Agilon Health at TD Cowen Conference: Strategic Focus on Value-Based Care

On Wednesday, 05 March 2025, Agilon Health (NYSE: AGL) participated in the TD Cowen 45th Annual Healthcare Conference, outlining its strategic approach to navigating the current Medicare Advantage landscape. The company highlighted both opportunities and challenges, emphasizing its commitment to disciplined growth and value-based care models.

Key Takeaways

• Agilon Health projects a 4% revenue growth for 2025, with a focus on quality incentives and risk adjustments.
• The company has significantly reduced its Part D exposure, aiming to mitigate potential losses.
• A "glide path" approach is being implemented for new partnerships, reducing initial risk.
• Agilon Health anticipates a cautious 3% growth in Medicare Advantage for 2025.
• Strong emphasis is placed on physician engagement and building robust payer relationships.

Financial Results

• Revenue Growth: Agilon Health forecasts a 4% increase in revenue, driven by 2% from bids and initiatives and another 2% net of risk adjustment.
• Cost Trends: The company expects a cost trend of 5.3%, consistent with 2024 levels.
• Part D Exposure: The exposure to Part D has been reduced from 70% to below 30%, with an anticipated loss of $65 million to $75 million on the remaining exposure.
• Profitability: Exiting certain partnerships has improved profitability, and the company focuses on contracting, cost, and cash management.

Operational Updates

• Class of 2025: The size has been reduced to 20,000 members, reflecting a cautious growth approach.
• Glide Path Approach: A new strategy for partnerships involves a no-downside care management fee initially, transitioning to full risk later.
• Quality Incentives: Half of the initiatives for 2025 are tied to achieving high-quality ratings.
• Geographic Focus: Expansion is concentrated within existing states and communities to enhance operational efficiency.

Future Outlook

• Growth Strategy: Agilon Health aims to control growth through new market partnerships and expansion within existing geographies.
• Market Opportunity: Dislocation within current markets presents significant opportunities.
• Medicare Advantage Growth: The company expects a conservative growth rate of 3% for 2025.
• Post-2026 Vision: Agilon Health plans to focus on value-based care in Medicare fee-for-service.

Q&A Highlights

• Payer Interest: There is growing interest from payers in value-based care to improve senior patient enrollment and STAR ratings.
• Physician Feedback: Partners are aligned with Agilon Health’s goals, focusing on clinical excellence and PCP involvement.
• Geographic Strategy: The company targets markets with favorable conditions, without geographic constraints.

For a deeper understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - TD Cowen 45th Annual Healthcare Conference:

Ryan Langston, Senior Analyst, TD Healthcare: Okay. Well, thank you everybody for joining us here. It’s forty fifth Annual TD Healthcare Conference. My name is Ryan Langston. I’m the Senior Analyst covering healthcare services and managed care.

Happy to have Agilon Health with us. We have Steve Sell, Chief Executive Officer and Jeff Swannicki, Chief Financial Officer and the IR team, of course. Real quick, Agilon is a physician oriented value based care company providing capitated physician services to Medicare Advantage Health Plans, has over 500,000 MA members along with over a 30,000 ACO reach, generating about 6,000,000,000 of annual revenues in 2024. So thanks for being here, guys. Appreciate it.

Steve Sell, Chief Executive Officer, Agilon Health: Thanks. Thanks, Ryan. Good

Ryan Langston, Senior Analyst, TD Healthcare: to be here. Good. I know you reported recently, but I think it might be helpful just to give us a minute kind of reflect on 2024 kind of an interesting year to say the least. But maybe just just give us a minute kind of your thoughts as we’re into ’25 now and what ’24 means is sort of a jump off and then we’ll get into ’25 from there.

Steve Sell, Chief Executive Officer, Agilon Health: Yes. I mean, I think that we talked about last week on our call, ’25 is the third year of a challenged cycle in Medicare Advantage. I think we’ve talked about ’25 as a transition year relatively flat off of ’24. Clearly, we made some important decisions in 2024, to be disciplined based on that challenging environment. And we talked about exiting a couple of partnerships.

