Please stand by. Your program is about to begin. If you need assistance on today's call, please press star zero. Good morning, everyone, welcome to Encompass Health's first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. At this time, I would like to inform all participants that their lines will be in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer period. If you would like to ask a question during this time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. You will be limited to one question and one follow-up question. Today's conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I'm gonna now turn the call over to Mark Miller, Encompass Health's Chief Investor Relations Officer.
Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining Encompass Health's first quarter 2023 earnings call. Before we begin, if you do not already have a copy, the first quarter earnings release, supplemental information, and related Form 8-K filed with the SEC are available on our website at encompasshealth.com. On page two of the supplemental information, you will find the safe harbor statements, which are also set forth in greater detail on the last page of the earnings release. During the call, we will make forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control.
Certain risks and uncertainties, like those relating to regulatory developments as well as volume, bad debt, and labor cost trends that could cause actual results to differ materially from our projections, estimates, and expectations are discussed in the company's SEC filings, including the earnings release in related Form 8-K, the Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022, and the Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31st, 2023 when filed. We encourage you to read them. You're cautioned not to place undue reliance on the estimates, projections, guidance, and other forward-looking information presented, which are based on current estimates of future events and speak only as of today. We do not undertake a duty to update these forward-looking statements. Our supplemental information and discussion on this call will include certain non-GAAP financial measures.
For such measures, reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP measure is available at the end of the supplemental information, at the end of the earnings release, and as part of the Form 8-K filed yesterday with the SEC, all of which are available on our website. I would like to remind everyone that we will adhere to the one question and one follow-up question rule to allow everyone to submit a question. If you have additional questions, please feel free to put yourself back in the queue. With that, I'll turn the call over to Mark Tarr, Encompass Health's President and Chief Executive Officer.
Thank you, Mark. Good morning, everyone. We're very pleased with our first quarter results, which once again exhibited strong volume growth and substantial year-over-year improvement in labor costs. Our first quarter revenues increased 9.5%. Adjusted EBITDA increased 17.5%. Demand for IRF services remained strong. We have continued to invest in capacity additions to meet the needs of patients requiring inpatient rehabilitation services. We opened three de novos in the first quarter and a fourth de novo earlier this month, adding a total of 199 beds. Over the balance of the year, we plan to open three more de novos and add 93 beds to existing hospitals. Our Fitchburg, Wisconsin de novo, originally scheduled to open in Q4 of this year, has been moved to Q1 of 2024 due to weather-related construction delays.
We continue to build and maintain an active pipeline of de novo projects, both wholly owned and joint ventures with acute care hospitals. We currently have 18 de novos under development with opening dates beyond 2023. This pipeline includes Danbury, Connecticut, for which we recently received approval for a certificate of need. Danbury will be our first hospital in the state of Connecticut, and we look forward to providing high-quality IRF services to patients in this market. During Q1, we again met the increase in demand for our services while reducing contract labor and sign-on and shift bonus expenditures. Contract labor was down approximately $21 million or 51% from Q1 of 2022, while sign-on and shift bonuses decreased approximately $5 million or 23% from Q1 of 2022.
On a sequential basis, contract labor and sign-on and shift bonus expenditures were similar to Q4 of 2022. Compared to Q4, contract labor rates were lower, but FTEs increased primarily due to higher patient volumes. Our talent acquisition efforts resulted in 54 same-store net new RN hires in Q1. Earlier this month, CMS issued the 2024 IRF proposed rule. This included a net market basket update of 3%. We estimate would result in a 2.9% increase for our IRFs beginning October 1st of 2023. The IRF final rule is expected to be released in late July or early August. We are continuing to invest in our hospital-based technology through initiatives like our Tablo onsite dialysis rollout.
We now offer in-house dialysis in 64 of our hospitals, and we'll continue to roll out in 2023. Reducing our reliance on third-party providers and obviating patient transport to receive this service leads to fewer disruptions to therapy schedules and improved patient outcomes and satisfaction. Onsite dialysis via Tablo also reduces our cost for these services. Moving now to guidance. We are increasing our guidance for 2023. We now expect net operating revenue of $4.7 billion-$4.77 billion, Adjusted EBITDA of $870 million-$910 million, and adjusted earnings per share of $2.94-$3.23. The key considerations underlying our guidance can be found on page 12 of the supplemental slides.
