Enhabit, Inc. (NYSE:EHAB) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Jason Cassorla: Yeah. Great. Thanks. Good morning. Just on the Home Health front. Visits for episode, I think continuously declined over time. But I guess that downward trend looked like it accelerated a bit in the fourth quarter. So, I guess, how should we think about that visit per episode trend for 2023 as perhaps somewhat of an offset to the reimbursement in labor backdrop in Home Health?

Barb Jacobsmeyer: Yeah. It’s obviously something that we continue to focus on the visits per episode. The balance for us is making sure that as we manage the visits per episode and in some of our markets, we’re now using the Medalogix Pulse tool, which is allowing us to have more real-time information on the patient. So, as we utilize that tool, we want to make sure we balance it in a way that we are not impacting those readmission rates because frankly that’s one of our biggest values to bring to the payers. So, right now, we’re comfortable where our visits per episode are. But if there’s the availability as we rollout Pulse to the rest of our branches, it’s something that we’ll continue to work on if we can do it and manage the readmission rates.

Jason Cassorla: Got it. Okay. Thanks. And then just on the Hospice front, you’ve dealt with some significant labor scarcity pressures this year. I know you have that 10% to 15% total admission growth target over the long-term. But just given the hiring efforts you’ve done throughout 2022, do you think you’ve more or less baseline these volume pressures in the fourth quarter and that you should be getting back to year-over-year organic admission growth next year? Or how should we think about that dynamic?

Barb Jacobsmeyer: Yeah. So, I do think — if you think about it, we hired our executive in June of last year. She’s really spent our time kind of understanding what was going on in our markets. The rollout of the new case management model happened in fourth quarter. That didn’t mean overnight, it turned on, it meant that everyone had — each local branch had to do kind of a gap assessment on do I need to hire to be able to really function in this case management model. But we’re excited to see the positive trend in hiring in that fourth quarter, and it has the word getting out that we’re moving to this case management model. We’ve been excited to see in January that our candidate pool has continued to be strong. So, it is really about getting the staffing where we need to, so to your point, we can get back to historic growth.

Jason Cassorla: Okay. Thank you for the color.

Operator: Our next question is from Andrew Mok with UBS. Your line is open.

Andrew Mok: Hi. Good morning. Can you provide a bit more detail on the volume expectations embedded in 2023 guidance? And if you could parse out expectations for fee-for-service and MA volume growth in Home Health, that would be helpful? Thanks.