Pennant Group at Jefferies Conference: Strategic Growth and Challenges

On Monday, 29 September 2025, Pennant Group (NASDAQ:PNTG) presented at the Jefferies 2025 Healthcare Services Conference, outlining its strategic growth initiatives and potential challenges. The company highlighted its acquisition of assets from Amedisys, while also addressing concerns about proposed CMS reimbursement cuts. Pennant’s unique operating model and leadership programs were emphasized as key differentiators in a competitive market.

Key Takeaways

• Pennant Group is acquiring assets from Amedisys in Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, with the deal expected to close in early Q4 2024.
• The company is preparing for potential CMS reimbursement cuts by focusing on operational efficiencies and lobbying policymakers.
• Pennant’s decentralized operating model empowers local leaders and is seen as a strength in driving growth.
• The "CEO in Training" program and joint ventures with health systems are pivotal to Pennant’s market expansion strategy.
• Pennant is investing in technology to enhance scheduling, coding, and intake processes.

Acquisition and Growth Strategy

• Amedisys Acquisition

- Assets in Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama are being acquired, with a court order requiring closure by early October.

- The acquisition will expand Pennant’s presence in the Southeast, including a joint venture with the University of Tennessee Medical Center.

• Growth Algorithm

- Pennant’s growth is driven by developing local leaders and investing in Home Health, Hospice, and Senior Living.

- The integration of Signature Healthcare at Home has been successful, highlighting Pennant’s ability to fold similar platforms into its operations.

Operational Updates

• Infrastructure Development

- New infrastructure is being built in Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, supported by a transition services agreement with Amedisys and LHC.

- A shared services component and service center will support local operations in the Southeast.

• Joint Ventures

- Joint ventures, including one with the University of Tennessee Medical Center, are key to Pennant’s market entry and growth strategy.

• Private Duty Services

- Pennant operates six standalone private duty service operations and plans to invest more in personal care services due to growing demand.

Reimbursement Challenges and Mitigation

• CMS Proposal

- A proposed 6.5% cut in home health reimbursement is significant, and Pennant is preparing by improving efficiencies and lobbying against it.

- The company is focusing on labor management, referral mix, and adding Hospice admits to mitigate the impact.

• Technology Investment

- Investments in technology aim to improve scheduling, coding, and intake, alongside developing internal tools for utilization and care management.

• Consolidation Opportunities

- Potential rate cuts may lead to industry consolidation, and Pennant is ready to capitalize on such opportunities.

Senior Living

• Pennant’s Senior Living portfolio is significant, with 25% to 30% of revenue from Medicaid or waiver programs.
• The company is monitoring Medicaid changes and working with legislators to address proposed changes.

In conclusion, Pennant Group’s strategic initiatives and preparations for reimbursement challenges were thoroughly discussed at the conference. Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for more detailed insights.

Full transcript - Jefferies 2025 Healthcare Services Conference:

Brian Timothy, Healthcare Services Analyst, Jefferies: All right, so good afternoon, everyone. I’m Brian Timothy, Healthcare Services Analyst here at Jefferies. Welcome again to the 2025 Jefferies Healthcare Services Conference here in Nashville, Tennessee. With us today is The Pennant Group, one of the larger operators of home health services, and they’re also in the senior housing space. Maybe I’ll start by introducing the management team here, or actually, you know what, I’ll pass it off to you guys, let you introduce yourselves, and then maybe we’ll do a State of the Union. Yeah?

Brent Guerisoli, CEO, The Pennant Group: All right, Brent. I’m Brent Guerisoli, CEO.

John Gochnour, President and COO, The Pennant Group: I’m John Gochnour, the President and COO.

Kirk Cheney, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, The Pennant Group: I’m Kirk Cheney, Executive Vice President and General Counsel.

Brent Guerisoli, CEO, The Pennant Group: We got it figured out.

Brian Timothy, Healthcare Services Analyst, Jefferies: All right, Brent, maybe a little bit of State of the Union and an introduction into what The Pennant Group is. I know I introduced you as a large home health provider, but I’m sure there’s a lot more that you can share about the company.

Kirk Cheney, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, The Pennant Group: Yeah, we have, we’re a Home Health, Hospice, and primarily Senior Living operator. We’re mostly on the West Coast or in the West. We also have some operations in kind of the Midwest, Central states, and then we’ve got a relationship with Hartford HealthCare out in Connecticut as well. Across 14 states at this point, we sort of have a model where we believe that healthcare is a local business and it’s really focused on leadership, going out, finding the right leaders in the local communities and giving them an entrepreneurial opportunity to build a successful operation in those communities. We’ve been doing this for about 15 years and we spun, we went public in 2019 and we’ve grown pretty quickly since then. Excited to spend a little bit of time talking about that.