Finally, I want to remind investors that we are planning to host an investor day in New York City on September 27th, 2023. At that meeting, we will provide more detailed insights into key elements of our strategy, including de novo hospitals, clinical technologies, and labor management. Please mark your calendars for September 27. Details will follow in the days ahead, and we hope to see you there. Now I'll turn it over to Doug for some further color on the quarter.
Thank you, Mark. Good morning, everyone. As Mark stated, we were very pleased with our Q1 results. Revenue for the quarter increased 9.5% over the prior year to $1.16 billion, and Adjusted EBITDA increased 17.5% to $229 million. We continued to see strong volume growth in Q1. Total discharges grew 9.4%, and same-store discharges grew 5.9%. As we've mentioned previously, in the summer of 2021, when the clinical labor market began tightening and contract labor and shift bonuses started to rise, we made the strategic decision to continue staffing our hospitals at levels sufficient to accommodate the increasing demand from IRF-appropriate patients, even when it required premium cost labor to do so.
We have persisted in this approach, thereby allowing our hospitals to provide value to our patients, referral sources, and payers. As a result, our value proposition continues to resonate, and we are experiencing gains in market share. As Mark Tarr noted, we made significant improvement in year-over-year labor cost in Q1. Our Q1 contract labor plus sign-on shift bonuses of $37 million was comprised of $20.7 million in contract labor and $16.3 million in sign-on and shift bonuses. Contract labor in Q1 declined approximately $21.2 million or 51% from Q1 of 2022. Agency rates declined year-over-year and sequentially.
Our Q1 2023 agency rate per FTE was $183,000, down from $240,000 in Q1 2022 and $211,000 in Q4 2022. We expected rates to moderate from Q4 once we got past the premium pay associated with holiday shifts. The reduction in rates is a favorable sign and indicates the overall market for contract labor is improving. We are optimistic that the end of the public health emergency next month, and with it the cessation of the COVID stipend paid to acute care hospitals, will inject further discipline into the market.
We indicated previously that the seasonality of our business and capacity growth via new hospitals and bed expansions could lead to a sequential increase in contract labor FTEs in Q1 of 2023, and that is what we experienced. Our contract labor FTEs increased from 325 in December to 520 in March. This was attributable to volume growth and seasonality. As evidence of our progress in managing contract labor, in March of this year, we had 230 fewer contract labor FTEs than in March of 2022 against an increase of 395 in our average daily census. We believe that the level of contract labor expense we experienced in Q1 represents an approximate quarterly run rate for the balance of 2023.
This does not represent the height of our aspirations, and we will maintain our focus on further reducing contract labor FTEs and expense. Sign-on and shift bonuses decreased $4.8 million or 23% from Q1 of 2022 and increased modestly sequentially. We also believe that Q1 sign-on and shift bonus expense represents a reasonable quarterly run rate expectation for the rest of 2023. Revenue reserves related to bad debt as a percent of revenue increased 20 basis points to 2.4%, as we experienced increased pre- and post-payment claim review activity during the quarter. In addition to TPE, CMS recently initiated an audit program using Supplemental Medical Review Contractors, or SMRCs.
Under this program, CMS has authorized the SMRCs to conduct widespread post-payment reviews of IRF claims with dates of service from March of 2020 through December of 2020. Under the SMRCs audit program, we have thus far received approximately 1,000 record requests at 30 locations, totaling approximately $21 million in claims. To date, we have received initial results on 11 of these locations, and the results have been favorable. Of the approximately $8.8 million in claims covered by these results, approximately 78% have already been approved without being subject to another level of appeal.
While the results so far have been favorable, we are still objecting to the time period of this review, the initial phase of the public health emergency, and to the interpretations of medical necessity criteria serving as the basis for denied claims. As has been the case with prior audits, we remain confident in the clinical judgment supporting the admission of patients into our hospitals, as well as with the veracity and thoroughness of required documentation. EPOB for the quarter was 3.32, an increase from 3.28 in Q1 of 2022. EPOB is typically lower in the first quarter due to higher volumes. Our guidance assumes EPOB to be approximately 3.40 for Q2 through Q4 of this year.
Q1 de novo net pre-opening and ramp-up costs totaled $4.2 million, we continue to expect $10 million-$12 million of these costs for the full year. Finally, we ended Q1 with a net leverage ratio of 3.1x , down from 3.4 at the end of 2022. With that, we'll open the lines for Q&A.
