ATI Physical Therapy, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to ATI Physical Therapy's first quarter 2022 earnings conference call and webcast. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If you do have a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Please note this event is being recorded. On the call today is Jack Larson, Chairman of the Board, Shannon Vitti, Chief Executive Officer, Joseph Jordan, Chief Financial Officer, Ray Waugh, Chief Operating Officer, and Joanne Fong, Senior Vice President, Treasurer, and Head of Investor Relations. I would now like to turn the call over to Ms. Fong to read the Safe Harbor and forward-looking statements.

Thank you, Lisa. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's call. Before we begin, we'd like to remind you that certain statements made during this call will be forward-looking statements. They're subject to various risks and uncertainties. and reflect our current expectations based on our beliefs, assumptions, and information currently available to us. Although we believe these expectations are reasonable, we undertake no obligation to revise any statements or affect changes that occur after this call. Descriptions of some of the factors that cause actual results in these short-looking statements can be found in the risk factors section in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, please note that the company will be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures that we believe are important in evaluating performance. Details and relationships between these non-GAAP measures and most comparable GAAP measures and reconciliation of historical non-GAAP financial measures can be found in the press release that's posted on ATI's website and filed at SEC. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Jack.

Thanks, Joanne, and welcome to all of you joining us this afternoon. I'm very pleased to welcome our new Chief Executive Officer, Sharon Biddy. By way of reminder, Sharon came from CBS Health where she served as the president of MinuteClinic and led the company's clinical and consumer-centered strategy. Sharon is digging into our business, and I look forward to working with her as I continue my role as chairman. Also on the call with us today is, of course, Joe Jordan, our chief financial officer, and Ray Wall, chief operating officer. I'll start the discussion with some highlights of our first quarter 2022 business performance. and then shift to the market trends we are currently seeing. Ray will then share an update on the activities in our clinics and with our teams. Joe will review our first quarter financial results and outlook for full year 2022, and Sharon will wrap us up with remarks to close. Before we jump in, as always, I want to acknowledge and thank our entire team for their continuing dedication and efforts. Although the significant spike in COVID earlier this year feels like yesterday's news, it impacted our teams in a very meaningful way. And in some parts of the country, it still continues to be a fact of life in a clinic. Nevertheless, our teams, both clinical and support, have tackled these challenges head on. Most importantly, throughout this time, we continued to achieve high patient satisfaction scores and help tens of thousands of people every day in their return to physical health. Since we last spoke, patient appointments to our clinics have continued to grow, and we remain laser-focused on achieving visit volume at pre-COVID levels later this year, and of course, building from there. Ray will go over the specifics, but I'm pleased to report that in March, we delivered approximately 22,600 visits per day, representing the highest volume month since March of 2020. To keep this momentum going, we are executing on our referral growth strategy. Alongside an expanded business development team, our 600 or so clinical field leaders have started wading back into relationship building with local physicians and those in the communities that they serve. Understanding that building these relationships take time, we expect to see the full benefits of our market activities in the quarters and years to come. Until then, referrals per day in the first quarter were approximately 91% of the pre-COVID level, full year 2019, while visits per day in the first quarter were approximately 84% of the full year 2019 level. But referrals without enough high-quality clinical staff is just a non-starter. So during the first quarter, we continue to focus on our people. both clinical and support. While COVID variants in January led us to conducting a virtual, rather than in-person, national leadership conference, it was great seeing our nationwide team taking part in leadership development and sharing clinical and management best practices, albeit at a distance. I have shared with you the many past actions we've taken to strengthen our position as the employer of choice for clinicians. and we continue to listen and quickly respond to further strengthening that reputation. As a result, our annualized clinician turnover for the first quarter of 2022 decreased approximately 900 basis points to 28%, which opposes our historical levels. Moreover, while we work to balance growing our clinical staff and driving referrals across our nationwide footprint, there are markets in the Southwest and Southeast where our clinics are running near full capacity. In the first quarter of 2022, we opened 12 de novo clinics with the majority in Arizona, Georgia, and Texas. And we have the financial and people resources to capitalize on these immediate growth opportunities as we see them come up. Finally, all of our work comes to a fine point in the measurement of our patient satisfaction scores. and they remain very high, with an NPS of 74 and a Google Star rating of 4.9 in the first quarter of 2022. We provide individualized NPS reports to each of our regions and clinics quarterly and to each of our therapists semiannually in our strong commitment to continuously raise the bar on what counts, patient satisfaction with their overall experience, and more importantly, their outcomes. With that, I'll turn the call over to Ray.