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J.P. Morgan 42nd Annual Healthcare Conference 2024

Jan 9, 2024

Anne Samuel
Executive Director of U.S. Healthcare Technology and Distribution, JPMorgan

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference. My name is Anne Samuel, and I cover Healthcare Technology and Distribution here at JPMorgan. We're thrilled to have Evolent here with us this afternoon. With us are CEO Seth Blackley and CFO John Johnson. They'll do a brief presentation, and then we'll open it up for Q&A. With that, let me turn it over to Seth.

Seth Blackley
CEO, Evolent

Okay, thank you, Annie. I see some dazed faces here at the end of the second day. People are looking pretty tired, maybe a few hungover Michigan fans. Good to be here. I'm honored to be representing our 5,000 mission-oriented employees at Evolent. As Annie said, I'm Seth Blackley, CEO and Co-Founder of Evolent. And I wanna start today just with a second on what Evolent does. So we are a value-based specialty care company. Many of you probably know about value-based primary care. We do our work around three main specialties, oncology, cardiology, and musculoskeletal care. Our customers, our health plans, and risk-bearing providers, we get hired by them, as I'll describe in a second, to help them manage the cost and quality of those complex cases.

Our users, our main interface point is actually with the physician community, so oncologists, orthopods, cardiologists, et cetera. At the end of the day, our motivation is around the patient. We don't touch the patient directly through our services for the most part, but our end goal is to make the care better and safer for the patient. It is our motivation. You can see a few of our selected customers here, listed in the bottom. In terms of the investment case for Evolent, we have a framework of three main objectives for shareholder value creation for the company, the same ones since John, the team, and I have been running the company, the same three. They're gonna remain the same three. The first one is organic growth.

Our three-year, acquisition-adjusted growth rate is over 30% a year, so we've been growing very rapidly. We have a $150 billion total addressable market, and we're coming up on $2 billion of revenue in the company. So obviously, we have low penetration in a pretty big market. We'll talk about this in a second, but our existing customers represent a $50 billion cross-sell. So 1/3 of the total market is addressable through cross-selling to our existing customers, which we think is a big deal. Second, we are focused on profitability.

That was less popular a couple years ago, but we've been focused on it for many years, and we're coming up on $200 million of EBITDA, and we continue to remain focused and disciplined around driving profitability in the company, and we'll talk about how we do that in a minute. And our third priority is around capital allocation. So part of that is around cash flow. We had committed to $120 million of unlevered cash flow after all CapEx this year, which we're on track to deliver. If you think about that ratio relative to around $200 million of EBITDA, it's a, you know, 60% conversion. That number is attractive, and I think will go up over time.

Related also to capital allocation is a commitment to remain disciplined about how we deploy that free cash flow. We'll talk about it a little bit later in John's section, but we're gonna be, you know, highly disciplined about how we think about that. In terms of the opportunity that we're addressing, I talked about the $150 billion market and the $50 billion cross-sell. On the right-hand side of the page, what is the root cause problem that we're solving? You know, there's three areas. One, costs are growing a lot in these complicated areas, right? Just with oncology, cardiology, and MSK, $50 billion of spending increase in the country between 2015 and 2020. So these are growing costs that are significant for our customers, the payers.

If you think about the bottom two categories around quality and patient experience, you know, raise your hand if, in the room, you or somebody in your extended family, has been diagnosed with cancer. How many hands in the room? A bunch of hands. Think about that experience for a second and what it was like. I know speaking for my family, you know, many times the care is not optimal, and the experience is not optimal. In fact, about 35% of the time, we find that the care plan for a given specialty, let's use cancer as an example, is not best practice.

65% of the time it is, 35% of the time is not best practice, meaning that the cost or quality of the way the care is being delivered is not optimal, and, you know, you probably have seen that in some of your own personal experiences. Evolent exists to try to take that 35% of time and reduce that number, right? So increase the percent of the time that the best care is delivered. Let's think about, okay, within that 35%, why does that happen? Why 35% of the time, you know, 1/3 of the hands of the room represented by that number, why is the care not optimal? Four reasons. One is, it is incredibly complicated. There are about 300, using the oncology example, 300 journal articles in oncology that are published every month.

