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Quest Diagnostics Incorporated (DGX)

Q2 2016 Earnings Call· Thu, Jul 21, 2016

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to the Quest Diagnostics Second Quarter 2016 Conference Call. At the request of the company, this call is being recorded. The entire contents of the call, including the presentation and question-and-answer session that will follow, are the copyrighted property of Quest Diagnostics with all rights reserved. Any redistribution, retransmission or rebroadcast of this call in any form without express written consent of Quest Diagnostics is strictly prohibited. Now I'd like to introduce Shawn Bevec, Executive Director of Investor Relations for Quest Diagnostics. Go ahead, please.

Shawn Bevec - Executive Director-Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, and good morning. I'm here with Steve Rusckowski, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Mark Guinan, our Chief Financial Officer. During this call, we may make forward-looking statements and also discuss non-GAAP measures. For this call, references to adjusted EPS refer to adjusted diluted EPS excluding amortization. Actual results may differ materially from those projected. Risks and uncertainties that may affect Quest Diagnostics' future results include, but are not limited to, those described in Quest Diagnostics' 2015 Annual Report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8-K. The text of our prepared remarks and a PowerPoint presentation will be available later today in the Investor Relations page of our website. Now here's Steve Rusckowski. Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thanks, Shawn, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. This morning we'll provide you with highlights of the quarter, share a few comments on industry dynamics and review progress on our five-point strategy. Then Mark will provide more detail on the results and take you through guidance. Through the second quarter, revenues declined 1% on a reported basis related to our efforts to refocus the business, but grew 2.4% on an equivalent basis. Reported EPS grew more than 69%, while adjusted EPS grew more than 7%. Before I get into our strategy update, I'd like to provide perspective on a few key aspects of the final rule implementing provisions of the Protecting Access to Medicare Act, referred to as PAMA, issued late last month by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, referred to as CMS. First, on the issue of timing, we are pleased with CMS's decision to delay the implementation of the new payment system until January 1, 2018, a position advocated by members of…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. We will now open it up to questions. our first question comes from Brian Tanquilut of Jefferies. Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Hi, Brian. Mark J. Guinan - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Morning, Brian.

Brian Gil Tanquilut - Jefferies LLC

Analyst

On the hospital JVs. I know that's something that you alluded to a little bit earlier in your prepared remarks. What are you seeing in the landscape on the hospitals now, and how do you envision this joint venture with HCA in terms of the opportunity set or the receptivity of HCA and other for-profit hospitals to expand into a similar kind of strategy? Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: well, a couple points, Brian. Thanks for the question. First of all, as I mentioned in my remarks, the interest of hospital CEOs, CFOs and their teams to work with us on their lab strategy is growing, evidenced with what we did with Hartford Hospital and their CLP laboratory. In fact, I was just up there last week meeting with the CEO and meeting with my team. And once we engage and we have this definite relationship, I would say the relationship continues to grow and we are their strategic partner for diagnostic information services. The same continues to grow at Barnabas. We feel good about the progress made there. Again, it continues to expand. And then you asked a question about HCA. HCA is not a joint venture. It is a contract. It's an agreement that we're helping them run their inpatient laboratories and we're hopeful that that will go well and could potentially provide us with more opportunities going forward, but one step at a time. Our job right now is to do a good job at the Denver area in this division and we can take it from there. So this continues to be a growth prospect for us. We've been focused on it for a number of years as you know, and we're starting to see the results.