Brian Timothy, Healthcare Services Analyst, Jefferies: Awesome. Maybe I’ll start with the latest news, right? I mean, you’re doing a fairly sizable acquisition. If you can talk through that, I mean, like we were saying, you guys have spent some time here in Nashville as of late. Let’s talk about the Amedisys deal.

John Gochnour, President and COO, The Pennant Group: Yeah, we’re really excited to be part of the transaction. As many of you might be aware, as part of the Optum Amedisys transaction, they were required to divest certain assets across several states, particularly in the Southeast. We were chosen as the buyer for the Tennessee assets. We also acquired some additional locations in Georgia and Alabama. While we haven’t disclosed all of the revenue and EBITDA associated with it, we’re really excited. We’re excited about the opportunity to have a significant presence in the state of Tennessee, about the ability it gives us as a jumping-off point in the Southeast. As Brent mentioned, the core of our business, we started in the Intermountain West. We’ve become one of the larger providers in the Pacific Northwest and in California. This is really an opportunity for us to move into the Southeast.

We expect that to close in the early fourth quarter. The court has entered an order requiring it to close within the first few weeks of October, and we expect to meet that timeline.

Brian Timothy, Healthcare Services Analyst, Jefferies: Maybe taking a step back, just back to the basics of the company, what differentiates Pennant from every other home nursing company? I know you have programs like the CEO in Training program, your local leadership strategy. Maybe if you can walk through that, just I know a lot of folks in the audience probably are aware of or familiar with the home nursing industry, but I think you have, you’re under a slightly different model from what we’re familiar with.

Kirk Cheney, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, The Pennant Group: I mentioned this earlier. We believe that fundamentally, healthcare is a local business. What that means is the individuals that can make the best decisions, healthcare decisions, are those that are in the communities where they’re serving. As an extension of that, we invest in local leaders and local teams. You referenced our CEO in Training program. Our Executive Directors have the opportunity to become CEOs. That essentially means an owner in the business to really run the business like it’s their own business. We also have unique programs like our clinical operations leadership training programs. We’ve got programs for our local marketers and teams like that. It really is a focus on giving the control at the local level. We also have this cluster partnership. If you think about it from an entrepreneurial experience, being an entrepreneur can be really difficult because you’re on your own.

We partner these leaders together in a sort of a peer accountability network. They are aligned through incentives, they’re aligned through goals, and just that accountability to drive results at the local level. We think that it, and our results kind of prove out, that this model has been effective at broadly taking what we’re trying to do to multiple states and really across the country.

Brian Timothy, Healthcare Services Analyst, Jefferies: Maybe for John or Kirk, as we think about the growth algorithm of the business, how are you thinking about what drives the growth for your company? What does that look like from a trajectory perspective?

Kirk Cheney, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, The Pennant Group: Yeah, we go where we have, where we see great opportunities. As Brent said, we’re a leadership company first. We first ask, do we have the right leaders in place and nearby strength where we feel like we can support these new operations? It is a compelling opportunity. We try to be very disciplined in our acquisition strategy. Even though some of these more recent larger platform deals don’t really fit that, you know, where we have strength all around, we’re kind of coming a little ways out here to Tennessee to do it. The opportunity is so compelling and we figured out a model where we can still support even more geographically distant operations by really ingraining them deeply in well-operating clusters, which is what we call our groups of peers who act as accountability partners for one another.

We’ve figured out a way to still take that approach to these bigger platform deals, but it really has to be compelling from a leadership, from a people perspective, and from a numbers perspective.

Brian Timothy, Healthcare Services Analyst, Jefferies: I would just add, we’re pretty agnostic to which service lines we’re looking at, right? Because we’ve kind of factored that into the value of the opportunities. Whether that’s a Home Health deal, a Hospice deal, or a Senior Living opportunity, if we have leaders and there are opportunities, we’re going to make those investments.

Brent Guerisoli, CEO, The Pennant Group: Maybe just to follow up on that, right? I mean, I remember when you guys were spun out of Ensign the first time around, and the strategy was always, as Kirk mentioned, it’s a disciplined approach to M&A, turnaround stories for in a lot of cases. You know, buying Amedisys where those agencies, especially the ones here in Tennessee, at least from my recollection, are fairly decently performing assets, right? How are you thinking about the opportunity to drive further improvement and deliver or create value from that acquisition?