Typical oncologist is reading three or four or five of those if they have time. That's hard to keep up with. We'll talk about Evolent's solution, but on the right, you know, we have invested a lot, including a staff of 1,400 clinicians, to help aggregate that information for the treating physician... Second, there's, you know, sort of a challenge model within the health plan world historically around utilization management. If you know what utilization management is, I may have heard a few curse words under people's breath out there. It's not popular historically. It has really driven, historically, a lot of friction for providers, and it does not typically increase the quality in a way that we think is possible.

When we figure out what we do, we'll describe in a second, we've invested a lot to make the process of reviewing care and figuring out what the right plan is much easier for physicians, more integrated with the EMR, and more around value-based care, meaning incentives, you know, rather than sticks. A third is provider misalignment. You probably know this, but in all those specialties I talked about, the way the physician gets paid often is disconnected from the quality or cost of care, right? So we do a lot, and we've invested a lot over many years around developing payment models that help align that practice with the payment that the physician receives. And the fourth, and finally, you know, the patient voice is often not included in this.

Evolent is increasingly doing more, touching the patient directly to get the member engaged in the journey. Turning to the next page, just bringing this together. Okay, what is Evolent's product? This is our product architecture here. Across the specialties I mentioned, oncology, cardiology, musculoskeletal, but also complex care, where we do this kind of work with patients who have multiple, you know, comorbid conditions. And the way we do the work, and including radiology and genetic testing and even supporting end of life, is you know, kind of lined up against those four issues I told you about on the last page, right? So it's deep and broad. We cover multiple specialties, and it goes deep into each condition.

We do a lot of work to make sure that the way the decision support is delivered to the physician at the point of care is done seamlessly. I mentioned number three, the incentives, and number four, the member journey. Let me bring this to life for a second with a case example, which I think, you know, you know, if you don't know the business well, this will help you get your hands around it a little bit. So, let's start with the idea that up to 35% of the time, the care is not optimal. And if you think about that, and you say, "Okay, how do you address those 35% of cases where the care is not optimal?" We do that through a three-step process.

The first on the left is we do aggregate all the data and all the information from all those journal articles that are published. But we also have a bunch of proprietary sources of data, including our own scientific advisory board, our 1,400 clinicians on staff, and we make sure that we have what we believe to be the gold standard for clinical evidence, that any oncologist in the country and the expert around the world would look at and agree with. From there, we take that and apply it to an individual case. So let's imagine that a patient, 48-year-old patient, diagnosed with lung cancer, presents to their oncologist. The way the process works is their oncologist submits to us, Evolent, through their EMR and the data that they have, their proposed care plan. We receive the care plan.

If it's one of the 65% of cases that meet standard, it is automatically approved. If it's one of the 35%, we look at it. If it's worthy of an intervention, meaning, gosh, there's a big opportunity to improve the quality for the patient, reduce the cost, we will go through this process in the middle of looking at the alternatives. In this case, there's nine different alternatives. Average tumor has 100 mutations. It's very complicated, genetic profile, age, tumor mutation, et cetera, to figure out what is the right pathway. We look at first, of course, efficacy. We also look at toxicity, and after those things, we look at cost. If in this example, the physician is not recommending Path B or E, in this example, we will reach out to the physician in some way.

We are delegated the utilization management capability, but only about 3% of the time do we actually deny a case and say, "That's not the right path." The vast majority of the time, we're using our influence model to partner with the physician, reach out to the physician, peer to peer, and if it's a lung cancer issue, we will have a lung cancer specialist reach out to that physician, have a conversation. "This evidence was published in the last 90 days. You may not have seen it," and we've had really good success at changing the practice pattern through that model. And you can see on the far right, what happens in healthcare, interestingly, is when you improve quality, which we believe we do through focusing on pathways, the cost also comes down.