Brian Gil Tanquilut - Jefferies LLC

Analyst

And then, Steve, you alluded to the Safeway arrangement. So, how should we think about the rationalization of the platform or the PSCs? Is that something that is based in a way to invigorate guidance, or is that going to be an incremental opportunity to reduce cost as you shift all your PSC's into the Safeways? Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. Well, first of all, there's three aspects of the work we've done with retailers and Safeway is a good example. First of all, it's to improve the patient experience. If you've seen any of these Safeway clinics or healthcare centers, they're very nice and so it provides a really nice, fresh patient experience for our patients, so we're pleased with that. So again, goes hand in hand with our strategy around improving quality patient experience, at the same time becoming more efficient. And on the efficiency side, we are looking at where these stores are, where we have Patient Service Centers, and where possible, we'll optimize that and take some cost out. But in some cases, we're also augmenting our unparalleled access to the marketplace with some of their locations. So it actually allows us to get greater access. And we think of this market, to the last point I made in my introductory remarks, it's quite important for us to continue to get more and more access for patients where they are. And retail has a great opportunity for us to continue to get more and more access because the data we have is about 30% of laboratory requisitions in the marketplace go unfulfilled. And so our notion is if they have more access, make it more convenient, make it easy for people to go in, get their laboratory requisition fulfilled, it's…

Brian Gil Tanquilut - Jefferies LLC

Analyst

Got it. Thanks, guys. Mark J. Guinan - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Ricky Goldwasser of Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Hi, Ricky. Mark J. Guinan - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Hi, Ricky. Ricky Goldwasser - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Yeah, hi. Good morning, guys. I have two questions. First one just in terms of clarification around the moving parts around pricing. I think you mentioned that the hospital contracts are a price headwind of 120 basis points. So can you just kind of like walk us through what the headwinds and tailwinds are on the price metric? Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Mark, I think that's yours. Mark J. Guinan - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah, sure. So, again, I want to separate price from mix. I think it's really important. So price itself, as we mentioned, which is apples-to-apples price for the same offering on a given test was down a little less than 1% in the quarter. So everything else was mix. So what we did share is the mix impact for Professional Laboratory Services was a headwind of 120 basis points. So you could back into everything else was the positive mix that offset price and offset the mix of PLS to give us a net 20 basis point improvement in revenue per req. Now with that said, the reason we're very careful, Ricky, about separating price from mix is that while price definitely directionally is an indication of profitability, mix is not always representative of profitability, so we caution people, and as we've said over time, don't take math, which is mix driven, as a signal for increased or decreased profitability. Ricky Goldwasser - Morgan Stanley & Co.…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Ross Muken of Evercore. Your line is now open.

Ross Muken - Evercore Group LLC

Analyst

Hi. Good morning, gentleman. Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Good morning, Ross.

Ross Muken - Evercore Group LLC

Analyst

I guess you talked a lot about some of the improvements across the business. Obviously quite evident first part of this year versus last year and the few prior. Now, I guess, where do you feel like the momentum has been maybe better than you would have expected? Maybe it's on some of the PLS agreements or what bps is looking like? And then is there any part that you would point to as it's trended that maybe you feel like needs to be more of a tailwind for you than it's been? It feels like the business is sort of starting to turn a corner here. So I'm just trying to differentiate where you feel like maybe not you've declared victory, but you're sort of where you want to be versus not. Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, I appreciate the question. And what we've said for the last four years is that our restore growth strategy is multifaceted. This business, this industry has a number of products, a number of different programs, a number of different services. And we have to work multiple fronts. To answer your direct question about where we are encouraged, we are encouraged about the continued prospects around advanced diagnostics; the genetic offerings that we introduced this quarter are very strong. We feel they're very competitive now with some of the incumbents in the marketplace, particularly around our BRCA offering. We expanded our panel. We have now a very nice comprehensive hereditary-based panel. And as you know, we continue to build on our relationship with Memorial Sloan Kettering in that space. And we offer some nice offerings around colorectal cancer, as well as a comprehensive hereditary cancer panel. So that is good and growing, and a lot of promise…

Ross Muken - Evercore Group LLC

Analyst

Yeah, that was great. And maybe just quick follow-up on the cancer genetic side. There's so much going on and we continue to hear more optimistic things in terms of the companion PD-L1. How is your thought process evolving around how you're going to play there? Obviously you have some existing relationships. And how you size that market versus maybe some of the legacy similar type drugs? Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, well, first of all, it's evolving, it's growing, it's exciting. As you know, reimbursement's always the challenge in this space. While we have focused on those areas where there is good reimbursement, and clearly, BRCA is one of the best examples of the industry seeing benefit from it and now it's getting reimbursed for it. And as we introduced with our new product this past quarter but we now have an expanded channel in that regard for other hereditary markers in that offering. We believe that it looks promising for us and it provides more prospects for growth and we continue to work the reimbursement side of this to demonstrate with good clinical evidence that in fact that that actually delivering value that's actionable because only when you can defend that you have good clinical value and it is actionable, then you will get paid by healthcare insurance companies. So we're continuously working that. So it's evolving but it is exciting and it's a key opportunity for growth for us going forward.

