Anthem, Inc.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to Anthem's second quarter earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session where participants are encouraged to present a single question. If you wish to ask a question, please press star then one on your telephone keypad. You will hear a prompt that you have been queued. You may withdraw your question at any time by pressing star then two. These instructions will be repeated prior to the question and answer portion of this call. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to the company's management. Please go ahead.

Good morning and welcome to Anthem's second quarter 2021 earnings call. This is Steve Tennell, Vice President of Investor Relations, and with us this morning on the call are Gail Boudreau, President and CEO, John Galina, our CFO, Peter Haitayan, President of our Commercial and Specialty Business Division, Felicia Norwood, President of our Government Business Division, and Jeff Walter. president of our pharmacy and health solutions businesses. Gail will begin the call with a brief discussion of the quarter, recent progress against our strategic initiatives, and close on Anthem's commitment to its mission. John will then discuss our financial results and outlook in greater detail. After our prepared remarks, the team will be available for Q&A. During the call, we will reference certain non-GAAP measures Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are available on our website, antheminc.com. We will also be making some forward-looking statements on this call. Listeners are cautioned that these statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, many of which are difficult to predict and generally beyond the control of Anthem. These risks and uncertainties can cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. We advise listeners to carefully review the risk factors discussed in today's press release and in our quarterly filings with the SEC. I will now turn the call over to Gail.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us today for Anthem's second quarter 2021 earnings call. This morning, we reported second quarter gap earnings per share of $7.25 and adjusted earnings per share of $7.03. ahead of our expectations despite ongoing uncertainties associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. I'm pleased to report that we continue to deliver on our commitments to our stakeholders while making considerable progress against our long-term strategy to transform our organization from a health benefits company to a lifetime trusted partner in health. This transformation is fueled by the continued expansion of our digital platform which improves connections across the healthcare system while leveraging the industry's largest data sets to drive actionable insights in pursuit of better health. In the second quarter, Anthem produced strong membership growth, won significant new contracts in our government business, and continued to integrate and expand our digital platform. On the membership front, we ended the second quarter with 44.3 million members up 1.9 million, or 4.4% year over year, and 820,000 new members since the end of the first quarter, reflecting the strategic acquisition of Puerto Rico's leading Medicare Advantage organization, MMM, as well as strong organic growth in our core benefits businesses. MMM is the largest Medicare Advantage plan in Puerto Rico, and operates the only four and a half star rated plan in the territory and is also the second largest Medicaid health plan. Through its integrated care delivery model, MMM has established a strong track record of delivering quality care for seniors and dual eligibles with complex and chronic needs. Medicare Advantage remains a key area of focus for our organization. and we continue to see an immense opportunity to grow and optimize this business. Just last week, we were awarded a major contract to serve the retirees of the City of New York in partnership with Emblem Health in what was one of the largest public procurements for group Medicare in the last decade. This opportunity builds on our more than 50-year relationship serving New York City's workers, retirees, and their families. and will significantly increase Anthem's group Medicare Advantage business, as well as our Medicare Advantage market share in New York. We're honored to have been selected to make a material difference in the lives of New Yorkers who worked hard to serve the city. In addition to MMM, we also closed on the acquisition of MyNexus during the second quarter, advancing our strategy to grow and deepen Anthem's capabilities in Medicare Advantage. MyNexus is a digitally enabled organization that optimizes home health for more than 2 million Medicare Advantage members across 20 states, including more than 900,000 existing Anthem Medicare Advantage members. MyNexus improves outcomes by facilitating timely, personalized care for our members in the comfort of their homes, leading to improved continuity of care and reduced hospital admissions, readmissions, and ER visits. In addition to supporting future growth in Medicare Advantage, my nexus furthers our diversified business group strategy to deliver on its risk contracts through the expansion of home-based care. Our Medicaid business is also performing very well and continues to build upon our deep local alliances and investments in population health, digital tools, and local solutions to help address the social drivers of health in our communities. We extended our strong RFP track record in the quarter, securing an award to continue serving consumers in the state