Ardent Health, Inc. Wells Fargo 21st Annual Healthcare Conference

You bet. Thank you. Our strategy or my key focus is really isolate on three particular elements, and you can see them on the slide there. First, of course, is organic growth.

Inside of organic growth, we're really focused on what we call Capacity IQ, which is really getting the best and smartest use of our assets to really drive margin. Secondarily is operational performance. Inside of there is strengthening margin. When I think about strengthening margin and operational performance, we have a program that we call IMPACT, which is Improving Margin Performance Agility and Care Transformation. The focus there, of course, is despite any headwinds on the top line, is to deliver bottom line EBITDA. Last is really our disciplined M&A activity. Our team is laser focused on reviewing all of our portfolio and assets to make the best decision with each of those, as well as to look at every opportunity we can have to make the next best decision to our portfolio in both directions.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, maybe just start with Capacity IQ. It might not be something that everyone's kind of familiar with in the room. Maybe give us just a minute on what that means and maybe a couple practical examples of what that translates to in the actual operations of the business.

You bet. Capacity IQ really came from this idea and understanding, obviously, that not all service lines are created equal.

Yeah. You have some service lines that have a particular customer demand that's high, that also matches a particular margin that's healthy.

And the smarter we are about increasing our access in those particular categories, and decreasing or, through atrophy, managing the other service lines so that we have the richest outcome with margin is really critical. That's an example. A second example would be brick and mortar bed utilization or imaging utilization, and ensuring that we have the right equipment with the right processes to get the full utilization out of that asset is really critical. There are many parts of the equation to Capacity IQ, but it's us getting laser beam focused on the right financial outcome and the right operational procedures to maximize both.

Okay. Yeah. And is there a way to kind of frame where you are from a staging perspective with Capacity IQ? Is this something that you'd say is like, hey, we're still in the first inning, maybe the game hasn't started yet?

Is this something that you've probably seen a little bit more impact from in the results at this point already?

Yeah. Nope. We're clearly past the first inning in it.

Okay. You may have heard us in our Q2 earnings describe inside of the operating room, the level of volume impact.

We did reduce specific categories that were negative margin categories coming into the OR, as an example.