Ross Muken - Evercore Group LLC

Analyst

Great. Thank you. Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Jack Meehan of Barclays. Your line is open.

Jack Meehan - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

Hi. Thanks. Good morning, guys. Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Good morning.

Jack Meehan - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

I wanted to start just on the underlying utilization trends you're seeing. I know, Mark, you mentioned about half the growth was from CLP and MemorialCare. What do you think – did Barnabas and maybe the movement of Easter add in the quarter? And then just in general what are you seeing in terms of the physician office trend? Mark J. Guinan - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah. So I have not, and I wouldn't break out a specific engagement like Barnabas and its impact, but certainly it contributed positively for us. As you look at all the moving parts, Jack, I think the organic growth is a pretty solid number, taking into account the movement of Easter and other calendar shifts and so on and so forth. So you can look at the approximately 100 basis points of organic growth and count on that as being solid and something that's a trend that we're going to build on and continue throughout the balance of the year driven by growth in our core business and also some growth in this new opportunity being our professional laboratory services, most notably Barnabas. But I'm not going to be splitting out specific relationships or engagements each quarter.

Jack Meehan - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

Yeah, understood. And then one more on PAMA. I'm just curious now that the final rule is out in the market and is beginning to get digested by the industry, are you seeing any different tone with either hospitals or smaller independent labs in terms of the M&A around whether it's in-sourcing versus outsourcing and just the relationships that you develop there? Thanks. Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Well, I can't say that the build, if you will, of interest around building a relationship with Quest is specifically related to what's going on with PAMA. But there might be some correlation between PAMA in that it's another contributing factor. When we have conversations with hospital systems, they talk about the changing nature of their business, they're moving away from fee for service to taking risk. When you move the risk, they need to have a low-cost provider. There's no question we're a lower cost provider than typically their hospital lab is, and they have a lot of other priorities and why would they put the next dollar of investment into laboratory when they have a good national leader nearby? And so that's typically the conversation we have, and they realize that there's going to be price pressure on the commercial rate in every place. And, yes, their laboratory commercial rates will be under pressure, but also they understand Medicare is not going to also provide a lot of help as well. So there could be pressure there. So it's contributing but it's not necessarily, I would say, an overall driver so far. But with all that said, I think people have realized that there will be, with all this analysis for interest in it going forward, it's hard to say beyond what the estimate was of mid-single digits in 2018, how that will affect specific labs. So that estimate is based upon the market basket that CMS says. The fees for all their expenditures from the clinical lab fee schedule, and so when you specifically apply whatever cuts there might be to a specific business, they could be considerable for small operators that are doing mostly routine testing in a small geography. And they're not billing out all the codes like we do for clinical lab fee schedule for Medicare. So it's unfolding, so more to learn, but I think we've got a lot more clarity today than we did six months ago.

Jack Meehan - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

Understood, thanks, guys.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Steven Valiquette, Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Your line is open.

Steven J. Valiquette - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst

Okay. Thanks. Good morning, Steve and Mark. Congrats on these results. Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Morning.

Steven J. Valiquette - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst

Just on the PAMA related reimbursement change delay, it's obviously good news as you mentioned. But it does still seem from some calls that we're getting that maybe there's still a little bit of investor confusion as to whether or not there could be any CMS cuts to the CLFS in 2017 to essentially replace the PAMA delay. I think there was some color in the final rule that suggests this is probably even more unlikely now, but maybe it wouldn't hurt on this call just to give your latest thoughts on that just to clear the air if you are able to. Thanks. Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: So I think CMS is very focused on getting PAMA right. It is an act of Congress and therefore, any change to PAMA would require another act of Congress. So their entire focus is on this. Clearly, they've got to get it right. They've been told by Congress that they need to do it with a market based approach, and this is their entire focus. So from our view, this is what we should expect will happen in 2017, is really gathering all the data, going through all the data trying to understand it. And as you know, we still have the CPI adjustment and the productivity adjustments as well. And some of that came through in 2016 and will continue to come through as time goes on. So our view is this is going to be predominance of focus for CMS and how we get paid.