At this time, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Again, that is star one on your telephone keypad. Please note, you will be limited to one question and one follow-up question. Thank you. We'll take a question from Kevin Fischbeck of Bank of America. Your line is open.
Hello, Kevin.
Hello. Great. Thanks. Morning. I just wanted to dig into some of your labor comments because, obviously your guidance, you raised the wage outlook, and you're looking for contract and sign-on bonuses to kind of be similar from here through the rest of the year. It seems like most of the other companies seem to be talking about, you know, modest improvement in these metrics as the year goes on. I'd just love to hear a little bit about why, you know, the wage gap got worse and why you're not expecting improvement on that?
Yes. Kevin, I think we'd point to a couple of things. One is, I think we had made more progress on a relative basis than perhaps some of our peers, and I think we've also been exhibiting higher volume growth, and adding more capacity to our base. Those things do factor in. Wanna reiterate a comment I made in my prepared comments there, which is those expectations do not represent the height of our aspirations. We're gonna continue to focus on opportunities to make improvement in those levels. Maybe just to shine a bit of a brighter light, though, on the level of improvement that we made on a year-over-year basis in Q1.
You know, if you look at Q1 of 2023 with an average of 459 contract labor FTEs, that comprised 1.8% of our total FTEs. To compare that to Q1 a year ago, where we had an average of 706 FTEs, that was 2.9% of our total FTEs for the quarter. The rate dropped from $240,000 to $182,000. The most recent kind of accurate or normalized comparison we can have is all the way back to 2019. If we look at the full year of 2019, we had contract labor FTEs that were about 0.9% of our total FTE workforce.
We're not back to that level yet, and we're not sure that we'll get all the way there, but we have made substantial progress over the last year.
It's obviously a huge focus for operating teams and they are exhibiting a great deal of discipline in terms of, you know, managing those extra shift bonuses and the amount that they are having to pay for extra shift bonuses or the sign-on of new staff. I'd also wanted to express the focus that we have right now on retention of our existing employees.
Not only on reducing contract labor, but once we do bring on new nurses or other staff, we're very focused on making sure that we are focusing on the details that it takes to bring them on, orient them, and have an equal amount of focus on the retention aspects to make sure that we get staffing where we want it and the contract labor and the premium costs down as low as we can. We saw the evidence of that in the first quarter with our nursing turnover dropping below 25% and our therapy turnover, which has always been low, below 8%.
Okay, that's helpful. I guess on volumes, you know, a bit of a debate about just kinda how strong volumes actually are or how much of this is, you know, somewhat easy comps off of a disrupted Q1 of last year. Do you have any color about how volumes progressed through the quarter? Was January really trusted and therefore stronger this year-over-year? Or was it strong throughout? Any color about kind of what you think maybe drove some of the volume outperformance? Thanks.
You know, Kev, we saw pretty consistent volume growth throughout the quarter. It was not only throughout the quarter, but we saw nice growth in all eight of our geographic regions. I, very pleased with progress we've made there. I think, if you consider what the driving aspects of that are, and you don't have to look any further than our quality indicators, our ability to get patients back home, our ability to keep the number of patients that go back to acute care hospitals as low as it can be and as well as those that get sent to a skilled nursing facility.
I do think that the work our teams have done in separating themselves based upon our quality outcomes, and the value proposition continues to resonate with the payers and referral sources and is assisting our growth going forward.
You know, I think what was really encouraging about the quarter was just how broad-based the growth was for us geographically across the patient mix spectrum and across payers as well. To provide some specifics there, if you look at our two major payer categories, for the quarter, Medicare Advantage was up 20% and over 17% on the same store basis, and Medicare was up 9% on a total basis and nearly 5% on a same store basis. We saw growth in every 1 of our major categories of patient mix. What we did see, and it was 1 of the factors that impacted pricing for the quarter, is that we saw growth in stroke and neurological, but every other patient category grew faster.
To us, that's an important signal that more normalized flows are occurring throughout the entire healthcare system.
Thank you. We'll take our next question from Andrew Mok of UBS. Your line is open.
Hi there, Andrew.
Hi. Good morning. Very strong volumes in the quarter. Pricing yield was flat year-over-year. Can you help us understand, or walk us through any items impacting rate beyond the sequestration impact?