Not 100% of the time, but on average. Sometimes it's more expensive, but it does, on average, is lower cost when the pathway, Level I pathway is followed. So in this example, from one patient, you know, engaging the physician, convincing the physician there's an alternative model, maybe different therapeutic in this example, and they adopt that different therapeutic model, the cost is significantly lower to the plan, it's lower to the patient, and the quality is also higher. So that's really at the heart of what we do. We do that across cardiology and musculoskeletal. Tell you a little bit about how our customers have grown with us.

I'm obviously biased, so don't take my word for it, but if you look at our customers and how they've grown with us, I think it's a good indicator that they have trust in what we're doing and that we're delivering value to them. Here are three good examples. Those of you who know Evolent have seen the first two examples. We added Humana here. About a year ago, we announced a significant expansion of our relationship with Humana, which rolled in across 2023. You can see that represented here. And I think all three of these case studies, in my view, communicate the same thing, which is, if we can begin working with a plan-...

We can demonstrate that we're improving quality for the patient, and we're reducing costs for the health plan, and there are not that many win-wins in healthcare, as we know, and we believe the model we have is doing that. The other message that, you know, we'd like to share today is that, if you, if you look at the penetration rate amongst our top 10 customers, the three that you saw on the last page, plus our other seven largest customers, is reasonably small. It's about 3% penetration on a revenue basis or about 14% penetration on a product lives basis. This data's from a couple of months ago and has not materially changed, despite the new announcements we've made across the last year.

And so I think this just gives you a sense for the kind of running room we have within our existing customer base. A couple more slides here. Just in terms of our growth model, you know, we have, I think, a proven algorithm for how we're growing the business. And one way we grow the business is add unique logos. We announced today a new logo, as of, for instance, or yesterday, through this presentation, a new partner. We have 72 of those today. There are 200, I think, target customers in the market. Second way we can grow is by adding members within a plan. So let's use Florida Blue as an example, who's a great partner of ours.

We work with their Medicare Advantage members, and we don't do any work with their commercial members. So if we added a product or a contract around their commercial line of business, that number would go up. The third category is around products, so products per customer. When we started reporting on this metric last year, I think the number was at 1.6 or something like that. It's moved up across the year to 1.9. If you multiply the unique members times the number of products, that gives you product members. So 41.7 x 1.9 is 78, and that is another metric that if you track us, you'll see, which is our unique product members.

We also track the number of cases that we have in around some of our musculoskeletal work and our end-of-life work. The fourth and final way we can grow is to add what we call the Performance Suite. We have two revenue models, a tech and services model, which is what it sounds like, Technology and Services, and has 50% type gross margins. The other model is a risk-bearing model, capitated model, and that's called the Performance Suite. We have about 5% of our product members covered in the Performance Suite today. So if we have a customer that's using us for tech and services and upgrades, if you will, to Performance Suite, that's a fourth leg of growth.

We have a bunch of examples across 2023 of this type of growth, and we'll talk about a couple of those in a second. Finally, here, before I pass it to John, just a couple of business updates, kind of the only new information here in the presentation. As part of the 8-K last night, we did announce two new announcements, two new contracts, a partnership with a new logo, with a regional Medicaid plan of 300,000 lives. It's the first time we have bundled together multiple of our products into a large-scale, integrated offering, post the NIA acquisition about a year ago. And so that's a big moment, I think, for the company. And then the second new contract is adding NIA to an existing, Evolent relationship that we had in the Northeast.

In addition to those new announcements, you know, we did also roll out our MSK services to Centene, which was something we announced planned to do when we announced that deal, that has happened. We had previously announced that Florida Blue Cardiology was a deal that we had signed that went live on January 1st. And then we're on track for our cardiology go live with Molina. In terms of profitability, you know, I'll let John go into a little bit more detail here, but as you can see on the slide, we feel like everything we're seeing is within expectations. It is a little bit different than perhaps some of the plans or others have shared, but we have largely seen consistent utilization with our expectations. And similarly, our redetermination number has been right in line with our expectations.