John Gochnour, President and COO, The Pennant Group: Yeah, so there’s a few things that factor into the growth algorithm when we go into a new location. We really believe that because healthcare is local, by investing in C-level leaders, C-level operations leaders, C-level clinical leaders, we’re able to differentiate ourselves in the community and drive growth from an organic perspective on top of what’s existing. It is unique to have an opportunity to acquire well-performing businesses, although there are parts of this portfolio that we see have real opportunity for upside just in getting them to our typical performance. We also see it as an opportunity for growth.

We really believe that our opportunity lies in differentiating ourselves in each of these local communities by putting the right leadership in place or training and developing existing leaders who maybe have been part of the formula that has worked well for Amedisys and LHC, but are looking for that opportunity to grow, to develop the skills and capabilities that would make them a CEO in our portfolio. That’s really where the differentiation comes in. This is a great portfolio. There are strong operators and strong assets, but we think we’ve got a lot of value to add by bringing our innovative operating model to bear.

Kirk Cheney, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, The Pennant Group: One of the reasons why we have a lot of confidence going into this deal is the fact that we did the Signature Healthcare at Home transition last year and the beginning of this year, which was a similar, a little bit smaller platform, but the same thing. It was a good performing operation in the Pacific Northwest, multiple leaders that were strong. We were able to go out there, kind of bring them into the fold of our operations, inject the culture, and create the opportunities for those local leaders. We’ve been really pleased with the performance out of the gate with Signature Healthcare at Home. We expect something very similar to take place here in the Southeast.

Brian Timothy, Healthcare Services Analyst, Jefferies: I have a lot of appreciation for just the discussion we’re having so far on developing talent, right, and developing that leadership and how you value people in the strategy. As we think about just these assets that you’re bringing on board, my understanding is that this doesn’t come with back office, right? These are pure agencies. I’m guessing you’re having to build a corporate infrastructure, regional infrastructure here in Tennessee and into Georgia and Alabama. How are you approaching that?

John Gochnour, President and COO, The Pennant Group: Yeah, we’re actually really excited about this. A year ago, we started a relationship with Hartford HealthCare, a large health system in the state of Connecticut. In a similar vein, we took over operations that were supported with a centralized structure. We took that group and rebuilt it, sort of with a mission to be accountable to the local operators. That’s what we are committed to doing here. First, we’ll be under a transition services agreement with Amedisys and LHC. Over the course of the next year, we’ll really have the ability to continue relying on the support that the agencies currently receive. During that time, we’ll continue to build the infrastructure for a shared services component to our business, which we believe will reflect the values of our model, which is ultimately our operators own it all.

Their responsibility means that any shared services component has to be accountable to the field first and that their results are measured by the results we achieve in the field. We’re really excited about this because we’ve piloted this in different parts of the organization where a cluster or a portfolio company, which is what we call our regional infrastructure, will unite together and share a particular service. That could be coding and OASIS. It could be billing and collections. Those shared services give us the benefits of scale that some of our competitors have while also allowing us to hold true to this model, which really empowers the local operator.

We’re excited about the fact that Tennessee gives us the opportunity from scratch to build a shared services component that we believe can be best in class in the industry at being accountable to local operators and producing the best results from everywhere from intake all the way through to collections. That’s the mission.

Kirk Cheney, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, The Pennant Group: The other thing that I would point out too is it allows us an opportunity to build a service center, which is separate from the shared services, but a service center to support out here in the Southeast. Just to give perspective, we have a service center already in Boise. We also have one in Salt Lake. We started a service center out in Connecticut to support those operations. This service center really provides some of the professional services, financial, legal, HR, IT, some of those areas. Now with this large acquisition opportunity, we can build a service center to support our operations in the Southeast. With these new agencies in Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, a shared services arrangement, and then a service center here, we’re really primed over time to continue to expand in the Southeast as well.

Brian Timothy, Healthcare Services Analyst, Jefferies: As I think about how, since you mentioned the Hartford HealthCare joint venture, as we think about your entry strategies and think about Middle Tennessee here, for example, is the JV strategy kind of like a key tenet of that? The other question I have related to that is, in terms of rolling out JVs, do you prefer that going forward? What does the JV bring to the table for you guys?