We are much more measured in terms of our growth with the class of 2025 relative to the class of 2024. And so I think we tried to close ’24 with really a solid step off into 2025 and then provide a 2025 guide that’s roughly flat year over year given the dynamics overall in terms of spread, but being focused on the important things that are going to position us well for ’twenty six.

Ryan Langston, Senior Analyst, TD Healthcare: And we will get into ’twenty five guidance pieces in a second, but just you touched on it, Steve. Just this sort of maybe change a little bit on the class of 2025 and there’s more glide path approach. I think it was a little less than 20,000 members, some portion of that. But just maybe what sort of was the impetus for that? And then as we think about it, how do we think about maybe the class of ’26, ’20 ’7?

I don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves, but is that maybe sort of a blueprint potentially going forward of just taking more of a step approach to risk?

Steve Sell, Chief Executive Officer, Agilon Health: So, I really appreciate the question. I think growth for us is something that we believe is really controlled. I would start with, you know, we partner with primary care doctors. We move them into a a new business model. And the demand from the primary care physician side is greater than we’ve ever seen.

The challenges of fee for service just continue to grow with Medicare fee schedule changes, with the aging population. And as we look out there, the alternatives for primary care doctors to partner with are fewer and fewer. So from a relative standpoint, I think we’re that much more attractive to those physicians out there. Specifically to your question, class of 24 largest class that we’ve had to date, performed very well even in a challenging environment at the high side of our typical year one medical margin profile. Class of 25 came in at 20,000 versus north of 130,000 in that classes of 24.

So it was a much smaller class. That was a conscious decision driven by the environment, looking at the underwriting with payers. Only three partners in terms of new partner, new market, that were included in that. Specific to your question about how we’re approaching that year one, we think of it, we call it a glide path. It’s really a transition to full risk.

And so given the environment, given the challenge of the spread that I talked about, we will take on a new partner and for one, maybe two years, do a no downside care management fee that covers the costs of the quality programs, the burden of illness programs, which the payers are very interested in us working on, but then transition into full risk. So in a twenty year partnership, eighteen, nineteen years of it will be in global risk, And this starting point will sort of be in this no downside care coordination fee. And Jeff always talks about if you think about this from a revenue perspective, you’re really sort of building a backlog of future full risk lives that will transition into risk. So it was really environmental. I think it’s not a change in strategy.

We’re totally into global risk, but it is an arrow in our quiver that we can use given the environment when needed.

Ryan Langston, Senior Analyst, TD Healthcare: You talked about payers being interested in this. I assume one of the reasons is they want you to be successful, right?

Steve Sell, Chief Executive Officer, Agilon Health: Absolutely. I mean, I think we talked about the demand from the primary care side. From the payer side, the demand is greater than ever. They have aggressive goals for getting more senior patients into value based care programs, really driven by things like the STARS cut points going up. And they look at the relative performance of their fee for service network against our performance as a value based care provider.

And you see things like with our contracts this year getting far more quality incentives. Half of the initiatives that we talked about last week for 2025 are tied around quality incentives and hitting four or 4.25 stars, which is increasingly valuable to them.

Ryan Langston, Senior Analyst, TD Healthcare: Yeah. Is there you know, maybe the way I think about it, is there potentially an opportunity for this to actually be sort of a tailwind maybe on membership where if you take that sort of year one glide path, if you will, maybe that opens up actually more lives that you can sort of bring onto the platform maybe than you would have historically. And so in terms of you might only bring 50,000 in full risk, but you could bring on more in first year because you’re only taking that partial risk.

Steve Sell, Chief Executive Officer, Agilon Health: I don’t know if that necessarily catalyzes the growth opportunity. I think the bigger thing is the demand from the primary care doctors and the demand from the payers. As I think about growth as a controllable, the one there’s multiple ways we grow. One is new market, new partner. We talked about kind of calibrating that to the environment.