And then, you know, related, we get a lot of questions about our Performance Suite. For those of you who don't know us, our Performance Suite has a three-year margin maturation path. We continue to release information every quarter or two about how that's trending, and it continues to trend well, is the short answer. We're on target there, and we're on target for our $300 million EBITDA number. And then finally, just in terms of capital, I'd say we're slightly ahead of plan on deleveraging. Given the strong cash flow in the year, we did complete a convert in December, which I think brings down our cash interest significantly, and I mentioned that we are on track for our $120 million of cash flow for the year.

I would say, just in general, we feel really good about the business going into the year. We've obviously reiterated guidance for this year and also the $300 million target towards the end of 2024. With that, I'll pass it to John.

John Johnson
CFO, Evolent

Okay. All right, Seth talked a bit about, you know, the market that we're in, how we're creating value, and how we're growing the business. We'll spend the next couple of minutes talking about how we translate that growth into EBITDA and cash flow, and then what we'll do with that cash. We think of the products that we take to market in two categories, and we like having this balanced business. Where about 75% of our earnings, we estimate during 2023, were derived from admin fee-style relationships, we call Technology and Services. Average PMPM there is $0.37, with an average gross margin of around 50%. There's 50%....

The rest of our business is the capitation style deal in the Performance Suite, where you have a significantly higher revenue, PMPM, and target flow-through margins of between 12% and 18%. Now, of course, that 12% and 18% on a much higher dollar revenue figure means that the Performance Suite profit pool for us, in terms of the profit opportunity, is much larger, as you see on this page, with close to $2.5 per member per month in the Performance Suite, versus maybe $0.18 per member per month in the Technology and Services Suite.

Within the Performance Suite, this capitation model, we see a year-to-year progression as we launch new contracts, where we see profitability between 4% and 6% in the first year, between 8% and 12% in the second year, and at maturity, in the third year and beyond, profitability of between 12% and 18%. And this is supported now by five years of data, from launches since we acquired this business in 2019. And the launches that we've done over the last couple of years, have been on track with this general profit maturation curve. It's an important contribution towards our $300 million, ending this year, target for Adjusted EBITDA. We articulated in May of last year the key steps to... from where we were at the time, to our target of exiting this year at $300 million.

The first is fully incorporating the Acquired EBITDA from acquisitions that we made in 2022 and the very beginning of 2023. The second is approximately $40 million-$50 million from the maturation of over $300 million of newly launched Performance Suite business. And the third is net new growth between the beginning of last year and the end of this year, so that's 24 months of growth, contributing about $50 million of EBITDA towards that $300 million target. And where we stand today, you see a lot of green on the page. We are on track on each of these metrics and feel good about our performance against each of them. On the capital allocation side, we've had three clear priorities for the last several years and are reiterating them again today.

The first is we use our cash to continue to invest in the core business. We believe that we have a significant moat in value-based specialty care, based on our clinical depth, and the breadth of relationships that we have. We believe it is important to continue to invest in making those products leading edge in the market. We spent about $50 million in R&D last year. Some was OpEx, some was capitalized, and that will grow over time, although not as fast as our revenue growth. Second capital allocation priority is discipline and accretive M&A. The NIA transaction that closed last January is a good example of this. We paid a very attractive EBITDA multiple for it, and it brought a breadth of specialties that accelerated our pipeline and lead to an incrementally differentiated platform, for our health plan partners.

Finally, we seek to achieve those first two priorities with a disciplined balance sheet. We typically talk about a soft cap on leverage of around 4x on a net basis. For example, when we closed into the NIA transaction, we had a 3.9x net leverage number, with a clear path down to being under 2x by the end of this year. And as Seth noted, we're a little bit ahead of schedule on that metric. Finally, I'll close here, and then we'll do some Q&A just by reiterating both our guidance for last year, which you see on the page here, our $300 million target exiting this year, and then a longer-term target beyond this year of continuing to grow Adjusted EBITDA at 20%+ for several years to come here.

With that, I will,

Anne Samuel
Executive Director of U.S. Healthcare Technology and Distribution, JPMorgan

Great. So maybe I'll start with the first couple questions. If anybody has a question, you know, please, raise your hand, and we'll be sure to get you a mic. But, you know, you've added so many new specialties in recent years, and you've outlined a really substantial addressable market. So I was hoping you could start with talking about the cross-sell opportunity, and how do you plan to move your customers from, you know, one to two products today to, you know, six over time?