Kirk Cheney, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, The Pennant Group: We think it’s a really, it’s emerged as a really exciting part of our strategy. It’s been very organic. It’s very much word of mouth. You know, these systems talk. It’s really hard to be good at every business. Their key business, their core business is acute care. The home health naturally arrives because they need to discharge people somewhere. It’s not necessarily their focus. It sounds like a business cliché, win-win, but it really, these ones have been a win-win and a home run for both parties because that’s what we’re great at. That’s not what they want to really be focused on. We’ve been able to produce really great results for our partners so far. That gets the word gets around. It does get us into a market or help us grow in an existing market really well because you get this natural immediate brand recognition.

You get, they usually have a, you know, such a strong local reputation and resources. It’s not the, you know, we don’t say we need to get a JV to get into this market, but we kind of follow those conversations where they go. We see a strong pipeline and a great tailwind there.

John Gochnour, President and COO, The Pennant Group: As far as Tennessee goes, the University of Tennessee Medical Center joint venture is a part of the transaction. We will be operating under the UT brand throughout parts of Eastern Tennessee.

Brian Timothy, Healthcare Services Analyst, Jefferies: Wow, that’s awesome. That’s a great partner to have in the state, obviously.

John Gochnour, President and COO, The Pennant Group: We’re excited about it.

Brian Timothy, Healthcare Services Analyst, Jefferies: Yeah. Maybe, Brent, as I think about regulations, I tried to wait for a little bit before touching on this, but obviously the CMS proposal is pretty onerous, to say the least, right? How are you strategizing around that? How are you thinking about where things stand in Washington, D.C. as it relates to your lobbying efforts and your feedback of comments to CMS?

Kirk Cheney, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, The Pennant Group: Yeah, I’m actually going to let John or Kirk answer some of that. I’ll just say internally, obviously, a 6.5% cut is a pretty significant cut. The way that we approach it as operators is this is something that we need to prepare for, and this is something we need to be ready to roll out, and the expectations don’t change. We’ve got local owners that are used to driving margins and not a percentage margin, but whole dollar margins. That expectation won’t change. They’re looking at their businesses, they’re evaluating any way to improve efficiencies, whether that’s through utilization or productivity standards, evaluating back office support and other ways to be more streamlined there. The local teams know how to adjust, right?

They can invest in, you know, if they’ve got Home Health and Hospice, maybe they put more of their energy into developing the Hospice programs, or being creative about the way that they allocate their resources to Home Health. Our local teams are prepared to take on the cut. You know, we also have a very robust effort across Washington, D.C. with our partners in hoping to change the outcome of the final rule. Like I said, I’ll let Kirk talk about that. Yeah. The 6.5% proposal is draconian. It’s really mobilized the industry in a way we haven’t seen before. We’re really unified in our voice. There’s been a lot of meetings with policymakers. We were fortunate to have some of the key policymakers in our states where we can get an audience with them. Their reception has been positive.

They understand the point, which is that the best thing for the system and the health and the taxpayer overall is to keep Home Health robust. It’s by far the low-cost setting, compared to sending someone to the hospital. That’s well understood. There’s a two-prong strategy. There’s, you know, to address this with the administration and with Dr. Oz, which is happening. If that doesn’t work, then there’s legislation proposed in the House to address it, if necessary, kind of as a backup.

Brent Guerisoli, CEO, The Pennant Group: No, the only thing I would add is we really believe that home health is vital to the future of healthcare delivery in the country. As a result, that’s why we didn’t step back from the UnitedHealth Amedisys transaction after the proposed rule came into effect. It’s why we did the GramCare transaction earlier this year. It’s why Brent said we’re agnostic as to which segment, whether it’s Hospice or whether it’s Senior Living or whether it’s Home Health. We believe reimbursement goes in a cycle. We’ve built our company over the last 15 years through two down cycles in home health reimbursement and one normalized cycle. We really believe that when we look at the future of care delivery, home health has an integral part to play in that, and policymakers will recognize that.

Our goal is to make sure that we are the most efficient in how we deliver care. That’s how we’re combating the potential of a rate increase right now, at every operation at the local level. We have a plan for how do we adapt our business to a 6.4% rate cut? How do we hold folks accountable? How do we ease their burden from a technology perspective? How do we reduce our indirect costs? As we do that, we’re going to be prepared to continue investing in home health. We feel like opportunities are actually going to open up if there is another cut that goes into effect to continue to consolidate and bring our brand of extraordinary clinical outcomes coupled with local leadership that can drive growth in the community. We have the opportunity to win whether the cut goes into effect. We believe it shouldn’t.

We believe that it’s not in the best interest of patients. If it does, we’ll be prepared to take advantage and make sure that Pennant emerges stronger.

