Kevin Hammons: Yes. We’ve had some EBITDA lift from those markets, not outsized and still have a fair amount of work to do in those markets. We have stabilized them. We’ve taken a number of actions, including consolidating some of the hospitals within those markets, closing some service lines, taking out contract labor because we were spending more on contract labor than we were making and had negative margin as a result. So we’ve made kind of taking steps to stabilize those markets. It will take us some additional time to continue to grow them, but we are working to that end.
Jason Cassorla : Got it. Okay. And then just piggybacking off a commercial contracting question in a way, I guess, are you seeing heightened scrutiny for managed care, just given the strong volume backdrop this year perhaps higher denials, greater intensity on utilization management techniques, pushing observation status. And if so, when do you see that moderating in the future? Or how would you frame that?
Kevin Hammons: So we are. I mean I think we saw a little pause by the payers during the pandemic on some of their tactics, if you will, they’ve slowed down to denial claims and pushing on observations as they had fewer claims to pay. But now that as volumes are coming back, we’re certainly seeing a higher number of denials and more pressure from the managed care payers. All that said, we are experiencing better-than-average renegotiated rates with them going forward contracts. So continuing to work with them on things like denials, observations, making sure we’re getting paid what we believe is the appropriate amounts and working closely with them.
Tim Hingtgen: And Jason, this is Tim. I’ll add on to that. We’ve mentioned in the past, really fortified our utilization review function here at CHS. We’ve centralized certain components of that, over made some data. We’re now investing in more, I’ll say, clinical oversight of the UR function for I think, appropriate placement for claims adjudication, denial management. So all those things will be coming into our organization here in the next couple of quarters to continue to improve our front-end games so that we can have the strongest relationship possible with the payers on the back end.
Operator: The next question comes from Kevin Fischbeck with Bank of America.
Kevin Fischbeck : I wanted to start off on this Project Empower announcement. I guess we’re kind of used to you guys talking about consistent cost savings initiatives over the last 5 — plus years. I don’t remember there being like a name like this to what you’re doing. So just trying to understand is this of a different scale than what you’ve done in the past? And then the timing of what you’re talking about starting at the end of this year kind of rolling through 2025. When we think about those medium-term margin target, does that mean not much progress on margins next year and then more kind of ’25 and ’26? Or are there — is there a reason to believe that it should be somewhat ratable towards that ultimate margin goal?
Kevin Hammons: Thanks, Kevin. So a couple of things I’d point to. We have been talking about our strategic margin improvement program that we really formally kicked off in the fourth quarter of 2019, which was putting a lot of discipline around and chasing a number of initiatives over the course of the last several years. Project Empower really takes that maybe to a new level. It is adding a significant investment into the company in terms of adding some technology around installing a new ERP and putting in Oracle of the entire enterprise is going to remove a number of disparate systems and put all of our data into an integrated platform across finance, supply chain and HR. That will significantly improve our ability to manage data at a large scale, give us more comparability across the enterprise versus the disparate systems that we and many others routinely work with.