But then the other is in our existing geographies, adding physicians in three, four, five PCP practices and senior patients around that, there is a tremendous opportunity. There’s a lot of dislocation within the markets we serve. We’re in 12 states, we’re in 30 communities. And so that in market TAM that we’ve got in front of us is dramatically increased relative to what we would have seen a few years ago. And so maybe our mix of growth is going to change a little bit as we have more that sits within that existing footprint.

But I think it’s a controllable and as we get this environment to a place where we feel good about, we have the ability to really turn it on.

Ryan Langston, Senior Analyst, TD Healthcare: We’ll get into 25 in a second. But on that point, the demand is there, of course, from the enrollment side. One question we get, and not just for Agilon, but how many of these groups are still out there to actually partner with, these large integrated groups or these large primary care groups? Because you just see the news flow of this group got acquired or this group’s partnering with that group. And what do you see out in the market maybe even two years out when you’re having these initial conversations?

Is there still a large opportunity of these groups out there? Are we sort of starting to bump into each other in market at this point?

Steve Sell, Chief Executive Officer, Agilon Health: Well, so I think there is a large opportunity is what I would say one, it’d be the headline. I think there’s primary care only groups, multi specialty groups, you know, IPA groups, which there’s a tremendous number of, and then health systems. We’ve got groups in each of those four categories that are successful for us today and we’ve got a criteria that sits around that. When you look across that, there is a rich opportunity. There’s probably fewer scaled single TINs, single EMR primary care only groups versus a few years ago.

So I think that is valid within the context. But overall, I think there is substantial new market, new partner opportunity. But again, what I would augment is the in market opportunity for these smaller practices and the dislocation that they’re feeling is significant. And we’re the alternative to acquisition by health system, acquisition by health insurance company or an affiliate of health insurance company. And so this mantra of keeping the independent docs independent is something that really resonates and I think is an opportunity for us.

Ryan Langston, Senior Analyst, TD Healthcare: On the opportunity point, we saw February MA enrollment finally, right after they put out January and then pulled it. I think if you just run the math out through the year, it really implies less than 3% of growth. And stunning might be strong, but surprising to say the least given IRA changes and some other things. So how do you view that? Was that surprising to you in terms of what it implies?

We still have the whole year to go. We’ll see what happens. But just any thoughts on that and maybe does that mean is this the new normal? Are we gonna settle in at a low single digit growth? And does that affect the business model at all or maybe that TAM that you talked about?

Steve Sell, Chief Executive Officer, Agilon Health: Yes. So our same geo growth that we forecasted for 2025 is 3%. That is the lowest same geo growth that we’ve had since the company started. And typically we look at 1.3x, 1.5x, whatever the market norm is. We booked this year at one point zero.

And we’re trying to be really again it’s a controllable, we’re trying to be really measured around that. There’s both disruption given some of the payer contract changes that we’ve had as well as just the tighter attribution management with that we do with payers around that. So I think when you have big periods of change like this, it’s normal human nature for people to sort of pull back. Benefit change is significant from payers. We talked about that on our call last week, and then the IRA coming in.

And so I just I think it’s probably not that surprising that you would see a little bit of a slowdown. Is that the norm as you go forward? I think it’s really going to depend a little bit on this macro and then how payers bid. I think that as we talk about notices for ’26, for ’27, the more attractive those are, probably the more you’re going to see payers bid back into that that might bump that number up.

Ryan Langston, Senior Analyst, TD Healthcare: Got it. Jeff, on ’25 guidance, obviously, you guys give a good amount of information. And I appreciate the way you laid it out in your presentations. I think it’s easy to understand. But maybe just give us, not all the pieces, but maybe sort of in those swing factors, where do you have maybe, I’ll say conservatism built in, maybe some, I don’t want to say not so conservative, but some of those biggest swing factors that can help you get to that guidance that you kind of laid out in ’25.

