One of the newer publicly traded health care companies on the market – Ardent Health Partners Inc. (NYSE: ARDT) – has been very clear about its ambulatory care ambitions.
Executives at the Brentwood, Tennessee-based Ardent Health doubled down on those ambitions Thursday, emphasizing that outpatient expansion is central to the company’s vision for the future as more patients look for convenient sites of care outside of the hospital.
“During 2024, we advanced our ambulatory growth strategy, highlighted by the recent acquisition of NextCare Urgent Care in Oklahoma and New Mexico,” CEO Marty Bonick said during Ardent’s Q4 earnings call Thursday. “This brings a total of 27 new urgent care centers into the Ardent network in the last year, which we believe will lead to increased volumes over time.”
Ardent’s total reported revenue for full-year 2024 was $5.97 billion, up about 10% compared to the $5.41 billion the company brought in the previous year. For the fourth quarter of 2024, Ardent reported $1.61 billion in total revenue, an increase of more than 19% compared to $1.35 billion in revenue during the previous year’s same period.
Looking ahead, there is still an “untapped opportunity” in ambulatory care, Bonick said.
“The broader M&A pipeline remains active, and we will continue to evaluate outpatient as well as inpatient opportunities,” Bonick said. “We will remain financially disciplined, both in terms of purchase price and our overall leverage, and we will seek assets where we can deliver synergies and demonstrate accretion over a two to three year horizon.”
In January, Ardent acquired 18 urgent care clinics from NextCare Urgent Care, spanning New Mexico and Oklahoma. The move significantly expands Ardent’s presence in two of its core markets, Bonick said.
“Prior to the transaction, we had only one urgent care facility across Tulsa and Albuquerque,” Bonick said. “Post-acquisition, we will have a meaningful share of the urgent care market in each of those geographies.”
The benefits of owning urgent care are twofold: standalone profitability and the potential to feed into the broader health system, he added.
“As a proof point to the downstream volume benefit, we saw that 45% of the 2024 patient visits in the six urgent care centers we acquired in East Texas were new to the Ardent system,” he said. “Furthermore, of those new visits, approximately 15% resulted in additional care within 30 days.”
While much of Ardent’s latest growth has come from the urgent care arena, Bonick said that the broader pipeline remains robust.
“Historically, we’ve had a smaller percentage of outpatient services relative to our peer group. In our markets, given how much they’re growing, there are opportunities to expand both in the hospital and beyond,” he said. “Urgent care was our early focus when we went public last year, and we’ve made good progress on those commitments. We continue to see opportunities for further urgent care expansion, whether through M&A or new development, as we fill in pockets of geography where we don’t yet have representation.”
This includes exploring new ambulatory surgery center (ASC) opportunities and other outpatient assets, such as imaging centers and freestanding emergency departments, he added.
Additionally, reductions in contract labor costs, supply chain efficiencies and strategic scheduling in operating rooms will help channel resources effectively, CFO Alfred Lumsdaine said during the call.
“We are pleased with our strong finish to 2024, delivering attractive financial and operating performance for the year,” he said. “We continue to advance our focus on market share growth, taking a disciplined approach to evaluating opportunities in both the ambulatory space as well as acute care hospitals.”
During the fourth quarter, Ardent’s overall admissions totaled 40,300, a more than 11% increase compared to Q4 2023. The company had 24,296 outpatient surgeries in Q4 2024, a more than 5% increase compared to 23,044 in the prior year’s fourth quarter.
