Unknown Analyst

Thank you for joining us. It's my pleasure to be kicking off day 2 of the healthcare conference with Ardent Health. With us today, we have Marty Bonick, who's the CEO; and Alfred Lumsdaine who's the CFO. Dave Styblo from Investor Relations is in the audience as well. Maybe it makes sense to kind of start off. The company is a little bit different than some of the other hospital companies out there. Maybe just makes a little sense to start off with kind of how you guys think about growing your business, the growth strategy of Ardent.

Martin Bonick
President, CEO & Director

Yes. I'll start. Good morning, everybody. Great to see everybody here. Ardent Health is a health system that's grown to 30 hospitals, almost 300 sites of care across 8 states and 6 markets. Our markets are growing faster than the U.S. average, which has built in some tailwinds that we've benefited by since we've gone public, and I think people are getting to see. And we said from the onset that we've got a tri-part growth strategy. The first is improving margins inside of our core book of business and our IMPACT program, which I'm sure we'll get into today. reflects that activity. We said we were going to grow within our regions, those 8 markets, we're #1 or #2 in the majority of those markets, and we've got a unique joint venture partnership that we'll talk about some more as well that has allowed us to grow our inpatient share to leading positions, but we have room to grow our outpatient.