Jeff Swannicki, Chief Financial Officer, Agilon Health: Yes, certainly. So I think that just broadly, I would say we have roughly a 4% growth in revenue, really driven by 2% coming from the bids and initiatives and then another 2% net of risk adjustment. And that’s after the impact of V28. And so as you think broadly, you have a 4% increase in revenue and then we have a cost trend assumption of 5.3%. And so part of what is offsetting that spread are the exits that we had in 2024, which substantially improved the profitability of the business.

And so as I look at the swing factors, obviously medical cost trends would be the largest. And our view on 5.3% is really it’s on par with what we experienced in 2024. And so we ended 2024 at 6.8%. There was 50 basis points associated with the two midnight rule. And then we had the payer bid changes, which we’ve talked a little bit about here, which was really a cost shift to the members.

And so our view is that cost trend is kind of equivalent to what 2024 was at a continued elevated rate. And so as I think about the variability, it’s really on the medical cost trend side. And to the extent trends are lower, obviously, that would flow through our P and L.

Ryan Langston, Senior Analyst, TD Healthcare: On the path to profitability over the next couple of years, what needs to happen both macro and internally to really hit those marks in ’27? And I guess the question is, we get it in different ways, but if trend stays higher than sort of historically we’re used to, does that affect that trajectory to get to profitability? Or can you manage that as we go forward if it was sustained for, say, the next two years?

Jeff Swannicki, Chief Financial Officer, Agilon Health: Yeah. I mean, I just think broadly, we’ve been managing through it now, right? But we’re here in a three year cycle. And so I we come back to the, like, the three pillars of contracting, cost and cash. And that’s what we’ve been focused on.

So we’re doing our part. Certainly, it would help to have, I guess, premiums that align with medical cost trends. I think the advance notice is obviously an early indication that they’re starting to recognize that the last three years cost trends have been outpacing the premium lift. And it really depends on the magnitude. I mean, we’ve been certainly managing through the last three years here on cost trends that have been very high.

But we’re hopeful that the advance notice and maybe the final notice will, I would say, change that spread the other way.

Ryan Langston, Senior Analyst, TD Healthcare: Yes.

Steve Sell, Chief Executive Officer, Agilon Health: I think in your scenario, just the one thing I would add to it is, if you had utilization remaining really high and you were still upside down, I think you would see an even more pronounced bidding effort from the payers to pull back on those benefits. And I think that’s a big question in terms of what that spread looks like on a go forward basis. But if you go back to 2019, I mean, where these MACVAT benefit levels are relative to them are very rich. So there’s a lot of room to move back on that, and that’s I think a little bit of the balancing item. Now that would probably slow that same geo growth rate that you talked about.

So there are levers that we’ve got, Jeff talked about contracting cost and cash. That contracting dynamic with the payers is very much around what are you seeing in the environment. By the time they do their bid, you’re going to know where the final notice lands, and you’re going to know what the utilization assumption is that they’re using within that. And so those become super important elements. Lot of robust discussions kind of late summer, September as you get ready for AEP.

What are you going to take risk on? What does that look like? And that ties to some of this disruption that we saw this year, right, in terms of some of those payer contracts that we chose to exit out.

Ryan Langston, Senior Analyst, TD Healthcare: Yes. On point on exiting, so Part D, right? I think I told you this in our callback. I was very impressed. I think you went from 70% exposure down to 30% on Part D.

Obviously, that’s a tailwind. But you also called out that you assume you’re going to double the PMPM loss on that part. So I guess the first question is kind of remind us how do you get to that assumption of double the PMPM loss? And I guess just going forward, where do we think Part D exposure for Agilon can’t crystal ball it, but over the next couple of years assume that continues to come down?