of Nevada. This follows our recent award in Ohio. These wins build on the momentum we have coming off a fantastic start to the launch of North Carolina, which went live at the beginning of this month. Our Healthy Blue plan has already become the largest Medicaid managed care plan by membership in North Carolina and the leading choice for consumers. Of beneficiaries who chose their plan, nearly 50% selected Healthy Blue, underscoring the power of our alliance partnerships and the blue brand. In our commercial business, together with IngenioRx, we continue to innovate, while demonstrating the power of true integration. By deploying machine learning and automation across our comprehensive ecosystem of medical, pharmacy, lab, and social drivers of health data, Anthem and IngenioRx are improving outcomes. Across these businesses, we're leveraging our proprietary predictive modeling algorithms to apply rich and analytic solutions that allow us to tailor our integrated medical and pharmacy offerings to each member population. This enables us to deliver the right solutions to improve health based on individualized needs. We extend this customized approach to our specialty products, which we are increasingly selling in bundles through Anthem's Whole Health Connection, a differentiator in the marketplace. This traction gives us confidence in the long-term targets we articulated for our commercial business at our recent analyst day, including narrowing the profit gap between our fee and risk-based commercial business by serving more of our fee-based members in more ways. The success we are seeing in our core business validates our commitment to continue to invest in building our digital platform for health. The essence of a platform is that what we own matters less than what we can connect, and we are seeing great success in making connections through consumer and provider-facing tools. While we are still in the early innings, our efforts to simplify the healthcare experience while creating a more connected and powerful platform are clearly resonating with consumers, providers, and employers. For example, over 30% of members registered for Sydney Health are actively using the platform. In the second quarter, we continued to expand access to Sydney across multiple Medicaid markets and saw a five-fold increase in engagement compared to our legacy digital tools for Medicaid. In the commercial markets, 32 national accounts have purchased Sydney Preferred for its superior end-to-end experience and enhanced functionality. like our Find Care feature, which provides members seeking surgical treatments a personalized omni-channel experience, including price transparency, tailored physician and facility recommendations, and access to telephonic health coaches to guide them through the process. Digital is also playing a key role in deepening our value-based care penetration and provider enablement by improving connectivity and real-time access to meaningful, actionable data. We continue to invest in building enhanced data connections to enable deeper collaboration at scale via our HealthOS provider platform. HealthOS connects siloed health data and disparate technologies to drive deeper insights and reduce costs and complexity. More than 100,000 value-based care physicians and 13,000 value-based care coordinators are connected to HealthOS today. This connection allows technology partners and providers to plug into HealthOS and gain data-driven insights as part of their existing workflow. In May, we announced a new partnership with Epic that will allow secure, bi-directional exchange of health information, paving the way to better leverage data-driven insights into care decisions. Epic is a significant enabler of many of our efforts to improve our HEDIS and STAR scores. We have nearly 150 provider systems on our glide path through the end of 2022 and are in discussions with other healthcare information companies for similar partnerships. All of these efforts align to Anthem's purpose to improve the health of humanity. Our community health strategy supports our purpose by addressing the health-related social needs of our associates, members, and communities through data and evidence-based interventions that promote health equity. Our commitment to living this purpose has earned recognition that I'm particularly proud of. For example, Anthem was recently named one of the top 100 U.S. companies supporting healthy communities and families by Just Capital. the leading platform for measuring and improving corporate performance in the stakeholder economy. We are the leader in our industry, ranking number one among healthcare providers and number 14 overall on the list. In addition, Points of Light, the world's largest organization dedicated to volunteer service, recently recognized Anthem as one of the 50 most community-minded companies in America for 2021. As we reflect on our achievements this quarter and our broader mission, we're cognizant that fundamentally improving the health of humanity takes partnerships, aligned incentives, and connections across people, care providers, researchers, data scientists, communities, and others dedicated to improving health. Anthem is making these connections through our digital platform for health while following the data and embracing our unique assets to drive positive change in ways that only Anthem can. We have deep local roots in our communities and the industry's largest data sets, both of which position us uniquely well to deliver against our mission. I'll now turn the call over to John to discuss our financial performance and outlook in greater detail. John?