There were a number of items. sequestration was certainly a significant one. We called out that there was a $7 million net negative adjustment related to the SSI adjustment factor. It was $2.5 million positive in Q1 of last year, and it went the other way on us to the tune of $4.5 million in Q1 of this year. The bad debt expense, for reasons I discussed in my prepared remarks, were up about 20 basis points. A bigger factor is one that I was just pointing to, which was the change in the patient mix. You really had two things going on there.
You may recall that although we didn't get the same 20% stipend that acute care hospitals get for a patient who enters coding with COVID, we were able to code and were directed to code COVID patients as a comorbidity, which led to an extra payment. We had a 41% drop in the quarter of patients who were coding with the COVID comorbidity. That decreased reimbursement as well. It was the broadening in the patient mix that I just talked about that resulted in somewhat lower acuity. We again, did have growth in stroke and neurological, which are our two highest acuity categories, but growth was faster in areas like lower extremity joint replacement and cardiac, to point to two specific areas.
Got it. That's helpful. Just as a follow-up, you already opened four de novos this year, I think through April, which presumably impacts 1Q. How much start-up cost did you incur in the quarter? And how do you expect that to track throughout the year based on your latest de novo opening plan? Thanks.
Yes, we had a little over $4 million in the quarter, continue to expect the range to be $10 million-$12 million for the full year. Basically, you can look at the opening dates that we have in there for new facilities, and it's gonna track, you know, most of those costs are gonna be born in the months leading up to the opening of any one of those facilities.
Great. Thanks for the color.
We'll take our next question from Ann Hynes of Mizuho Securities. Your line is open.
Good morning, Ann.
Hi, good morning. How are you? Great. When I look at current EBITDA guidance, where do you think, you're most conservative, and what would have to happen maybe to get you to the low end? Then secondly, on the Tablo, that you're insourcing, is there any other services like the Tablo that you can insource over time? Thanks.
Yeah. You know, I think when we look at the revised guidance, obviously on the top line, you've always got some potential volatility around volume. We did see more of a pricing impact from the change in the patient mix in the first quarter than we were anticipating. Perhaps we underestimated the year-over-year change related to the COVID comorbidity. There's some variability there. The single biggest factor then remains what is the trend line on labor expense. We're gonna continue to make the trade-off that we have been making with regard to volume over labor expense. Definitely think that the current guidance range, that the bias is more towards the away from the lower end and more towards the mid to higher end.
Ann, this is Mark. Relative to your question about Tablo, I would say that we are always looking for ways to become more efficient providers and improve our services. I would say that the dialysis was an area that became obvious, particularly starting back in 2020 and 2021 when we had difficulty with our existing outstanding providers to provide the care when nursing shortages really started coming into effect. It highlighted our need to go out and do what we needed to do to provide that services in-house and reduce our reliance on outside agencies to provide it. I think the Tablo's been a real good solution for us there.
We'll continue to look at other opportunities that may exist, particularly from the clinical provision of our care.
Great. Thanks.
We'll take our next question from A.J. Rice of Credit Suisse. Your line is open.
Hello, A.J.
Hi, everybody. Hey, first, I might just ask about the JVs. Obviously, you've got a big backlog there, 18 in development. Are you seeing the timeframe, from when you start discussions to when something finalizes? Is that compressing as you get more of these done? Are the terms on the deals changing in any way, economics because of the type of, a group that's JV-ing? Is that changing? Just give us an update on what you're seeing out there.
Yeah. A.J., just in the way of a clarification, we said we had 18 de novos that have been announced and are under development with opening dates beyond 2023. Only a subsection of those will be JVs. I think right now, the percentage of the portfolio that's inclusive of JV opportunities is somewhere between 35% and 40%.
Okay.
-that we take on JVs and the economics around those really haven't changed very much. With regard to the gestation period on it, if you're doing a joint venture with a partner who's accustomed to doing joint ventures with other providers and perhaps some of them has experience with us, those are gonna go much faster. If it's a first time in both of those categories for a partner, it's probably gonna be a little bit longer. You know, beginning about three years ago, we made kind of a subtle shift in our strategy.
As we developed more experience on successfully opening de novos, we got more comfortable going into a market where we thought it might be preferable to have a JV partner just announcing that we were coming on a wholly owned basis, and then having subsequent conversations with potential partners about JV-ing as opposed to wiring it on the front end. We really haven't experienced anything in those negotiations that's impacting the timing of facilities. The biggest challenge we have right now is just the elevation in construction cost. Again, we've mentioned previously-
Right.