Jeff Swannicki, Chief Financial Officer, Agilon Health: Yes. So I’ll cover the first piece here, which just to go back in time. I think in the obviously Part D has been a challenging area for us. We have limited visibility. We’ve talked about all those reasons why we wanted to reduce our exposure to that.

In the third quarter of last year, we said our goal was 50%, ultimately came in less than 30% with the strong work of our contracting team. And I would say as we closed out 2024, obviously, we enlisted the services of external actuaries to really review where do we think we’re coming out on Part D. In the fourth quarter, you noted that we added costs. That was one of the reasons we came into low end of the guide. We added costs driven by that analysis for the Part D risk.

And so heading into 2025, we just took a stance that said, listen, we know because of the Inflation Reduction Act, the dollars, the magnitude of the dollars are increasing substantially. So for those contracts where we’re retaining the risk, the 30%, we took the PMPM cost and just doubled that. And just a reminder, we record Part D net in revenue. So it’s recorded net in the revenue line. And just to give you a magnitude of that, it’s between $65,000,000 and $75,000,000 of a loss that’s recorded net in our revenue line.

And so, I would like to say there’s a lot of science around that. We did use external actuaries to inform our guide for 2025. But generally, we knew the dollars were increasing, so our suspect was that the loss was going to increase as well. And I think going forward, this is an area where we continue to have higher in our priority list to continue to take it below 30%.

Ryan Langston, Senior Analyst, TD Healthcare: Got it.

Steve Sell, Chief Executive Officer, Agilon Health: Yes, Ryan. What I would just add to what Jeff said is, I think the success getting to below 30% when the target was to be just below 50 really reflects kind of the value of the scale that we’ve got, but also the value that payers are placing on, you said earlier, our success, I would say yes, but also having more members in a PCP driven model given the way quality thresholds are being set at higher levels And increasingly, this is about to deliver a cost trend below benchmark. Right? And so I think I think those things led to that. And you’re really talking about a handful of payers that are left.

You have one national payer that has not carved this out as of yet, and obviously pretty active dialogue with them around that. So that’s that’s that’s a big focus for us.

Ryan Langston, Senior Analyst, TD Healthcare: Past Part D, obviously built in the guidance, I think, is some operational improvements. Maybe run us through a couple of these, I’ll call them action plans, but things you’ve been working on, what have you actually been successful at? And I’m interested to hear sort of a corollary to that about, obviously, you have a lot of different relationships with different groups. But have you learned anything from some of those more mature, better operating groups that maybe you can take to some of those other groups that maybe aren’t as operationally efficient?

Steve Sell, Chief Executive Officer, Agilon Health: Yes. I mean, it’s a good two part question. I mean, I would say, in terms of the action plans, the headline on all those is improved financial performance and reduced beta. And the areas we’re looking are around contracting, around cost and cash. And if you just think about what we’ve done from a contracting perspective, Part D, we took it from 70% down to 30%, that reduces beta.

We increased pop on 40% of the book that we renewed for oneone of 25% and that was reflected in our revenue increase. It was 4% overall and Jeff kind of broke down the dimensions around that. Quality incentives, literally half of our initiatives for this year is around quality incentives. Now we didn’t have most of those incentives in 2024. So I think that’s a big area for us.

And then obviously cash, the good success that we had in Q4 coming in better was advanced payments from those payers side. On the cost side, it’s about this PCP model and kind of education and coaching. And when we’re able to run below the benchmark, it’s really around impacting inpatient, admits per 1,000, readmits, ER utilization, particularly with our high risk patients. So when we talk about our palliative program or high risk touchpoint program, those things really impact that and I think we’ve had good success around that. And then just operating efficiency overall, being able to maintain that at 3% with the changes that are there.

When you look at the characteristics of the groups that really perform well and helps us really think about our criteria, I think they’ve got strong governance that you’re able to leverage as you roll out the ABCs of your model. They’ve got a strong comp formula that aligns sort of outcomes with sort of their physician compensation. These are entrepreneurial physicians. Very focused on the clinical side of that, but having that alignment is really critical. And then I think single EMR allows you to go faster.