Seth Blackley
CEO, Evolent

Yeah, I think, Look, I think the biggest piece, Annie, there is that, health plans and patients would like to be treated kind of as, as a holistic human experience in a condition versus, a, you know, somebody that is getting reviewed around silos. And historically, whether the companies we've acquired or the way that the markets work, there might be a radiology benefit management over here and a genetic benefit management over there. And the way we're moving is to actually integrate those things, such that when a patient and a family's dealing with a diagnosis of, you know, a cardiovascular diagnosis, that the imaging and the genetics and the entire condition are treated, created, treated holistically. It reduces friction for the physician, for the patient. I think it's just the right way to do healthcare, and I think our customers see that.

And so I think clinically, it's the right thing to do, Annie, and I, and I think that's gonna be part of the answer. I think the other part of the answer, just at a practical level, is our customers prefer to work with fewer vendors. They don't wanna have five different partners, so to the extent we can do more with them, if we can have all six products with them, that's easier than having, you know, three vendors doing two each, or three partners doing two each. And so I think there's a couple different tailwinds, clinically, and kinda from a contracting perspective, that should help us. And we've got the account management team set up to run at that.

Anne Samuel
Executive Director of U.S. Healthcare Technology and Distribution, JPMorgan

How quickly can you scale towards those, you know, six? Because I feel like that probably takes a bit of time.

Seth Blackley
CEO, Evolent

It does take time. I mean, I think, you know, the pace we've been at, going from 1.6 -1 .9 across the last 12 months, it, I think, is a good trajectory. And if we continue to move in that direction, you know, that'll, that'll, that'll get us in a much better place over time. I don't think it'll ever be 6, because there's certain dynamics in certain markets, but I think we're kinda gonna continue trending at that rate.

Anne Samuel
Executive Director of U.S. Healthcare Technology and Distribution, JPMorgan

And then, you know, you announced two new partnerships this week. Can you just help us understand maybe some of the math around, you know, PMPM and lives, just so that we can understand for our models?

John Johnson
CFO, Evolent

Yeah. So the first, we mentioned 300,000 Medicaid members, multiple specialties there. And then the second is adding a specialty to an existing partner, about 200,000 lives with that partner. Between the two, you're looking at revenues of $5 million-$7 million, once they're fully rolled out. And we expect that to be completed probably in the middle of this year.

Anne Samuel
Executive Director of U.S. Healthcare Technology and Distribution, JPMorgan

Great. Thanks. You know, you've taken a little bit of a different approach to value-based care, you know, versus other players that a lot of us look at. You know, you've really narrowly focused on high-cost specialties. So can you talk about why focusing on specialty care management is so attractive, and how can it meaningfully bend the cost curve?

Seth Blackley
CEO, Evolent

Yeah, I think that if you talk to most of our customers right now, Annie, the biggest thing I hear is, hey, one, risk adjustment pressure's real, right? And two, we've done a lot on the primary care side already, and three, utilization's going up. And so I think that leaves you with not many options of how to manage cost. But one of the ones that's left is the utilization of these really complicated cases, right? And a lot of the cost sits around oncology, cardiology, et cetera. So I think when you put it in that frame, there's a lot of interest in using the service that we have to help reduce the cost of care in those areas. And again, it's sort of one of the last bastions of opportunity left.

Last thing I'd say is, one of the things we do that others don't do in the specialty side is take you know, take a capitation model through our Performance Suite. I think particularly in this era where plans are under pressure, that's attractive to be able to guarantee a savings.

Anne Samuel
Executive Director of U.S. Healthcare Technology and Distribution, JPMorgan

And then just, you know, maybe to that point, you know, can you talk about the competitive landscape? I mean, there's, you know, kind of very few of these, you know, kind of public players that we, you know, that we look at that kind of are structured the way that you are, you know, around specialties. So who, who are you up against? Who are you kind of, you know, winning against or losing against, you know, in the, in the market? And does stacking all of these different specialties together... You know, you talked about, you know, kind of wanting to deal with one vendor. Does that give you a competitive advantage?

