Operator: The next question comes from Brian Tanquilut with Jefferies.
Brian Tanquilut: Bill, you touched on the impact of Envision being a 30 basis point drag. I know there’s some — a lot of noise happening with American Physician Partners and just stuff moving around the physician staffing. So as we think about that drag, is there opportunity to bring that up? Or is that like a more structural thing where you’ve had to bring in in-house capabilities for physician staffing?
Sam Hazen: Yes. This is Sam. Let me start with that and Bill can color in here. As I mentioned, the backdrop in the hospital-based physician space has been very difficult over the past few years because of multiple factors. And for us, in the short run, we have had to respond to these difficulties to maintain capacity and service availability and so forth. And so we did what we had to do to make sure that our business continue to move forward appropriately. And for the most part, we’ve overcome these pressures and been able to grow, and we’ve increased our earnings expectations for the year in the face of some of these challenges. As Bill mentioned, we don’t anticipate the same level of increases and pressures in the last half of the year, although we’ll have some.
But it’s not going to nearly be what we’ve experienced in the first part, we don’t think. And we do believe with the Valesco operations, we now have a platform that gives us the potential to respond better to these type of challenges and possibly integrate hospital-based physicians into our hospital operations even more effectively, producing better clinical performance efficiency and even growth, we think. And so — and I’ll say this again, I said it earlier, we have a pattern of responding to different kind of operational challenges, whatever they happen to be. We’ve had labor, as I mentioned. We’ve had physician costs. Currently, we’ve had uninsured in the past. And we’ve tended to overcome them. In the short run, sometimes they can create an individual pressure.
But I think the scale of HCA, the resources that we have and the ability to execute allows us to move through some of these pressures over time and get where we want to be.
Operator: And the next question comes from Lance Wilkes with Bernstein.
Lance Wilkes: I’ve got a strategic question for you on digital health and AI. I was just interested in the initiatives that you’re kind of putting in place through the organization at this point, where you’re maybe investing on the venture capital side here. And long term, what do you see is the opportunity for this, whether it’s potentially reduced compensation or an ability to expand volume across the footprint?
Sam Hazen: This is Sam. We have a growing digital agenda in our company, and I’m very excited about what the prospects are for us around that. We are investing in a new clinical system, which we think is going to allow us to move information to the cloud more efficiently, and a matter of fact, move standard data sets into the cloud so that we can then use big data even more effectively and infuse that back into the care process. We will couple our digital agenda with something we’re calling care transformation innovation. And inside of that, we believe we have opportunities to improve care processes, eliminate a lot of the variation that exists today in our company, create better quality and, at the same time, more efficiencies.
Artificial Intelligence, we believe, will play a huge part in that. It’s way early for us to know exactly what that will be and how that will influence our agenda, but we’re encouraged about the prospects for it. We are partnering with some very sophisticated companies to help us push through this in ways that I think will accelerate our agenda and inform it with more expertise than what we have internally. So we’re excited about what this can yield for us as we push into our next life cycle, if you will. And we’ll wait to see what Artificial Intelligence, in fact, can do. But we view it as a positive potential for us in a very significant way.