Brian Timothy, Healthcare Services Analyst, Jefferies: Maybe that was going to be my question, but I’ll double-click on that, right? Should we expect that if the cut goes through as proposed, as draconian as it is, it probably drives a lot of distress in the industry, whether it’s the PE-backed platforms that are out there or the mom-and-pops, right? Should we expect you to be ready for consolidation? Obviously, we could talk about the balance sheet and your cash generation and all that. Just curious how you’re strategizing and planning around a potential 6.4% cut on the consolidation side.

John Gochnour, President and COO, The Pennant Group: Yeah, I mean, our focus starts with ourselves and making sure that in the way that we respond to the final rule, that that revenue cut doesn’t follow through to our earnings and that we continue to produce strong cash flows because that’s what positions us to be able to continue to invest and take advantage if there are opportunities like that. Certainly, if you go back to the implementation of PDGM, people thought that there was the potential for a lot of dislocation. Between the implementation of PDGM, all of the benefits that took place during the pandemic and the fact that in some ways the pandemic was a tailwind for home healthcare, it sort of has pushed that out to a point where a 6.4% reduction would, in fact, dramatically impact providers in addition to lost access for patients.

I think that’s a separate story that we could talk about later. We do anticipate that there could be lots of opportunities for consolidation. We’re already seeing assets that would normally go quickly on the market, and we’re getting multiple calls from brokers saying, "Won’t you please take a look?" That signals that there’s things happening in the industry right now where there’s a lot of uncertainty and people are waiting to see what happens. If it is bad, I think it’s going to dramatically impact multiples that are paid for home health. We’re fortunate in that the deal we struck with UnitedHealth, we feel confident that it works, even if the reduction goes into effect.

Kirk Cheney, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, The Pennant Group: I would just add, even if the reduction isn’t as bad, I think it’s already created disruption in the industry. You’ve got a lot of really mom-and-pop owners that are really worried about the regulatory environment, the reimbursement environment, so much so that they’re looking for now, even though we believe the long-term future is bright for home health, it does create disruption. A natural result of this is I think the market will become more and more frothy over time because you’ve got individuals that are operating small businesses. It is harder to operate if you’re an individual operator in this environment.

Brian Timothy, Healthcare Services Analyst, Jefferies: Since you talked about mitigation efforts and, you know, operationally, what are the levers that you can pull? I mean, as we think about technology, whether that’s your Home Health, Home Base, your metallurgics, I mean, we hear that from the other players. If you can walk through how you’re strategizing around operational offsets for a potential cut.

John Gochnour, President and COO, The Pennant Group: Yeah, there’s a couple of different areas. It starts, I’ll start with one, even though it may not be the most important. We’re reaching a tipping point from a technology perspective where we feel like the advances are getting to a level where they actually begin to save dollars. We have been piloting a variety of different products, particularly on the indirect side. Nothing is ever going to replace a patient going and healing a wound, or a nurse going and healing a patient’s wound, or a therapist helping someone to be mobile again. What we can do is we can look for efficiency in the way that we schedule, the way that we code, the way that we do intake. We’ve been looking very closely at that.

In addition to that, on the technology side, we’ve developed internally our own product that helps with everything from utilization and care management to bridging patients to the appropriate care setting. We’ve utilized internal tools to perform many of the functions that others are using, like a metallurgics or something like that for. The second thing, and maybe the most important thing, is we have to manage labor effectively. That’s always going to be the biggest expense when it comes to delivering care. It comes back to how do we manage utilization, whether it’s from a visit per episode standpoint, whether it’s who is delivering the care, are we getting routine visits done by mid-level professionals, are we measuring productivity and holding our staff accountable to the right thresholds of accountability or productivity, and then are we celebrating them as they achieve it?

Are we paying them at the top of the market for great performance? We believe that there’s space, there’s space to manage expense while also being disciplined so that we can be generous. I think the third thing is how do you manage the revenue levers of your business? This comes back to, from a referral mix standpoint. Are you thoughtfully approaching institutional referral sources versus community referral sources? How are you navigating in places where you have Home Health and Hospice? Like Brent mentioned, are there opportunities to add to our Hospice admits and be able to serve more of those patients? We’ve really got kind of a three-pronged attack. That’s why we feel confident that we can ameliorate a big portion of this cut and position ourselves to be successful in the event that it goes through.

Brian Timothy, Healthcare Services Analyst, Jefferies: No, it makes sense. Maybe shifting gears a little bit, Brent, you know, you operate one of the larger Senior Living portfolios in the country. Maybe if we can explain to the audience, you know, the strategic rationale of running two different business lines.

