optimized, efficient operational infrastructure and processes that we can. I would say in the whole world of automation and AI, you know, that pharmacy intake process, pharmacy revenue cycle, that is just where a ton of our energy is right now. And super exciting to look at all of those initiatives and where we expect those to be.
You know, unfortunately, a lot of the benefits of that next year that we are expecting, you know, will get eaten up a little bit by any of the IRA impact, assuming IRA is not addressed, and that's still an open question, but we always plan for, you know, a certain scenario, you know, to make sure we're prepared, but a lot of progress, you know, around, you know, continued automation and AI investments in that business. Look, we just think in LTC pharmacy, you know, like all of pharmacy scale is massively important. You know, if IRA is not fixed here as it should be, it's ridiculous, you know, what IRA is potentially doing to LTC pharmacies. It really is, and it was a complete miss, and, you know, we've been educating on it for the last two years, but it's set to go live one-on-one.
The government shutdown did not help. There, you know, is a ton of sympathy and understanding now for the issue, but there needs to be a resolution, and so we're still, you know, trying to work through that, trying to talk to people who get it, who want to do the right thing, but we are prepared either way, and, you know, that's why for the last year, we've been laser-focused on a ton of automation and cost initiatives, and outside of sort of the one-off Genesis-type situations, which are very unfortunate, sadly, that kind of occurs, you know, we have really good performance from, you know, a broad customer base where, you know, we continue to be viewed as a really high-quality pharmacy out there, so, but, you know, skilled nursing is only one end market within LTC pharmacy. Senior living is a great end market.
Behavioral IDD is a great end market. Our hospice pharmacy is just a world-class leader in hospice pharmacy, getting into place more and more. Detox, I mean, there are a lot of, I mean, think about all the places where people, complex acute patients need their drugs, completely different from you and me walking into CVS or Walgreens. And those are significant needs in big markets. And so there's a lot of attractive ones. So our long-term home community pharmacy strategy is to build an infrastructure and a platform that can be the most efficient and then execute as best we can in sales and marketing to drive as much volume across all of these end markets as we can. And we think ultimately that's going to be a winning strategy.
You know, any of the IRA impact of unresolved that is very bound within, you know, our plans for next year. You know, we feel like we'll be able to, you know, we'll be able to grow through that, you know, across the breadth of our organization.
Okay. That was great. That was my follow-up question, whether you expect to grow despite the IRA, but it sounds like, yeah, I guess.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And look, I think that's where the benefits of our scale, our complementary diversification, our accretive M&A, you know, these are the things that have driven our organization for a long period of time. Volume growth, economies of scale driven by our platform, volume growth coming from the diversification of related businesses. You've got accretive M&A. And, you know, that's a playbook that works. And we just have to continue to execute against those three underpinnings while in the future, hopefully adding a fourth, which is more value-based care, like no risk necessarily, but shared savings. You know, we've got to get, you know, that primary care. It's not a linchpin to our future, but it could be something that would be a really interesting adder, you know, driving more home-based primary care, driving more patients into ACO shared saving constructs.
You know, we're still working on that too, and hopefully that care management angle will be just an adder in a fourth growth driver as we look out into the future, but you know, continuing to execute against, you know, what we've seen work historically, but you know, it takes a lot of hard work across all of those fronts in each one of the businesses every day, but you know, we see more and more, you know, the benefits of having these businesses under one umbrella and, you know, as we just continue to try to focus on operational excellence.
Right. And I guess we have only a few minutes left, but on the provider segment, right? So hospice is the biggest piece there, right? And BrightSpring there has been pretty stable. And I want to say in the past, you talk about the end market, the hospice market going five to 10. So kind of how do you expect the company, the BrightSpring hospice business to grow relative to the industry? And also, you know, is there something to be said about acquisitions?
Yeah. So we do expect our provider business to continue to grow at really outsized to the volume growth that we would expect in the end market. So that would include hospice. We are doing that by really having some of the highest quality services in each of those different business lines. And we believe that that is a critical success factor for our ability to grow in these markets as high-quality services are really important to our customers. And so we're really focused on those quality measures, and we think that that's going to allow us to continue to grow. We do see hospice continuing to grow. It has received really strong rate support, which we know, which is beneficial.