If you look at the folks that we laid out in the Q4 call that were in that low bucket, They had all of those elements I just talked about, but they had a few things structurally are going to take a little bit longer, some payer dynamics that take a little bit longer, new to risk, multiple EMRs. And so I think that’s sort of the calibration as we look at. And as I said earlier, that could be in a primary care only model, it could be in a multi TIN IPA like model or even a health system.

Ryan Langston, Senior Analyst, TD Healthcare: What’s the feedback been from your physician partners? I mean, you’ve obviously been implementing a lot of goals, changing some things around. I know you’ve been working on physician engagement now for a while. What’s the feedback from them given the fact, like you said, they’re entrepreneurial, they want to be successful, you want them to be successful. What’s the feedback been?

I mean, I’m sure there’s been growing pains, but I’m sure there’s some positive reactions. So just some thoughts that you’re getting back from your partners.

Steve Sell, Chief Executive Officer, Agilon Health: Yeah. Look, I I think our alignment with the leadership of our partners is stronger than it’s ever been. They are leaders in their community, and they need this value based care senior business to be very successful for them. And it has been, but it’s seen the pullback with the macro that’s there. I think they have really embraced the clinical nature of what we’re doing in terms of thinking about like our burden of illness as a clinical program.

They’re really proud of the fact that the PCP is at the center of doing that assessment. We’re providing the information with them and they’re going through to ultimately determine the condition the senior has and then what that care pathway is for them. So I think those are really powerful validations of what we’re trying to do, but there are adjustments that we’ve made as we tweak these programs and we kind of work our way through it. We’ve invested much more in terms of our medical directors that are on the ground. Interestingly enough, all of our regional medical directors are practicing physicians from our partners who who first learned the value based care model in their own practice, then were leaders within their groups, and now are still seeing patients, but also spending a few days a week working regionally with their peers, that physician to physician connectivity is huge for us.

And so I think part of our learning is investing more around that, is something that we think is really smart.

Ryan Langston, Senior Analyst, TD Healthcare: On the model, maybe to that point, we get questions about, if you look at California, that seems to be a fairly integrated model already. I’ll say it’s easier to run a value based care business there. I’m sure it’s not easy, but maybe easier. Are there geographies, because you have been spread out across the country, that you just realized maybe it’s a difficult market, maybe the payers don’t have enough sophistication, or the physicians just aren’t used to taking risk? Are there other places where it’s just not that easy to run a value based care business?

Steve Sell, Chief Executive Officer, Agilon Health: So I don’t think there’s a geographic constraint. I think there’s significant opportunity. And I think we’re in 12 states and 30 markets and we feel like those are markets that we’re thriving or we can thrive in the very not too distant future. We talked about the pipeline ahead. California is a whole different entity, right?

Kaiser basically plowed the road. I mean, I spent decades there, and value based care is kind of what everybody understands and the norm around that HMO heavy model. People have a primary care physician they understand, that model does not translate as well to other areas. That’s why we’ve tried to plow the road and bring risk to these markets. I think the bigger thing is that markets that fit the criteria that we talked about, which is really critical, which is you look at the benchmark rates.

There are some of the markets we pull back on where we saw decreases in benchmark rates two or three years in a row. It’s just not sufficient around that. That payer mix, is there something structurally there with payers that is going to make that more difficult? And then the elements I talked about around partners, whether it’s governance, whether it’s around comp formula or really how much they value value based care, tapping into that entrepreneurial spirit and their desire to grow their leadership position and really transform their community is key.

Ryan Langston, Senior Analyst, TD Healthcare: What do we think about the new administration’s stance towards MA? And and maybe we just don’t know yet. I mean, we don’t have a CMS administrator currently.

Steve Sell, Chief Executive Officer, Agilon Health: Yeah.

