Acadia Healthcare Company, Inc.

Hello and welcome to the Acadia Healthcare fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw from the question queue, you may press star, then two. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the call to Patrick Feely. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning. Yesterday, after the market closed, we issued a press release announcing our fourth quarter 2024 financial results. This press release can be found in the Investor Relations section of the AcadiaHealthcare.com website. Here with me today to discuss the results are Chris Hunter, Chief Executive Officer, and Heather Dixon, Chief Financial Officer. To the extent any non-GAAP financial measure is discussed in today's call, you will also find a reconciliation of that measure to the most directly comparable financial measure calculated according to GAAP in the press release that is posted on our website. This conference call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements, among others, regarding Acadia's expected quarterly and annual financial performance for 2024 and beyond. These statements may be affected by the important factors, among others, set forth in Acadia's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and in the company's fourth quarter news release. And consequently, actual operations and results may differ materially from the results discussed in the forward-looking statements. At this time, I would like to turn the conference call over to Chris.

Thank you, Patrick, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for being with us for Acadia's fourth quarter 2024 conference call. For the fourth quarter, we reported solid financial and operating results, capping off another year of growth and progress for Acadia. Total revenue increased 4.2% over the prior year's fourth quarter to $774 million. For the full year, we delivered over $3.1 billion in revenue, a 7.7% increase over 2023. Same facility patient days grew 3.2% in the fourth quarter and remained stable between 3 and 4% in each month throughout the quarter. Excluding the impact of a handful of underperforming facilities, same facility growth would have been above 5% in the quarter. We also benefited from a more stable labor environment in 2024, supported by our initiatives centered around recruitment, retention, and employee engagement, and a strong focus on training in our local markets. Working together with our facility operators has helped us attract and maintain talent in a competitive market. I'd like to now take a moment to reflect on what drives us forward as an organization and why I remain as confident as ever in our strategy. At our core, we are a company dedicated to transforming the lives of patients, families, and those in the communities we serve for the better. Our facilities treat many of the most complex, high-acuity cases and fill a critical gap in the continuum of care for evidence-based, specialized behavioral health care. What sets us apart is our unwavering commitment to putting patient needs first, setting a high bar for care standards and compliance, and prioritizing quality. We back up this commitment by investing heavily in technologies to enhance safety in people and processes to support effective patient care delivery. We have led the industry in adopting the latest technology and evidence-based practices in attracting the most skilled practitioners in the field, helping us to deliver safe, quality care with positive clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction scores. For example, we are going above and beyond what's required of behavioral healthcare facilities by investing in electronic medical records, which reduce medication errors, improve care coordination, support quality, and ensure the consistent delivery of evidence-based care. We have added patient monitoring devices across Acadia's acute facilities, which enhance patient safety and mitigate incident risk. We believe we lead the industry in performance metrics in the use of this technology, underscoring our confidence that the care delivered at Acadia sets the standard for other providers. We have also implemented wearable safety devices for staff that enables improved response times and mitigation of potential risk. Our ability to use data has continued to advance significantly. Our integrated quality dashboard now provides real-time visibility into over 50 distinct safety patient experience, and regulatory compliance-related key performance indicators. This gives facility leadership real-time insight into performance across our hospitals, creating a culture of accountability for quality. As CEO of Acadia, I continue to remain highly focused on these initiatives, and we will continue to prioritize them and expand them when necessary. I strongly believe this patient-centered approach is driving superior outcomes and patient experience and also unlocking operational effectiveness across the organization. Before I turn it over to Heather to dive deeper into the financial discussion, I'd like to provide a progress update on our growth strategy. We completed construction on approximately 1,300 beds in 2024 including approximately 1,100 completed during the fourth quarter. 776 of these new beds became operational during 2024, including the opening of four new acute inpatient hospitals. In the fourth quarter, 577 newly constructed beds became operational, including 233 beds to existing facilities and 344 beds from new facilities. In the first two months of 2025, we have added an additional 313 licensed beds. Joint venture partnerships continue to be an important part of our growth strategy. We are fortunate that a growing number of well-respected health systems are choosing to partner with Acadia to better serve patients by bridging the gap between physical and behavioral health care. During the fourth quarter, we opened our 144-bed joint venture hospital with Intermountain Health in Denver, Colorado. We also recently opened our 192-bed joint venture hospital in partnership with Henry Ford Health in Detroit. Looking forward, we have a solid pipeline of potential opportunities to work with other leading providers in attractive markets and expect to add between 800 and 1,000 total beds this year. We are proud of this progress, which would not have been possible without the efforts of the over 25,000 dedicated employees, clinicians, and healthcare professionals who work at Acadia. As communities across the United States continue to face an unprecedented mental health and addiction crisis, with rising rates of depression, anxiety, substance use disorders and suicide, Acadia continues to be committed to expanding access and providing the specialized care and treatment that's so desperately needed. As we look to 2025 and beyond, we remain confident in our strategy and goals we have set for ourselves. At this time, I will now turn the call over to Heather to discuss our financial results for the quarter.