We'll be talking more in the days ahead about our utilization of prefabrication. That helps to contain the cost, but, construction costs over the last 2 years are certainly elevated.
Okay. Maybe on the follow-up, to ask about your MA contracting. We hear a lot of the MA plans talking about post-acute care coordination, putting more focus on that. Does that create any opportunities or challenges for you? More broadly, what are you seeing with your MA recontracting? Any change in other value-based aspects to it?
Really haven't seen a lot in the way of value-based initiatives arising from that payer category. You know, generally speaking, we continue to make great progress on Medicare Advantage. If you look at the payer mix for the first quarter, it was 16% of the aggregate. That compares to, say, 9% as recently as 2018, so steady growth. The payment differential, in spite of the broadening of acuity within our MA book of business, continued to be very favorable at under 5%. I mentioned previously that the growth for the quarter was 20% and over 17% on a same-store basis. The real opportunity that exists there is even with that tremendous progress that we've made on Medicare Advantage, the admission to referral rates for MA patients remains at half of what it is for traditional Medicare.
You know, for traditional Medicare, we run at about a 64% admission to referral, and it's 32% for Medicare Advantage. That just points to the fact that there are IRF-eligible patients who would benefit from treatment in an IRF, who have Medicare Advantage coverage, who are not receiving that coverage for various reasons. That's an opportunity for us and it's an opportunity for the MA plans. It's also something that CMS really highlighted and provided some specific guidance around in the recent MA update.
Interesting. Okay, thanks a lot.
We'll take our next question from Steven Valiquette of Barclays. Your line is open.
Great. Thanks. Good morning, everybody. Thanks. Good morning. My question really kind of relates also to the full year outlook. You know, just given the strength in the operations in the first quarter, that was pretty consistent, and all signs pointing to momentum in the second quarter. I also thought maybe perhaps the full year guidance could have been raised a little bit more. With your comment here during the Q&A that there's now a bias for the full year results to come in at the high end, I guess the question now really is just to confirm whether that comment was related to essentially all of the key guidance metrics that you provided previously?
Were there specific guidance metrics that you were alluding to with that comment about the bias to the high end? Just wanted to try to get a confirmation on that. Thanks.
Yeah. First, a clarification. I don't think I said high end. I think I said-
Sure
less on the low end and more in the mid to high.
Okay.
You know, Steve, as you know, we issue annual guidance for our key financial metrics. From time to time, what we see is that quarterly consensus estimates diverge from the internal expectations that we had in establishing that guidance. Now we had a very good quarter. We feel really good about how our business is performing. As a result, we raised guidance after just one quarter of the year being done. I think you should interpret that as it is.
Okay. All right. Appreciate the extra context on that. Thanks.
We'll move next to Pito Chickering of Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.
Morning, Pito.
Yeah. Good morning, guys.
Hey, Pito.
Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. great job on the quarter. I'm gonna ask sort of the volume question just a different way. Your occupancy of 73.4%, I think is the highest I have in my models. My question is sort of threefold. Like, Number one, what occupancy rate should we consider to be max occupancy due to different genders sharing rooms or requirements for one person in a room? Number two, How fast are the beds coming online versus occupancy increasing? Number three, taking a multi-year view, do you, do you foresee any capacity constraints, or can you bring on beds fast enough to sort of keep this level?
All right. There was a lot in that, Pito. The theoretical peak occupancy or max occupancy rate that we have is rising over time with the change of the composition of our rooms, skewing more towards private versus semi-private, which allows us to work around the rooms, requiring isolation or gender compatibility. We still got a long way to go on that, particularly with our legacy hospitals. You know, we're a little over 40% in all private rooms right now. We're continuing to address that issue in 2 or 3 important ways. One is almost all of our capacity additions, without exception, the new hospitals and the bed expansions are all private rooms. The second is we're undertaking in some of our hospital renovation efforts to take semi-private rooms and convert those into private rooms.
You can't do it 100% in a lot of those facilities, but it is increasing. When you look at an all private room hospital, the occupancy max is gonna be in the 90% range, right? It's really just more based on patient close and discharge timing than anything else. In a semi-private room, depending on the configuration and the patient mix, it's gonna be more in that probably 70%-80% range. We would expect it to increase over time. I know I didn't get to all your questions, Pito. Which ones did I miss there?
