Barb Jacobsmeyer: So, there’s a difference, first, I guess. So, there is two things. Contract labor is different from PRN. So, contract labor is the agency labor that you pay, that is a pretty significant amount above our normal staffing rate. So, for example, in quarter four, 5.2% our visits in Hospice was performed by contract labor nurses compared to 1.7% last year. That is different than PRN. So, PRN are our staff. They’re hired by us. They’re just — they’re paid as our staff members. However, their status is that they work when they want and they don’t work when they don’t want to. And so, it’s a very flexible staffing. So, when we talk about the shift of full-time to PRN, it really is addressing those nursing staff that want more flexibility.
So, when you see us going from that 34% to 39%, what it means is you would have expected our vacancy rate to actually go down with how positive our quarter four net new hires were. However, it stayed relatively stable because what we wanted to do is readjust the headcount needed to kind of counter that movement of some of the staff to PRN and that’s why you see that 24% vacancy rate.
Tao Qiu Key: Yeah. Got it. You need more staff to handle the same volume.
Barb Jacobsmeyer: Yeah.
Tao Qiu Key: Just curious on the — could you talk about the nine new contracts executed this quarter and the additional nine in the works? What is the size of the potential beneficiary pool that you could access and how quickly do you think you can build scale there? And maybe refresh us on the pricing you expect from those?
Barb Jacobsmeyer: Sure. So, what I would say is what we’ve decided is probably best to give you those covered lives in the ones that are effective. Last quarter, we talked about the ones we had negotiated. We decided that probably what’s most meaningful is what is the member lives of those that are now effective. And so, when you look at the ones that are effective, which are nine of the 18 that we negotiated between quarter three and quarter four, of those nine, it covers a little over 1 million lives, seven of those are at episodic rates. And the reason we’ll do the covered lives on those that are effective as we are finding that there’s a pretty big variance of — by the — when you start and negotiate the terms to it actually being effective and it has a lot to do with the credentialing that has to happen on the payer side. So that can range between three and six months to actually have those contracts become effective in a market.
Tao Qiu Key: That’s helpful. Thank you.
Operator: The next question is from A.J. Rice with Credit Suisse. Your line is open.
Barb Jacobsmeyer: Good morning.
A.J. Rice: Hi. I understand, obviously, the growth rate in your MA book is quite robust and the challenges associated with that. On the fee-for-service side, that seems to be declining at high single digits. I know there’s not a lot of growth in fee-for-service enrollment, but I’m sort of still surprised and that’s happening for a couple of quarters now. Do you have any assessment as to why the fee-for-service visits have — or episodes have dropped off to the way they have? It seems like it’s greater decline than what we’re seeing in the actual enrollment in fee-for-service.
