Universal Health Services, Inc. (NYSE:UHS) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Steve Filton: Yeah. I think those characterizations are fair. So if we’re talking about overall — an overall pricing assumption in our guidance, 2.5% to 3%, we’re probably getting twice that on our commercial business, so 5%, 6%. And in terms of specifics about whether we’re able to cover increases in our physician subsidies, et cetera, that really varies contract by contract, et cetera. But the mid-single-digit commercial increases that you’re saying our peers are citing seems to be consistent with our experience.

Sarah James: Great. And one more just on what you guys are doing on technology investments on the acute and behavioral side. Are you implementing any sort of virtual bed checks on either of those segments or where would you focus your technology investments?

Steve Filton: Yeah. So I would highlight, I mean, we have a lot of technology investments, but I think specifically in behavioral, and we’ve talked about this before, we are implementing an electronic medical record in our behavioral facilities. That project is already underway. We are experimenting with and testing a number of technological solutions to more efficient patient grounding in our behavioral facilities where patients will wear something like an Apple Watch kind of device and we’re able to track their location and we’re able to track when we lay eyes on those patients, et cetera. So that’s improving the efficiency of our patients and in our behavioral facilities as well.

Sarah James: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. I’m showing no further questions at this time. I’d now like to turn it back to Steve Filton for closing remarks.

Steve Filton: Yeah. We’d just like to thank everybody for their time this morning and look forward to speaking to everybody in a couple of months after the first quarter. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you for your participation in today’s conference. This concludes the program. You may now disconnect.