Sam Hazen: This is Sam. Thank you for that. I mean we did, as I mentioned in my prepared comments, had some moments in the quarter where we were unable to receive transfers in or take certain patients into our facilities. And that was actually a little bit elevated over the third quarter. We had roughly, using this as the proxy, approximately 2% of our total admissions we were unable to take through our transfer centers and ahead to find those patients alternative solutions where we could. We were busier in the fourth quarter than we were in the third quarter, so that was part of it. But nonetheless, we still are seeing opportunities for us to improve the throughput through our case management initiatives, as you spoke to, continue to increase the head count in our facilities in order to take care of these patients. And we’re hopeful that those numbers will start to come down a little bit as we push into 2023.
Operator: Our next question comes from Whit Mayo with SVB Securities.
Whit Mayo: Hey, thanks. Good morning. Sam, I wanted to go back to the long-term plan that you mentioned. You talked about advancing the transformation of care delivery models. Can you maybe elaborate more on that, sort of how that may be playing in the physician strategy, maybe a different view into working with MA plans or anything would be helpful? Thanks.
Sam Hazen: Well, let me give you a little bit of a backdrop on our long-term thinking with in €“ and I think this going to help you understand why we are investing in these categories. First and foremost, we think we have just an incredible portfolio of communities that we serve. They are growing in and of themselves. So we have opportunities to invest in that growth. We think demand is going to grow in our markets. Aging baby boomers population growth chronic conditions, all those things unfortunately produce demand in some respect. And we think our portfolio is a little better than the national averages on that front. So we’ve got that as a backdrop. So there is opportunities, I’ll call it, outside the walls of HCA to invest in that natural growth in demand.
The second piece that we believe exists is opportunities inside of HCA. We have what we call an economy of opportunities that exist across our 180 hospitals and 2,400 outpatient facilities that we have. And that opportunity is to use big data, use better clinical system capability and better analytics to support better care. And so our technology agenda, coupled with our care transformation agenda, is really about tapping into the economy of opportunity that exist inside our organization. So we think we have two sets of opportunities, outside to continue to grow market share and benefit from the growth in our markets, and then continued improvement in care delivery for better patient outcomes, more efficiency, better operational management in our hospitals by infusing machine learning, advanced analytics with our care transformation agenda.
So our care transformation team is led by a physician and a clinical team with industrial engineers and other type of people who are big data analysts who are supporting evaluating great performance that we have inside our company and really studying the processes around those, or looking outside the company for better processes, better technologies, and, again, weaving that into our overall agenda for our long run. And we’re encouraged by that. We have a major initiative that we’re rolling out this year in our obstetrics unit, and we’re excited about the possibilities around that. On our clinical systems, we are actually in our alpha pilot on our clinical system upgrades. We will have a beta pilot later this year. This is a system that we will be able to push more information, standardized information into the cloud and start to turn that into actionable insights that, we believe, can help our patient outcomes.
So we’re really excited about our long-run agenda. And again, it’s geared toward better patient care, but capitalizing on the opportunities inside the walls of HCA.
Operator: Our next question comes from Pito Chickering with Deutsche Bank.
