DaVita Inc.

Good evening. My name is Darren, and I will be your conference facilitator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the DaVita First Quarter 2019 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 period. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star and then number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star and then number two. Thank you. Mr. Gustafson, you may begin your conference. Participants, please stand by. The main speaker got disconnected. Participants, please stand by. We have Jim Gustafson in a minute. Gustafson, you may begin.

Thank you, Darren, and welcome, everyone, to our first quarter conference call. We appreciate your continued interest in our company. I'm Jim Gustafson, Vice President of Investor Relations, and with me today are Ken Theory, our CEO, Joel Ackerman, our CFO, Javier Rodriguez, CEO of DeVita Kidney Care, and Jim Hilger, our Chief Accounting Officer. Please note that during this call, we may make forward-looking statements within the meanings of federal securities laws. All of these statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, that could cause 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 first 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 on 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. 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 Kent Therry, our Chief Executive Officer.

Thank you, and greetings to all of you, and thank you for your interest in DaVita. The first quarter results, as many of you have already seen, were slightly ahead of our expectations. Javier and Joel will elaborate on that. But as we are first and foremost a caregiving company, I will start, as we always have, with a clinical highlight. In this case, readmissions, hospital readmissions, of course, remain the top priority The normal 30-day hospitalization readmit rate for ESRD patients is about 35%. That's more than double for the normal patient population in Medicare. Our Q1 readmit rate was 31.8%, so significantly lower, also continuing to improve versus the prior quarter and prior year. And our readmit rate is steadily trending down since we launched a number of transition of care initiatives, really pretty much starting in 2017. which focus on delivering the right care to patients when they are discharged. If you do the math, just to get a sense of the impact on the overall system and the savings and quality improvements associated therewith, that improvement over the last two years equates alone to about 45,000 fewer patient days in the hospital. Good for patients, good for taxpayers, good for their families, and we're only gonna get better. Moving on, this is just shy of my 20-year anniversary. here at DaVita. I think it's my 102nd earnings call when I combine that with my time at Vibra, where some of you were with me slash us there as well. It's nice to finish in a call where we're going to reaffirm our annual guidance. And I was told the other day by one of the capital markets players that we have, in fact, hit our annual guidance in every one of the 20 years, Javier and I together. It is also a good thing about this call that I'm turning over the ranks to Javier, whom Some of you know, and all of you will soon know, we worked together as friends and partners for over 20 years. He's been my heir apparent for several years, but this was a board-directed process, really according to all contemporary best demonstrated practices. But it's nice that both the board and I feel like we're leaving you in very, very good hands. A quick DMG update. There's really three positive things to say about DMG before I turn things over to J.R. figuratively as well as substantively. But the three positive points on DMG, number one, we do have a clear path to obtaining FDC approval, which is the exact same perspective that was shared by United quite recently. Good fact number two is that since those statements, there have been a number of recent developments that have moved us along that path and have us feeling even more positive. And then third, DMG itself has had a solid slash strong operating performance in the first quarter. The rest of the year looks even stronger, making the close all the more attractive to United. Now, over to JR.