Kirk Cheney, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, The Pennant Group: We really think about providing care in the home or in the home setting. Our assisted livings really represent the home setting for many of our residents that are in those facilities. We also think about the post-acute care continuum and really look at it from the perspective of the patient and the patient’s family. When a patient discharges the hospital, it is oftentimes a really challenging experience because at every setting, you’re sort of having the same conversations, you’re resetting on what the care plans are and what that experience is. We see it as a real opportunity to close off that care continuum and to be able to provide the services, whether it’s Home Health, Senior Living, private duty, home care, even provider services, all the way in assisted living, to these patients and these residents.

They can almost be a one-stop shop, and we can collaborate with our partners in each of the communities to be that solution.

Brian Timothy, Healthcare Services Analyst, Jefferies: As we’ve done with the other presentations, we will open it up for questions from the audience if there are any.

We just mentioned at the very end that you have private duty, like the first. Most of it was skilled and Senior Living and all the other good stuff. Is private duty a big play in The Pennant Group?

John Gochnour, President and COO, The Pennant Group: Right now, it’s a relatively modest play. We have six operations that provide private duty services standalone, and then we have another probably five that provide it as part of their offering to the community. What we have found is that we’ve got a lot of opportunity on the private duty side. We think it’s an important part of the continuum of care. We think that it adds significant value because of the touches it gives us with our patients. It’s an area that we have developed leaders and that there’s a group forming that we expect to use the organization’s dollars to invest and grow. We view organizational decisions like that and strategy decisions as first who and then what.

When there’s a group of leaders who believes in that service line, who is ready to build a company around it, and has a proven track record of results, we’re willing to put the organization’s capital to work. We haven’t had that in for the past few years, and that hasn’t been a focus, but we’ve got leadership that is now excited about that. I think you’ll see us begin to invest more in personal care services and private duty, just because we believe that there’s a lot of opportunity and a lot of need on a go-forward basis.

Brian Timothy, Healthcare Services Analyst, Jefferies: I’ll follow up on our discussion of Senior Living earlier. You have Medicaid patients in your Senior Living facilities. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act has some changes to the Medicaid benefits. Just curious how you’re thinking about the exposure that you have there.

Kirk Cheney, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, The Pennant Group: Yeah, we do have somewhere between 25% and 30% of our revenue, and our residents are on a Medicaid or a waiver type of program. Certainly, we’re mindful of that. We’re kind of watching it on a state-by-state level to see where the impacts may be. Right now, the only state that has been impacted is in Idaho. Just like we’ve done with the home health reimbursement, we’re working with legislators in that state to reverse a lot of those proposed changes. There is an impact. At the same time, we also recognize that we are serving some of the most vulnerable populations, and the need for these services is significant. Any sort of a cut will potentially limit access. It could create a quality of care issue. While we’re mindful of it, we’re watching it closely. We’re very engaged.

At the same time, we have confidence that there will be opportunities going forward as well.

Brian Timothy, Healthcare Services Analyst, Jefferies: Brad, one of the questions that we’ve asked every company that’s presented today is, what is the one thing that you think investors underappreciate about The Pennant Group story, and any closing remarks you want to share with the audience?

Kirk Cheney, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, The Pennant Group: All right. I might give more than one thing. Let’s do five. It won’t be five. First of all, I think our consistency. If you look at our track record, we have continued to perform no matter the environment, whether it’s a reimbursement environment or a COVID or any other things that may be going on around us. Obviously, we had an impact in our Senior Living business through COVID, but that kind of masked the strength in our performance on the Home Health and Hospice side. We’ve made significant investments on the Senior Living side, which is part of the reason why you’re seeing exponential improvement now because we’ve got strong operators and leaders in Home Health, Hospice, and Senior Living.

The other thing, we’ve already talked about it, but you cannot underestimate the value of our model because we’ve got local owners making decisions, pulling levers, and ensuring that they are successful. You’ve got hundreds of operators across the country that are engaged in driving the best outcomes possible, both clinically and financially.

Brian Timothy, Healthcare Services Analyst, Jefferies: Awesome. Thank you guys. Really appreciate the thoughts today and good luck with entry to Tennessee.

Kirk Cheney, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, The Pennant Group: All right, thanks. We’ll see you here.

Brian Timothy, Healthcare Services Analyst, Jefferies: Appreciate your time.

Kirk Cheney, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, The Pennant Group: Thank you.

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