Universal Health Services, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the first quarter 2026 Universal Health Services Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Darren Larrick, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Daniel. Good morning, and welcome to Universal Health Services' first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. I'm Darren Larrick, Vice President of Investor Relations. With me this morning are our President and CEO, Mark Miller, and our Chief Financial Officer, Steve Filton. Mark and Steve will provide some prepared remarks, and then we will open it up to Q&A. During today's conference call, we will be using words such as believes, expects, anticipates, estimates, and similar words that represent forecasts, projections, and forward-looking statements. For anyone not familiar with the risks and uncertainties inherent in these forward-looking statements, we recommend a careful reading of the section on risk factors and forward-looking statements and risk factors, and our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2025. In addition, we may reference during today's call measures such as EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA net of NCI, and adjusted net income attributable to UHS, which are non-GAAP financial measures. Information and reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to net income attributable to UHS can be found in today's press release. With that, Let me now turn it over to Mark Miller for some introductory remarks.

Thank you, Darren. Good morning to all participants on today's call, and thank you for your continued interest in UHS. The first quarter of 2026 features significant acceleration in our behavioral health outpatient strategy with the announcement of the Talkspace acquisition and continued steady operating performance and cash flow generation in our core operations in the midst of a more challenging seasonal volume trend. Revenue growth for the first quarter was 9.6%. Adjusted EBITDA net of NCI increased 8.4% and adjusted EPS increased 16.1% as compared to the first quarter of 2025. These results highlight the adaptability and financial discipline of our leadership teams and the benefits of our efficiency initiatives, which are driven by technology adoption and operational excellence. Speaking first to the Talkspace acquisition announced on March 9th, Talkspace is an established market leader in virtual outpatient behavioral health care with a network of 6,000 licensed professionals serving all 50 states. We believe Talkspace is the best in class virtual platform in the behavioral industry with differentiated technology offering and strong brand recognition among patients and clinicians. Talkspace's successful payer-driven business model aligns well with our strategy to increase access to a full spectrum of outpatient services and diversify our behavioral payer mix Over the past 24 months, we've focused significant resources to grow existing outpatient service locations adjacent to our hospital campuses and develop new freestanding outpatient clinic locations. We will continue to invest in these areas internally. The addition of Talkspace's high-quality, scaled platform accelerates our ability to create the industry's first end-to-end continuum of behavioral health care services that is strongly aligned to the demand trends and preferences of the market overall. This national continuum includes lower acuity, outpatient, and step-in services, all the way to residential and inpatient services, where we've led the market for more than four decades. We plan to share more details about the impact of the transaction after closing, but I'd like to highlight two primary benefits for the acquisitions. First, from a strategic perspective, Talkspace represents a multi-year value creation opportunity underpinned by access to new sources of outpatient revenue growth. This is supported first by the strength of the base Talkspace business, which has a very strong outlook on a standalone basis and enhanced further by the programs we plan to develop alongside Talkspace to complement each other's businesses. For example, there is a significant opportunity for us to introduce Talkspace's 6,000 clinicians into our environment to develop higher acuity virtual offerings, such as virtual intensive outpatient programs or IOPs. This will improve our ability to manage more patients stepping down from UHS facilities with a preferred virtual option. The types of programs we build on a virtual outpatient basis will drive higher quality continuity of care further downstream after our patients step down from higher levels of care. There are numerous other bidirectional revenue synergy opportunities we'll be working on post-closing that will improve access to outpatient virtual services for UHS patients and improve access to higher levels of care for Talkspace patients. Second, from a financial perspective, we expect the deal to be accretive to earnings during the first 12 months post-closing, and we expect it to be increasingly accretive thereafter. By year three post-closing, we expect the effective EBITDA multiple for the Talkspace transaction to be in the single-digit range. Moving on to the quarters, I'd like to highlight a few items before I turn it over to Steve to review the financials. From a growth perspective, we met our internal same facility revenue growth and earnings objectives in the first quarter, despite a more dynamic operating backdrop. This was accomplished through solid expense management and higher contributions from pricing in both segments due to more positive trends in rates. We expect same facility growth to be more balanced between volume and pricing as the year progresses. As we believe first quarter volume performance was impacted heavily by seasonal factors consistent with what we highlighted in February on our fourth quarter earnings call. From a technology perspective, our enterprise level AI governance process remained very active and focused on two primary domains within our business, in the operational domain to impact quality and patient experience, and in the administrative domain to increase efficiency. During 2025, we focused heavily on scaling solutions that reduce the burden of our routine administrative tasks. We deployed and scaled a total of eight different use cases of AI solutions into our revenue cycle operations that are now yielding significant benefit on a go-forward basis. For 2026, we are focusing more heavily on enabling solutions in our clinical operations to improve hospital-level efficiency and patient experience. Included in our 2026 roadmap are several new use cases being designed and built with Hippocratic AI, which is one of our key AI solution partners. It is too early to project the longer-term financial impact of the 2026 initiatives, although we expect them to be incremental to margins over time, and just as importantly, we expect them to have a real impact on quality and patient experience. In closing, I am encouraged by our progress so far in 2026 and remain optimistic about our ability to deliver high-quality services in an efficient manner in the communities we serve. On behalf of our entire organization, we look forward to welcoming Talkspace employees into UHS in the coming months. With that, I will now turn the call over to Steve Stilton for more details on the quarter.