Ryan Langston, Senior Analyst, TD Healthcare: You know, just where do we think about it? Because classically, you would think a Republican administration is more positive for MA. I think the incoming administrator has had some positive comments in the past. You know, OMB director has had some positive comments about about MA. But just where is your heads at these days with what that might mean for the next couple of years?

Steve Sell, Chief Executive Officer, Agilon Health: Well, I think you’re right. Traditionally, Republican administrations are more supportive of MA. I think the comments that have been out there are certainly supportive of not just MA, but value based care and full risk for physicians. And and I would extend that not just to MA, but to reach. Right?

As you think about what happens post ’26, you know, we talked on the call about we believe there’s a very high likelihood that there is going to be a full risk vehicle in Medicare fee for service post-twenty six, because today reaches that only vehicle. And so I think if you look at the people who are in the chairs and will likely be in the chairs on a go forward basis, they are supportive overall of MA and of value based care.

Ryan Langston, Senior Analyst, TD Healthcare: Must be looking at my question, Les. Only a couple minutes left, but maybe to to that point where the 2026 advance notice, a little bit more positive than I think what some folks were expecting. And obviously, you know, it’s been pointed out by us and others that the reach data would tell you that, you know, some of the components CMS used to build that rate might have even undersold it. Hopefully, expect it, you know, first part of of April. Where do you think the advance notice goes from here, Given maybe you see more updated data from say the REACH side than maybe we can see on the street?

Jeff Swannicki, Chief Financial Officer, Agilon Health: Yes. I mean, I think the latest REACH data we had was a 7.8% cost trend. I think there’s external Milliman and others who think it could go higher. I think the advance notice is a good start, obviously, from what we’ve seen in the past three years. Could it go higher?

I think the expectation is it could go based on history 70 to 100 basis points higher. Is that enough even after that? I don’t think so. I don’t think we think so or the industry thinks so given what’s happened in the last three years, but we’ll have to see where that lands, but we’re hopeful that it’s going to be another positive.

Ryan Langston, Senior Analyst, TD Healthcare: And on reach data, on the benchmark being that high, I think typically sort of the Street thinks about when it’s high, it actually makes it, I’ll say, somewhat easier to be. And therefore, you can be successful and you have been successful in that program. So is that sort of how we should think if trend continues to run sort of hot, if you will, that ACO reach, all things equal, is probably still going to be a pretty successful program for you?

Steve Sell, Chief Executive Officer, Agilon Health: Well, I think it has been a success story and I think it will continue to be. I mean, the key in that program is you deliver top tier quality and you beat the benchmark. We’ve beaten the benchmark every year. We’ve beaten it when it’s moderate in a 3% to 4% range and we’ve beat it when it’s high in that 7%, eight % range. And so our expectation for 25% is we’re going to do that again.

And then we’ll see kind of what happens because this year will be the answer to the question, what happens post ’26?

Ryan Langston, Senior Analyst, TD Healthcare: We’re basically out of time, but I’ll ask you the same thing I’ve asked everybody else. What are you most proud of at your time during your time at Agilent?

Steve Sell, Chief Executive Officer, Agilon Health: I think there’s probably two things. I’m really proud of what we built. I think this physician network is 12 states, 30 communities, 2,200 PCPs. I think the platform that takes these groups into risk for the full time and really has these key levers and I think the outcomes that we’ve seen clinically. But the second thing I would say is just the resilience of our team.

There’s kind of two books that we talk a lot about. Andy Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive, Jim Collins, Good to Great, right? And in ’25, you need a bit of constructive paranoia just about the environment. And Collins talks about great companies look at brutal facts all the time about where we’re at. We do that all the time and the team is just in it.

Our partners are in it. But at the same time, he talks about relentless optimism and we are super optimistic about the future of value based care and what it means for a primary care driven model.

Ryan Langston, Senior Analyst, TD Healthcare: That’s great. We’ll have to leave it there. Steve, Jeff, really appreciate

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.