Quest Diagnostics Incorporated

Welcome to the Quest Diagnostics first quarter 2026 conference call. At the request of the company, this call is being recorded. The entire contents of this call, including the presentation and question and answer session that will follow, are the copyrighted property of Quest Diagnostics with all rights reserved. Any redistribution, retransmission, or rebroadcast of this call in any form without written consent of Quest Diagnostics is strictly prohibited. Now I'd like to turn the conference over to Dan Hammerly, interim vice president of investor relations for Quest Finastics. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning. I'm joined by Jim Davis, our chairman, chief executive officer and president, and Sam Samad, our chief financial officer. During this call, we may make forward-looking statements and we'll discuss non-GAAP measures. We provide a reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to comparable GAAP measures in the table to our earnings press release actual results may differ materially from those projected. Risks and uncertainties that may affect Quest Diagnostics' future results include, but are not limited to, those described in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and subsequently quarterly filed reports on Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8-K. For this call, references to reported EPS refer to reported diluted EPS, and references to adjusted EPS refer to adjusted diluted EPS. Growth rates associated with our long-term outlook projections, including consolidated revenue growth, revenue growth from acquisitions, organic revenue growth, and adjusted earnings growth are compound annual growth rates. Now, here's Jim Davis.

Thanks, Dan, and good morning, everyone. Our strong first quarter performance reflects a focused business delivering innovative solutions that meet our customers' evolving needs for lab insights. During the first quarter, we grew revenues over 9% almost entirely from organic revenue growth on broad-based demand for our clinical innovations, expansion into new clinical areas, and collaborations with elite healthcare and consumer health organizations. In addition, we grew adjusted diluted earnings per share by approximately 13%, supported by productivity gains from our deployment of automation and AI across our operations, both in and outside our labs. Given our strong first quarter momentum and continued strategic focus, we are raising our revenue and EPS guidance for the year. Now I'll provide more detail on how we executed our strategy across key customer channels and operations during the quarter. Quest operates at the center of healthcare, delivering solutions that make testing simpler and smarter for our core clinical customers, physicians and hospitals, as well as customers in higher growth areas of consumer health, life sciences, and data analytics. In the physician channel, we delivered high single-digit revenue growth in the first quarter on strong demand for our clinical innovations, geographic expansion from greater health plan access, and increased volume from our growing business and enterprise accounts. We are also pleased with our growth during the quarter in end-stage renal disease, a new clinical area for us focused on lab testing for dialysis patients. In addition to volume from serving thousands of dialysis clinics operated by Fresenius Medical Care nationwide, we also added independent dialysis clinics and other providers as clients of our lab and water purity testing. In the hospital channel, we grew revenues at a double-digit rate, with the majority of this growth coming from our collaborative lab solutions for Corwell Health, a leading health system in Michigan. Our CoLab solutions combine our scale, clinical depth, and operational excellence to improve quality and cost efficiencies. Our implementation with Corwell Health is proceeding smoothly. We are also advancing our joint venture with Corwell Health with plans to open a state-of-the-art lab in Southeast Michigan next year. Hospitals value our flexible solutions that enable them to free up capital while benefiting from our expertise and innovation. Our pipeline of potential CoLab collaborations, as well as potential outreach and independent acquisitions remain strong. In the consumer channel, we deliver solutions that empower people to own their health. Similar to recent quarters, we generated significant revenue growth during the quarter, both from questhealth.com and from our portfolio of top consumer health collaborations. Growth from questhealth.com featured robust double-digit customer repeat rates and notable demand for new solutions, such as our elite health profile and autoimmune and hormone tests. Quest is a trusted healthcare brand with broad reach, which enables us to drive efficient customer acquisition for questhealth.com. In addition, we are the preferred lab engine for top consumer health brands, and a key part of our growth this quarter was due to consumers accessing our lab insights within the apps and wearables of our collaborators. Our customer channels are also growing as we continue to deliver advanced diagnostics in five key clinical areas. Advanced cardiometabolic and endocrine, autoimmune, brain health, oncology, and women's and reproductive health. We delivered double-digit revenue growth across several of these areas in the first quarter. I'll comment briefly on a couple of examples. In the areas of brain health, Alzheimer's disease is a progressive dementia that affects over 7 million people in the U.S. and is expected to affect nearly 13 million Americans by 2050. For several quarters, we've spoken about delivering double-digit revenue growth from our AD DETECT blood tests for Alzheimer's disease, a trend that continued in the first quarter. To understand this growth, consider that until recently, clinicians typically diagnosed Alzheimer's using PET-CT scans, which are costly and inaccessible for many. While these scans are highly accurate at identifying mid- and late-stage disease, They are less sensitive at detecting Alzheimer's in early stages before major impairment has occurred. Years ago, we recognized the power of blood testing to reveal disease earlier and more affordably so more patients could benefit from the emerging therapies with potential to slow progression sooner. Today, Quest provides a range of tests under the AD Detect brand. featuring sensitive mass spec tests for amyloid beta and APOE, a genetic risk marker to complement p tau 217 and p tau 181. We also developed a proprietary algorithm that combines multiple biomarker results to establish Alzheimer's pathology with sensitivity and specificity of 90% or greater. At the same time, we are seeing that physicians are becoming more confident using blood tests to aid diagnosis and guide pharmaceutical treatment decisions, often in lieu of imaging. As blood tests are increasingly used both in primary and specialty care, we expect to remain a leading source of diagnostic innovation and insights for managing this disease. In other areas, we drove double-digit revenue growth across much of our cardiometabolic and endocrine portfolio, including for tests for Lp and ApoB, as well as for kidney, liver, and reproductive hormones. New guidelines from the American Heart Association recommend Lp and ApoB testing for the first time, underscoring the clinical value of these important biomarkers. We are also encouraged that the guidelines now recommend screening for high cholesterol at young ages, as new research has found dangerous cardiovascular events are increasingly occurring in young adults. In oncology, we recently announced a research collaboration with City of Hope, a cancer and research treatment organization, to study the use of our Haystack MRD test to aid recurrence monitoring and treatment decisions in clinical trial participants with solid tumor cancers across 14 U.S. sites. In addition to driving top-line growth through innovation and collaborations, our focus on operational excellence aims to improve productivity as well as quality and the patient experiences. Through our Invigorate program, we expect to continue to deliver 3% in annual cost savings and productivity improvements. We have spoken in the past about our growing use of AI in automation in our labs. And while that continues to be a major focus, in the first quarter, we stepped up our deployment of these technologies in several other areas. As one example, we boosted productivity by 40% in the first quarter among customer service agents that used AI to triage and route customer emails to speed responses. We are also deploying AI to make testing simpler and smarter for everyone, including our patients. Our new Quest AI companion transforms complex biomarker data and reference ranges on test reports into clear, plain language. By empowering patients with lab insights, our AI tool, which is powered by Google Gemini, can help shift the doctor-patient relationship to be focused on shared decision-making instead of data gathering, potentially improving care outcomes. Patients have engaged Quest AI Companion approximately 350,000 times since we rolled it out to users of our MyQuest app in the first quarter. Lastly, we are scaling the planning and design work for Project Nova, our multi-year initiative to transform our order-to-cash processes and systems, and are on track to implement our first wave of solutions in the fall of 2027. And now, Sam will provide more details on our performance and 2026 guidance. Sam?