You bet. Great answers so far. I guess and the question is, as you look at your bed additions, you know, sort of how fast is this coming online versus demand, which is, you know, fairly significant here. Taking a multi-year view, do you foresee any capacity constraints, or can you bring on beds fast enough to meet sort of this, you know, almost hyper growth of demand?
You know, Pito, I think we're gonna be in good shape in terms of how we plan for the bed additions and which hospitals and accommodating the increasing demand for our services. I don't anticipate a widespread capacity challenge in terms of diminishing our opportunity for growth. We've been very careful and very disciplined in thinking about which facilities need the bed additions, not only to accommodate the growth that's out there, but also to make sure that we minimize those hospitals that have a significant higher semi-private complement so that we can increase the number of private room complements.
My final comment on that is we still have some hospitals that are heavily weighted on semi-private rooms, but have the capability to provide those patients that are looking for a private room, they can still provide a single room for them that may be semi-private, but not have the second bed occupied. We've been able to accommodate the demand and foresee that going forward.
Pito, in almost all situations, if the occupancy level is justifying a bed expansion, we can move pretty quickly. Even in CON states, there's typically a provision that allows for an expansion of some level, providing you've maintained a certain occupancy level for a period of time. Obviously, we're unfettered in most instances in non-CON states, unless there's a physical constraint on the facility. Again, the utilization of prefabricated construction, even if it's just head walls or exterior panels, can allow us to shorten the construction cycle on those.
Great. Thanks so much, guys.
Once again, if you'd like to ask a question, that is star one on your telephone keypad. We'll move next to Brian Tanquilut of Jefferies.
Hello, Brian.
Morning, Brian.
Hey, good morning, guys. Congrats on the quarter. Doug, I guess, as I think about staffing, you know, obviously, so you're expecting the same level of temp staff, but how are you thinking about bill rates for temp labor going forward or at least for the rest of the year?
Yeah. You know, we talk about the average rate per contract labor FTE, the fact of the matter is there continues to be significant disparity across geographic markets. There could be a little bit of a push me, pull me, which is we may see that as the labor market improves across our entire network, we're able to bring down the level of contract labor FTEs, but there could be certain markets where it's still required. In those markets, the rate is likely to be somewhat sticky. You know, I would expect some additional improvement with regard to FTEs, where improvement in labor conditions in existing markets is somewhat offset by capacity additions.
Because we'd see more of a concentration in harder markets or more stubborn markets, we may see the rate drift a little north. I will tell you that is complete speculation at this point. Every day is a new observation point.
I will say, Brian, Mark, you know, I mentioned earlier the discipline in which our operators in their various marketplaces are applying to this. I mean, part of that is testing the sensitivity of the market to relative to price as well. You know, we have been, you know, very aggressive at trying to push down the rates as we go forward, whether that is from a contract standpoint or whether that is offering less on shift bonuses than maybe what we have done historically, and certainly on the sign-on bonuses. We've pretty much put a moratorium on sign-on bonuses in certain marketplaces where we just don't think they're necessary.
Got it. All right. Thank you guys.
We'll go next to Ben Hendrix of RBC Capital Markets.
Hello, Ben.
Morning, Ben.
Hey, good morning, guys. Thank you. You talked at length last quarter about the EBITDA flow through from changes to EPOB. Now you're reaffirming the 3.4 for the balance of the year. Apologies if I missed it, but how should we think about the phasing through the rest of the year given the sequential decline from 4Q? I assume that there's discharge growth versus the pace of hires as a component, but what else do we need to keep in mind for the EPOB guidance there? Thanks.
Yeah, I think two most significant factors are the progression of patient volumes through the next three quarters, and then also, they're impacted by the opening and ramp-up of new hospitals. Obviously, you're gonna have some seasonality in the second and third quarters as we normally do with regard to patient volumes. Again, just factor in the timing as indicated in the schedule in our supplemental slides regarding the addition of de novos that'll open this year.
Thank you.
This does conclude our question and answer session. I'm happy to return the call to Mark Miller for any closing comments.
Thank you. If anyone has additional questions, please call me at 205-970-5860. Thank you again for joining today's call.
This does conclude today's conference. You may now disconnect your lines and everyone, have a great day.