But from a volume and an ADC perspective, we continue to see and have really focused areas to go deeper in the markets that we're serving and just being able to continue to grow underpinned by those high-quality services.
Yeah, hospice is a good example where we see our patients more, you know, considerably more than the industry. We don't put quite as much burden on our nurses from a staffing perspective. And if we can get a really healthy culture and quality built around those things, you know, let's try to serve as many people as we can with these incredible services. We're also further building out our palliative program, which is, you know, a really strong program in quite a few states. And we're looking to take that into all our states by the end of this next year.
Great. That's interesting. Okay. So there's some other things you're doing there. But if I may, on the home health piece, right? So we got the final reg out, right? That looks better, much better than proposal, but still it's a negative net update, right? So that's not great. So does that change kind of how you're thinking about that business at all? And does it change your appetite, you know, to do more acquisitions there? Because I guess now, you know, there's still, you know, something that's pending, right, in terms of the closure. But kind of after that, how are you thinking about that business and growing that?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, look, it was very pleasing to see the final rule come out where, you know, there was some real levelheadedness, and I think, and I think, you know, an example, I think a testament to CMS seeing the clear value in home health. I mean, if there's anything I've seen in home health, I mean, just, you know, you know, the ability for hospice to reduce costs and improve quality of living, the ability to reduce hospitalizations and visits with really good med management, where people are on the home and community pharmacy side, and then what home health does for mortality rates and to keep people out of hospitals. I mean, it's just, it's just black and white, and it's an incredible, it's incredibly powerful data.
So I think there was, you know, I think that that rule being reined in a little bit was a testament to the value of home health. You know, they did say in that rule that, you know, it is the end of permanent rate cuts. So that's good as well. And, you know, we would expect rate increases in the future, except for, and we'll see what happens with any of these clawbacks, right? So, you know, that now becomes your singular issue is what do those recoupments look like to, you know, to get back at what, you know, CMS has said they believe there were overpayments back during COVID and due to some fraudsters out there. So we'll see about that piece. But there was very good news around permanent rate cuts going away.
You know, so that'll be something that we'll have to continue to get worked out. I think the industry needs to continue to do a better and better job of educating on the benefits of home health. You know, we can't just keep cutting these services while costs go up 5% a year and you have these incredible outcomes that are keeping people out of the hospital. I mean, it's the exact opposite of what you should be doing. You should be funding this industry as much as you can and making sure that the ethical and highly compliant providers, you know, are not being sort of the babies being thrown out with the bathwater and some of this stuff. So we're optimistic that longer term, you know, rates will be where they need to be, you know, given the value and the benefit of the industry.
I think there's more and more advocacy coalescing around this. We have to use the data to continue to tell the story in black and white. But prior to this acquisition of the divested Amedisys and LHC branches, we were very conservative in home health. I mean, we had bought just a tiny amount of branches over the last six years, and it was an organic build. And we've just been really waiting to see, you know, what does the home health rate landscape look like in the future? And hopefully, you know, it gets to where it used to be and where it should be to drive, you know, to drive the impact for the patients that they need and to reduce costs for the overall healthcare system. But we've been waiting to see how this plays out before making any sort of big moves.
Now, the Amedisys and LHC acquisition of those divested branches, that was just a situation where we saw an opportunity to be a partner there that was so unique. You know, the geographical fit was so hand in glove. It was just truly kind of a once-in-every-30-years sort of situation that you have that we felt like we needed to lean into. Those branches have been very well run, historically really high-quality Star Ratings. And so that's an exciting situation for us to step into as it relates to future acquisitions in that space. You know, we have just a ton of acquisition opportunities across all of our businesses. I think in home health, we will continue now to wait and see, you know, what happens long-term on the home health rates in the industry.
And we will really focus on driving just great integration of these acquired branches here in 2026 and make sure that we achieve all of our goals around those.
Great. I think this is all the time we have. Even though there's other things we would like to cover. But thank you so much, Jen and Jon, for joining us today. And thanks, everyone. And please stick around for our next session.
Thanks, Joanna.
Thank you.
Have a good day.
Thank you.