DaVita Inc.

Thank you for standing by. My name is Colleen, and I will be your conference facilitator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the VITA fourth quarter 2018 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. At that time, to ask a question, please press star followed by the number one on your phone, and to cancel your question, press star followed by the number two. Mr. Gustafson, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Colleen, and welcome, everyone, to our fourth quarter conference call. We appreciate your continued interest in our company. I'm Jim Gustafson, Vice President of Investor Relations, and with me today in the room are Ken Theory, our CEO, Joel Ackerman, our CFO, Javier Rodriguez, CEO of Davida Kidney Care, Jim Hilger, our Chief Accounting Officer, and Leanne Zumwalt, Group Vice President. Please note that during this call, we may make forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. All of these statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. For further details concerning these risks and uncertainties, please refer to our fourth quarter earnings press release and our SEC filings, including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly report on Form 10-Q. Our forward-looking statements are based upon information currently available to us and we do not intend and undertake no duty to update these statements. Additionally, we'd like to remind you that during this call, we will discuss some non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures is included in our earnings press release, submitted to the SEC, and available on our website. I'll now turn the call over to Ken Ferry, our Chief Executive Officer.

Thank you, Jim. As you probably already noted, we had solid fourth quarter results that were consistent with prior communications. And, of course, JR and Joel will discuss those in greater detail a little bit downstream. But we are first and foremost a caregiving company. And so, as usual, we will start by talking about a clinical highlight today, antibiotic stewardship. As many of you know, dialysis patients are highly prone to to infections. We have continued to get better at supporting evidence-based prescribing of antibiotics, which has a couple of benefits, including reducing harm to patients from excessive antibiotic use and also preventing the emergence of antimicrobial resistance. This is something that all caregivers should be doing across American and global healthcare, and we're proud that we're getting better. In fact, in 2018, Among patients with symptoms of bloodstream infections, we actually decreased IV antibiotic starts by 12% while maintaining all clinical quality. This is important not only in terms of what we did this year, but we continue to collect data to improve our ability to do even better in the future. Now a quick update on the DMG transaction. We are working closely with Optum to obtain FTC approval, which of course is necessary. The timing of the process was very negatively impacted by the government shutdown, as it was for so many other transactions, and we cannot speak definitively to timing for all the reasons we haven't been able to do that up to this point and all the same reasons that other companies involved in other transactions cannot, but everybody's working very diligently to move that ball forward. In addition, some good news is that in 2019, the DMG financial performance will improve, is expected to improve, significantly. There are a number of very tangible reasons for this. One, for example, is significantly better Medicare Advantage rates than in prior years. Number two, the elimination of the health insurer fee is a dollar-for-dollar significant pickup. Number three, the dollar-for-dollar elimination of considerable consulting expenses incurred in 2018 that will be gone in 2019. And fourth, the number of operating improvements and investments that we made in prior years that are bearing So the net is that 2019 NDMG will be significantly better and is expected to be significantly better than 2018. Now over to Javier for a summary of our kidney care business.