HCA Healthcare CEO Sam Hazen said the Nashville, Tenn.-based system's objective for Valesco is to "get to an appropriate level of financial performance."
"This year, we are, in fact, on our plan, maybe slightly ahead of it, but it's not material to the company as a whole," Mr. Hazen said on the company's Oct. 25 earnings call.
HCA fully acquired Valesco — its joint venture with EmCare, a physician practice management firm affiliated with Envision Healthcare — in August. The deal came after HCA increased its ownership of Valesco from 50% to 90% in April 2023.
In an October 2023 earnings call, Mr. Hazen said the company's results were "unfavorably impacted" by Valesco's performance amid increased staffing costs and lower-than-expected sales. At the time, the system anticipated a loss of about $50 million per quarter from the venture. Since then, HCA has sought to integrate the venture and improve operational results.
On HCA's most recent earnings call, Mr. Hazen said the system's long-term goal with Valesco is to "create an internal capability with this particular physician group that basically turns this into a strategic asset."
"And by that, I mean, we have the ability to improve our clinical outcomes and quality results for our patients because we have a physician group that is fully integrated as an employee base inside of HCA," Mr. Hazen said. "We can build more rigor, more routines, more standards in how we do clinical processing."
Mr. Hazen said HCA is also working to improve Valesco's efficiency and "embed these physicians more into how we manage our emergency room, how we execute on our case management agenda, and so forth."
Mr. Hazen added that HCA sees Valesco as aiding its technology and growth agendas by building relationships with referring physicians and supporting outreach efforts.
"Those aspects of value creation that we see with Valesco far exceed the financial performance inside the group," he said. "We continue to improve our reimbursement with the payers as it relates to hospital-based physicians. But these other elements provide more value, we think, globally to the organization and will be part and parcel to our core initiatives."