Steven J. Valiquette - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst

Okay. Got it. One other quick one, just if I can sneak one in too. The earlier color on the Safeway retail deal is helpful. Just the one quick follow-up on that is, I'm curious whether that Safeway deal precludes you from entering into other similar large deals with other retailers in those six states that you've entered into so far. And could you theoretically still do a national retail deal like this with any third party if you chose to do so? Thanks. Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, we continue to have freedom to operate. It's a great relationship. We could build on it. But we believe there's more opportunities for us to build our patient access. We have unparalleled access, we believe. We have over 2200 Patient Service Centers, they have over 3500 people in physicians' offices, and then we have partnerships with JVs. So – and it continues to build, and we think this retail opportunity, as I described, has really got those three prongs. One is great patient experience, second is that helps us with efficiency, and potentially, augments that unparalleled access, with nice access to where people go every day which are typically retail stores. So we're encouraged, but we have more prospects as well going forward to expand in even further because we're not limited in our ability to operate with the relationship we have with Safeway. Mark J. Guinan - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yes. As Steve said, the contract with Safeway does not preclude us from other arrangements. But as you might imagine, we're not going to put in redundant space. So if we have a Safeway location in a given neighborhood, it's unlikely, even if we have a partnership with another retailer, that we would put another PSC in the same location. So it's really all about mapping this out, the demographics where our business is, where we draw the businesses from the physician's office, et cetera. So in the partnership in Safeway it's really important, and they're kind of, since they're on the lead here, they're going to be one of the first people to decide, in partnership with us, where we're going to put some of these locations. And so I wanted to stress that while it doesn't preclude us and we certainly are in discussion with other retailers, we highly value the Safeway agreement, and as I said, as the first mover, they're going to going to be the one we're starting with.

Steven J. Valiquette - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst

Okay, got it. Okay. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Amanda Murphy from William Blair. Line is open. Amanda L. Murphy - William Blair & Co. LLC: Hi. Good morning. Just a follow-up on PAMA. So I'm not sure if you have an answer to this, but I'm just curious, in terms of using the NPI from a hospital perspective, just given that you have quite a few relationships with hospitals at this point, I'm just wondering how, or if you have any view into how they're looking at that piece of it, particularly if they don't have an NPI as a hospital lab. Is that something you think that hospital labs will have incentives to get at this point? Or is yours the opposite view? Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, well first of all, as I said in my remarks, the movement away from using the TIN, the tax ID number, to a net provider indicator or (44:04) number, is positive. We think there'll be more labs required to contribute their data to CMS with that. But like so many parts of healthcare, we don't fully appreciate the extent of how many more and what percentage that will be. And actually, as trade associations, as American Clinical Lab Association, we're going to sponsor a project to actually do a sampling of hospitals to see if in fact there are – what this does to the sample. Because our objective, along with Congress, along with CMS is to get this right, and we said it should be market based, and we all agree that the market includes the national labs, the regional labs and hospital outreach. And so we appreciate this new approach, but we want to make sure that this new approach does capture possible outreach.…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Bill Quirk of Piper Jaffray. Your line is open. William R. Quirk - Piper Jaffray & Co.: Great. Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Good morning, Bill. William R. Quirk - Piper Jaffray & Co.: So first question I guess is going back to the earlier HCA HealthONE lab management question, and that is in the event that you were able to expand this, do you have any sense, Steve, what time, I guess, the evaluation period would be? I'm just trying to get an idea here. Is this a two-year see if this works and we can expand it, or is this a longer-term sort of project? Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: That would be highly speculative for me to comment on that. We have to be successful at this first project, demonstrate we can save them money. I mean, in the end, this all about making their inpatient laboratory more efficient. We believe we can. When we put those points on the board, we realized that that's going to be very visible to HCA management and we'll take it from there. But beyond what I said, it would be highly speculative for me to comment on how fast it's going to move. Mark J. Guinan - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Just be clear, the relationship itself is not a pilot. It is a firm multi-year relationship that we're committed to. What we were implying is that, as you might imagine, there's a possibility of further expansion. And whether it's within HCA or other hospital systems, seeing the momentum we're getting, hearing from some of the CEOs with whom we have relationships how successful…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from A. J. Rice, UBS. Your line is open. Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Hey. Good morning, A. J.

