Premier, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to Premier's Fiscal 2024 First Quarter 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 touchtone phone. To withdraw from the question queue, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Ben Krasinski, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome to Premier's fiscal 2024 first quarter conference call. Our speakers this morning are Mike Alkire, Premier's President and CEO, and Craig McCaffin, our Chief Administrative and Financial Officer. Before we get started, I want to remind everyone that our earnings release and the supplemental presentation accompanying this call are available in the Investors section of our website at investors.premierinc.com. Please be advised that management's remarks today contain certain forward-looking statements, such as statements regarding our strategies, plans, prospects, expectations, and future performance. And actual results could differ materially from those discussed today. These forward-looking statements speak as of today and we undertake no obligation to update them. Factors that might affect future results are discussed in our filings with the SEC, including our most recent Form 10-K and our Form 10-Q for the quarter, which we expect to file soon. We encourage you to review these detailed safe harbor and risk factor disclosures. Also, during this presentation, we will refer to adjusted and other non-GAAP financial measures. including free cash flow to evaluate our business. Information on why we use these measures in addition to GAAP financial measures and reconciliation of these measures to our GAAP financial measures are included in our earnings release and in the appendix of the supplemental presentation accompanying this call. Information on our non-GAAP financial measures will also be included in our form 10-Q for the quarter and our earnings form 8-K. both of which we expect to furnish to the SEC soon. I will now turn the call over to Mike Altire.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. We are pleased to be with you today to discuss our fiscal 2024 first quarter results and provide an update on progress in advancing our strategies to technology-enabled better, smarter healthcare. Our first quarter results reflect disciplined execution and actively managing our business. As a result, we performed better than anticipated in terms of profitability. At the same time, we were slightly below our expectations for consolidated and segment net revenue, which Craig will discuss later. First, let me address our ongoing strategic review process. Our board and management team continue to work with outside advisors to evaluate potential actions. As part of this assessment, we previously announced the sale of our non healthcare GPO operations for approximately 800 million in cash, subject to certain post-closing purchase price adjustments to unlock value for our shareholders. As we continue to be thoughtful and diligent in our evaluation of additional opportunities, I want to emphasize that we do have a sense of urgency in reaching a conclusion to our process. We remain very focused on ensuring this process is not a distraction for our employees and their ability to continue executing our strategies and delivering value to our members and other customers. I'm incredibly proud of our team's agility and adaptability, which have become defining characteristics of our culture and company. At Premier, our strength is our people, They are core to the success and growth of our business. We are incredibly honored to recently be named one of the best companies to work for in 2023 and 2024 by U.S. News and World Report. Our people and the resilience of our business reinforce our role as a trusted partner for our members and other customers. It also gives us confidence in our long-term positioning and ability to enable providers to safely reduce costs and improve outcomes through our technology enabled performance improvement platform. Our members continue to grapple with financial recovery and normalization, in part due to continued workforce challenges and shortages. We believe our role to help them plan for the future has never been more important. Many providers are expressing increased interest in our shared services and co-management models. These models can help alleviate workforce pressures and reduce overall costs within their systems. As pressure to reduce costs and improve quality continues, many healthcare providers turn to Premier to help with market differentiation, which is why we were pleased to recently release, together with Fortune Magazine, the 100 Top Hospitals and 15 Top Health Systems of 2023. Made possible by our acquisition of this established, credible program, these reports are serving as an entry point to have strategic discussions with new health systems about their performance and how premier technology and services can help drive performance improvement. We also remain very focused on advancing the rapid and accelerating technology innovation in healthcare. Premier believes that artificial intelligence and machine learning have a unique and important role to play in healthcare. We are excited to be at the forefront of this movement, given our years of experience in this space. With our robust data assets and ability to co-develop AI solutions alongside our members, the end users of these technologies, we are differentiated from others in the market. We are committed to identifying additional innovation catalysts to enable use cases to incubate, grow, and scale. Premier believes that AI can transform healthcare and spur innovation. To drive successful implementation of our future, I'm excited about our recent leadership promotions, those being Lee Anderson to the Chief Operating Officer role, Andy Braylow to the Chief Commercial Officer role, and Bruce Radcliffe, the Senior Vice President of Supply Chain Services. These promotions position our team to move forward with our one premier growth mindset. This includes continuing to execute with precision on our strategies and continued innovation around the capabilities that our members and other customers will need to be successful in the future. In summary, we remain focused on executing our strategies by partnering with our members and other customers to deliver innovative, scalable solutions. We will continue to help them navigate the challenges of the current environment in the short term and position them to provide lower cost, higher quality healthcare over the long term. We believe our trusted relationships with members and other customers are a key component in the foundation of our business and position us for continued growth and long-term value creation for our stakeholders. Thank you, and I will now turn the call over to Craig for a discussion of our operational and financial performance.