Operator: Our last question is from Bill Sutherland with The Benchmark Company.
Bill Sutherland: Thanks very much everybody. I wanted to get a clarification if I could on something I think you said Bill, about the rates. You’re looking out on the locked in rate. And you said that could be a bit of a headwind in next year. I guess I just wanted to clarify that that’s kind of what — .
Bill Burns: Yes, no worries. Good evening to you. So if you think about what I said, we have open order rates and we have the rate at which we’re locking, which I consider like the market clearing rate, the rate at which we can get a clinician to the bedside. And we’ve seen stability in both. That’s the good news, right. Both are no longer continuing that downward trajectory. The open order rate and the lock rate are moving kind of sideways up or down 1% or 2%. Nothing that significant. But we’re still blending down the overall portfolio. So when you look at, because we’ve been locking at this rate for so many months now, the fourth quarter is getting much, much closer. The average bill rate you’ll see for the fourth quarter will be very close to what we’re locking at.
And my point was that it’s just a handful of points. Two, three percentage points from where we expect the fourth quarter to blend out to be to what that could look like in the first quarter, beside anything else happening on the bill rates. So that’s all it really was. It was just about the portfolio averaging down to the current lock rates we’re seeing in the market.
Bill Sutherland: And then just to clarify on how you’re feeling about just the numbers that you can, you’ve got tons of orders. But in terms of fill rate, do you have a sense of what that’s going to trend like in the quarter into the next quarter?
Bill Burns: I mean, along with bill rate stability, we’ve seen relative stability in our production as well. So when you look, week over week in terms of what we call net weeks booked as we go each week, we go through at a recruiter level, we look to see how much we are adding to the backlog of revenue. And so that’s kind of seen some stability as well. I think the key to seeing an uptick and we’ve been asked this before, but if bill rates were to increase, would we see a bill rate increase or would we see a volume increase? And I think it’s more likely we would see a volume increase. And what I mean is if the average open order rate were to start to rise a little bit, we would be able to fill more of the orders. So that’s really what it comes down to.
It doesn’t need to be a wild bill rate swing for us to start to fill more. It’s just that the open order average rate, if that inch closer to what we’re seeing the market close towards, we could start to see volume growth. So Marc, I don’t know if you have any color on that.
Marc Krug : No, but I think it’s interesting to point out that our recruiter productivity has been consistent and at the same level for the better part of two quarters now. So even though there’s been bill rate pressure and orders that are below market rate, we’re seeing the same productivity. That’s why it’s encouraging in terms of a volume perspective moving forward.
Bill Sutherland: Okay, that’s good. So I’m thinking it feels like with all the puts and takes that 4Q, I think someone says, is that a good starting point? And we’ve been thinking about 3Q as a trot, and maybe it’s not good to think about 4Q as necessarily that. But it’s sort of a baseline. Is that kind of what is the best way to think about it?
Bill Burns: Yes, I think so. I think you’ll have assumptions to layer into that, like we talked about puts and takes as you move through 2024, but it starts to feel like that’s a good starting point as you move into the new year. And for all the reasons we talked about, the fact that orders will remain fairly stable and actually have ticked up over the last couple of quarters, bill rates have leveled off, it feels like we’re getting to that point of stabilization in the market. And we will look to go off of that, of course.
Bill Sutherland: Is there on Cross Country DAS, just curious about the monetization model for that if there is something significant in that way.
John Martins: Yes, what really what this is doing is there’s two different types of ways to monetize it. We can sell it directly to a non-client of ours. And the idea with that is we want to make sure that there is transparency in this industry about bill rates, just like we’ve brought transparency in the industry and brought transparency to clinch the period over the last five, six years. And so part of that is to show clients that how they can rationalize the costs by understanding what the market rates are. And then they look at and what DOS does is it shows them the low, medium, and high rates ranges from a local, regional, and national level. And then the hospital can make sure that they can choose, they can obviously select what type of rate they feel to attract, look to attract clients in their area.
And so that’s one way we can rationalize — one way we can monetize it by selling it directly. But that also allows us to start having conversations with these non-clients of ours to show them really how we can help them save money. And then number two, we also embed and can embed DOS into Intellify. And that is also can be monetized as we embed it into Intellify as it is a separate product from Intellify. It can be embedded into Intellify, but we would monetize that when it’s embedded in.
Bill Sutherland: Okay. So last one for me. The five wins you’ve had in Intellify. What’s the aggregate dollars on that in total?
John Martins: We haven’t given out the numbers yet because as we’re going through even the one that’s greater than $100 million, as we’re implementing them, we’ll actually get to see the actual dollars and the actual spend through there. So as we will give the numbers in future calls, but right now we’re letting these first five, especially because we’re implementing three right now, come in before we give that total dollar.
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude the Q&A period. I’ll now turn it back over to John Martins for closing remarks.
John Martins: Thank you, operator. In closing, I’d like to thank everyone for participating in today’s call, and we look forward to updating you on the progress of the company on the next call in February.
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.