A. J. Rice - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst

Oh, thanks. Hi, everybody. How are you? Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Good.

A. J. Rice - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst

With the pickup in the pace around deals with hospitals, whether its contract, outright purchasing of business and other structures, can you just maybe comment a little bit on how those structures have evolved and the economics of the deals that you're seeing today versus a few years ago? Are they different, about same? Are you pushing a different type of structure? Is the hospital asking for any kind of different structure? Just give us some flavor on that. Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, well, first of all, you see one deal, you see one deal. We've said this before because healthcare is complex. Every deal has got its own nuances as you could appreciate. And you have to separate. When we buy an outreach business, that's an outright purchase of their existing commercial business. And in the case, a good example of that is what we did with Hartford Hospital and CLP, which we closed and we're in the process of integrating. And I would characterize those deals as being similar to the other ones we've done. We take over the business. We reprice it at our rates. We build a business case around taking out cost and we think the returns for our shareholders are quite good. But what I'll also say, and I said this in my introductory remarks, when we typically do that, it typically gets us into a broader conversation about their lab strategy. And so typically they say, wow (51:18), okay, now we're tight with you. Let's talk about our advanced testing for our hospitals, or what's called reference testing, and let's talk about how you potentially could help us with our hospital inpatient laboratory and making that more efficient. So it typically becomes a beachhead opportunity for…

A. J. Rice - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst

Yeah, that's great. Let me – just a quick follow-up on a different area. So you had the asset sale this quarter and you stepped up the share repurchase as you've done before with other asset sales. When you think about capital deployment for the second half and moving forward, should we assume the share repurchase activity sort of settles back to what we saw in the first quarter? Or any other comments on direction of cash flow in the back half of the year? Mark J. Guinan - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah, so I assume when you say cash flow, you mean cash utilization, A. J.?

A. J. Rice - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst

Right. Mark J. Guinan - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: What you should assume is we'll follow our fifth point of our five-point strategy, so once we get through the ASR, which was really triggered as you pointed out by the monetization of the Focus Products business, we'll continue to either deploy towards M&A or towards share repurchases. Obviously between the dividend and share repurchases we've done through the first half of the year, we've met our commitment of guaranteeing a majority of our free cash flow to our shareholders. So we've met that threshold. So the back half, depending on the timing and probability of executing any sort of deals, the cash flow will either be utilized for that, and if we don't have value-creating deals and we close in that timeframe, then we will – as opposed to sitting on the cash – we would do some additional repurchases.

A. J. Rice - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay. Great. Thanks a lot. Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Isaac Ro of Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Isaac Ro - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Thanks, guys. Good morning. Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Hi, Isaac. Isaac Ro - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Hi, Steve. First question was kind of a longer-term item regarding PAMA. Just curious if the current state of PAMA legislation has had any impact on the nature of your conversations with private payers when it comes to negotiating your longer-term contracts with them. Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: No. It's an interesting topic, but frankly they're looking at our relationship, the term of that relationship, where any discussion around pricing should be. So very little relationship, if any, between what's happening with PAMA and the refresh of the lab fee schedule in our discussions with payers. Mark J. Guinan - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah, we've gotten that question, Isaac, a number of times. I want to say again that there's very, very few contracts, if any, that are mechanically tied to Medicare rates. Yes, it's a reference point that people use in some discussions, but there's really – since there's not a mechanistic trigger, as Steve said, it's really not been a topic of conversation. They obviously want the best value. We're having discussions around the value that we bring them and the fact that we already have excellent pricing. That's more the focus of the conversation versus anything going on in the public sector reimbursement. Isaac Ro - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Yeah, that's helpful. And then just a follow-up question on 2016 guidance, specifically for cash flow. I think your guidance does call for an acceleration in CapEx in the back half…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our last question comes from building Bill Bonello of Craig-Hallum. Your line is open.