Seth Blackley
CEO, Evolent

Yeah, you know, it's a great question. I mean, I would put the competitive landscape, Annie, into two big buckets. One are kind of broad-scaled organizations, and there are a couple... There are two others of those and us, really. And then there are, you know, a number of smaller companies that may be just doing one specialty. And I think the dynamic I would describe is that on average, the plans would prefer to work with a more scaled entity. So to your point, they don't have to deal with lots of different partners, and you can holistically deal with patients and fewer handoffs. So I think that trend is to our advantage.

And then, you know, I think the other thing I would note, Annie, is that the capital required that we've had to deploy and that our other two larger-scale competitors have had to deploy to get to a place of scale, I think does create a bit of a moat as well for the kind of work we do. And it also creates a scale, a level of scale, where we need to do something like AI, which we're investing heavily in right now. We have a big base upon which to deploy that AI versus just one small... So I think the sort of broad and deep model is the right model. And then, you know, as to the competitive landscape between the other two scale partner competitors and us, we tend to be very different actually.

We're much more clinically oriented in nature. We're much more focused on the government program segment, very focused on alternative payment models and provider engagement, given our heritage.

Anne Samuel
Executive Director of U.S. Healthcare Technology and Distribution, JPMorgan

And maybe to that point, you know, one thing I thought that was really helpful at your recent analyst day was you outlined how you get provider buy-in, you know, kind of by leveraging your clinicians. So can you talk about how you balance using technology to drive, you know, cost savings with maybe some of that provider intuition?

John Johnson
CFO, Evolent

Yeah, absolutely. So the goal, right, is to be fast when we can be fast. So Seth mentioned that when something comes through for an authorization request, for example, and it's on pathway, we wanna get that automatically approved. We wanna make that as streamlined as possible for the practice. And so meeting them where they are in that way is really important. And that's the sort of area where we're first interested in deploying AI, for example, right? What can we take out of the equation from an administrative perspective that's just friction right now? But then you got, also gotta be slow with slow things. So if something is a high-value intervention where we believe the data indicates that there's a better path than what the physician is currently suggesting to prescribe, then we'll seek to do a specialist-matched peer-to-peer, right?

And so if it's a lung cancer case, we'll have a specialist in lung cancer make that phone call and do a real seeming to be collegial, right? "Here's what I see in the data." And so taking as much of the adversarial relationship that so often exists between providers and payers out of the equation and making it provider-led in that way.

Anne Samuel
Executive Director of U.S. Healthcare Technology and Distribution, JPMorgan

That's really helpful. And you touched on AI, and that's something that everybody's been, you know, having kind of top of mind, recently, especially from healthcare tech companies. Can you just, you know, talk quickly about, you know, how you use AI, both maybe internally for your own efficiencies and then also within your product suite?

John Johnson
CFO, Evolent

Yeah. We're really focused first, as I mentioned, on where are the pockets of excess administrative work that today is highly manual, that could be automated through AI. And so a couple of examples of that, literature review from large language models and generative AI, using that sort of technology to accelerate that sort of work. Another example is in supporting one of our about 1,000 nurses in clinical reviews, who often have to go to multiple different places to pull items together to do their review. Can we have a copilot that sits next to them, virtually speaking, and pulls all of that together? Where we're not focused today, because we believe it would be premature, is to move anything resembling clinical decision-making into the sphere of AI.

We're really focused on the administrative piece right now.

Anne Samuel
Executive Director of U.S. Healthcare Technology and Distribution, JPMorgan

And maybe going back to specialties, you recently added musculoskeletal, and it's a little bit kind of a different animal than, you know, kind of cardiology and oncology. So could you maybe help us understand over time, what a Performance Suite arrangement could look like in that space? Maybe how similar or different it would be to kind of the ones that you have today, you know, kind of relative to cardiology or oncology?

