Jamie Perse: Okay, great. And then I just wanted to go to external provider costs maybe near term and over the longer term. I know you mentioned a 1% improvement drives a $7 million improvement in profitability, which I kind of just simply the math, but how do you actually — what’s the path to achieving that, again just in the short-term, what do you think you can accomplish this year in terms of improvement against external provider costs as a percent of revenue, and then longer term, what are the longer-term initiatives and how much progress do you think you can make on that front? Thank you.
Patrick Blair: Yeah, in terms of timing this year, we’ve got a robust portfolio. I think our guidance is reflective of those initiatives are maturing over time, and having an impact over time, predominantly in the last part of the year and going into fiscal year ’25. When you think of those that are going to have the largest impact as soon as it’s really those around the provider unit costs. So, I think we said in the past, we’ve a lot of diagnostics on our provider network and our reimbursement rates to our providers and we found some areas across the country and provider types where we feel like there’s opportunity to improve that. And so, we’ve got a broad range of, let’s call them re-contracting initiatives that touch core areas of our external provider costs, hospitals as well as a broad array of ancillary vendors, DME, lab imaging, we’re looking at every single driver of our medical cost.
We’re looking at our unit costs, and building initiatives to ensure that in every market, we are reimbursing providers at market rate. And over time, it’s easy for those things to kind of inflate. And so you’ve got to be very diligent about it. And I think that sort of provider network side is around $4 million right now is kind of what we’re targeting in sort of annual savings. It all depends, the impact to ’24 is just going to depend on sort of limited contracts negotiated but overall feel very good about the unit cost initiatives. And then I might ask Dr. Feifer. Just to say a few words about utilization, which is sort of the other side of the cost and that’s where we’ve made a lot improvement recently in. It just has sort of a longer timeline on it.
You’re changing behavior rather than renegotiating the contract and Dr. Feifer and his team are just doing a really great job of building that expertise within the company. So let me ask Rich just to comment on a few areas. Rich, that you feel like we’re going to have an impact over time.
Rich Feifer: Sure. And some of them are going to have an impact sooner and some later. But of course the areas we need to focus the most on to impact utilization are the main drivers of low value, high cost impacts. So we’re looking at ER utilization, inpatient utilization hospitalizations. We’re looking at skilled nursing facility, short-stay or skilled days and hospice costs, those are four big buckets ones where we can have a significant impact not only in reducing avoidable costs, but in many cases improving participant and patient safety care and their overall experience. And so, one example of how we’re tackling that is ensuring that our clinics are available and accessible to our participants even longer in the day, and frankly throughout the week.
So that they’re accessible nights and weekends, and we have after hour coverage, so that we can reduce the chance that participant might seek to go to the emergency room on their own. As we know, about 40% of emergency room visits from our population get admitted. So that’s just an example of how we’re tackling utilization and we have a whole bunch of other initiatives to get at that.
Jamie Perse: Thank you, Rich.
Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. And that will come from the line of Jason Cassorla with Citi. Your line is open.