William Bishop Bonello - Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC

Analyst

Thanks. Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Hey, Bill.

William Bishop Bonello - Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC

Analyst

Just kind of a big picture question on the commercial contracting outlook going forward. I think we're coming up on 10 years of some of these preferred national relationships for the large labs and some of the largest payers. Obviously the payer landscape's changing pretty dramatically. At least one of those contracts, I believe, terms in 2018. I'm just curious how you think that situation plays out going forward. Do you think we continue to have a situation where you have certain payers aligned with certain national providers? Or do you think we move into a more open access kind of contracting situation over the next several years? Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. Well, first of all, Bill, thanks for the question. We're not going to comment on the specific contracts with some of our largest partners. But as we said before, we have hundreds of contracts so we're potentially working, and what happens every year with some of the refreshes on those contracts. And in that regard, we have our normal cadence of how we'll work through that this year, next year and into 2018. Generally, given our leadership position in this marketplace, we're fortunate to be included in most of the healthcare insurance contracts throughout this country. And I think we're increasingly making it obvious it's good for patients, it's good for them attracting membership that they have Quest on contract. Now despite us maybe not having a preferred national relationship in some cases, we still continue to have strong working relationships with some of those healthcare insurance companies that we don't enjoy those relationships. And also, we continue to see other ways of working together with some of those systems. So I won't speculate on or give specifics on contract dates and timing of all that, but we're managing this in due course. And fortunately for us, we have a very strong position given our strength and position in this marketplace that collectively and collaborately we're part of the network of what's required in healthcare delivery throughout the country in a big way. And we have a good, strong seat at the table.

William Bishop Bonello - Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC

Analyst

Do you want to elaborate at all, you said exploring alternative ways of working together, on what any of that might look like? Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Sure. I mean, give an example. We have a big business measure around wellness. So our wellness business is a good business, we sell it directly to large employers but we also sell it to healthcare insurance companies. In selling it to healthcare insurance companies, they resell it. An example of that is we sell it to Aetna, we sell it to Cigna, but we also sell it to United Optum, as an example. We also are perpetually asked for data. We test about 50% of adult Americans every year, excuse me in the course of three years. Having that data is quite important to healthcare insurance companies. So we're quite collaborative with the industry of serving up our data to help them manage some of their managed Medicaid or managed Medicare business in a collaborative way. So, two examples. And the third example is with Inovalon, which is our data analytics product which is part of our new product introduction that we made this year around Quantum. We serve this up to all healthcare insurance companies, regardless of what we have for a laboratory contract. And so we're proactively working with all the companies that are taking risk, and so put this again in a different place with all healthcare insurance companies in a much different and broader way. So we often think about our laboratory contract, but our relationship with these systems are much broader than that.

William Bishop Bonello - Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC

Analyst

Perfect. Thank you very much. Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thank you.

Shawn Bevec - Executive Director-Investor Relations

Management

Operator? Stephen H. Rusckowski - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: So thanks again for joining us on this call today. As you can tell, we're making very good progress executing our five-point strategy, and we appreciate your time, and look forward to seeing you in our travels. Have a good day.

Operator

Operator

Thank you for participating in Quest Diagnostics Second Quarter 2016 Conference Call. A transcript of prepared remarks on this call will be posted later today on Quest Diagnostics' website at www.questdiagnostics.com. A replay of the call may be accessed online, at www.questdiagnostics.com/investor or by phone at 888-566-0473 for domestic callers or 402-998-0640 for international callers. Telephone replays will be available from 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time today until midnight Eastern Time on August 20, 2016. Goodbye.