John Johnson
CFO, Evolent

Yeah. Important piece of our product roadmap right now. You know, we have, I think, a very good foundation in terms of clinical IP for musculoskeletal conditions that was a part of the NIA acquisition. And we serve millions of members in the Technology and Services Suite for musculoskeletal today. So the work that we do from a product perspective right now is then how do you underwrite it, and how do you craft the right scope around a Performance Suite deal for musculoskeletal conditions? And I think that work now is very much ongoing and will be across this year. And we have a general sense that in 2025 is the right time for us to target having something like that to bring to market.

Anne Samuel
Executive Director of U.S. Healthcare Technology and Distribution, JPMorgan

You've obviously got a lot to integrate right now, but how do we think about maybe additional specialties that you think might make sense to add down the line?

Seth Blackley
CEO, Evolent

Yeah, I may answer it in two ways, Annie. One is that in the short term, we're probably not gonna add any beyond the musculoskeletal Performance Suite opportunity because we've got low market share, big market, lot of opportunity. So I think that's kind of the short answer. In the medium term, you know, we do see a number of specialties and, you know, post-acute or kidney or nephrology, there's a number of places that I think are pain points as well, that if we had them, you know, being able to offer more to our customers, as I mentioned, is a positive. So I think there are a number of targets, probably, you know, down the road, an interesting, either build or buy opportunity for us.

Anne Samuel
Executive Director of U.S. Healthcare Technology and Distribution, JPMorgan

Maybe we can shift to margins, John. You know, you guys have done such a really great job of expanding your margins. You've set out this target for $300 million. Can you talk about... It seems like with what you've got right now in terms of, you know, kind of partnerships and maturation and synergies, that there's really not a lot incrementally that you need to do to get to that target. I guess what's left of, like, as your go-getter or, you know, relative to what you have today in the bag?

John Johnson
CFO, Evolent

Yeah. Yeah, so as we think about the three core stairsteps, the synergy components from the acquisitions, that feels very good right now. The second, the Performance Suite maturation, we're on that curve. There's an execution component of that as we continue across the year, but we feel very good about it. And there's a $50 million of growth go-get. I recall that was from last January, so we've had 20 or 13 months so far of execution on that. And we still have some go-get to get to where we wanna be by the time we're exiting this year. We feel a bit ahead of schedule and feeling good about achieving that.

Anne Samuel
Executive Director of U.S. Healthcare Technology and Distribution, JPMorgan

And then maybe just one more going back to... I mean, you guys have kind of really done a great job of, you know, cleaning up your balance sheet as part of your transformation. How do we think about your capital allocation strategy, you know, from here? You know, obviously, you've said that, you know, kind of M&A isn't a near-term focus, but, you know, how are you thinking about capital allocation?

John Johnson
CFO, Evolent

Yeah. So I think the first priority continues this year to be achieving our Net Leverage target of being under 2x on a net basis. It's a clear priority. And then investing organically in the business, I think will be an important focus for this year.

Anne Samuel
Executive Director of U.S. Healthcare Technology and Distribution, JPMorgan

Any questions for them? Well, maybe I'll take the last question here in the last couple of minutes. What are you most excited for in 2024?

Seth Blackley
CEO, Evolent

You want to start?

John Johnson
CFO, Evolent

Sure, I'll start. You know, I think 2023 was a year of integration, and we had a lot of work to do to do that, and the teams did an incredible job of executing on that, mammoth of a lift. I'm very excited to have a lot of that work done and be able to execute on the organic path in front of us.

Seth Blackley
CEO, Evolent

I'm really looking forward to the next JPMorgan Conference, Annie. No, I'm just kidding. Look, I think I'm excited about the fact that we have, as John said, the chassis set, and it's really clean, clear execution year. And that feels good. And I think the product innovation that we have on the horizon, whether it's musculoskeletal or more on the patient or the AI side, are also quite exciting.

Anne Samuel
Executive Director of U.S. Healthcare Technology and Distribution, JPMorgan

Correct. Well, thank you so much for being with us today, and thanks to everyone in the room for joining.

John Johnson
CFO, Evolent

Thank you.

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