Nick Bardo

to allow all of our employees, not just our clinical employees.

We also talk about our clinicians practicing at the top of their license.

But for us, it's also about our support leadership, our support staff, our supply chain, our finance, our HR, our technology leaders to practice at the top of their license, right?

So how do we use these new technologies to enable them to be more effective in delivering their core job?

The long-term objective of anyone in our industry is to figure out a way to take cost out, right?

Things are not getting easier from a revenue point of view for us.

Obviously, we still see a lot of inflation.

So again, focusing on and being honest about the fact that some of this is about reducing the total cost of care.

It's about reducing the total cost.

overhead expense that we see as an organization as we continue to fight some of the headwinds that Rich talked about earlier, and really to streamline and eliminate duplication and to make sure we're using every dollar we can to invest back into care and invest back into capital and invest back into the communities in our mission.

And I would add, just to reach this point, I would say most proud of our teams that not only have been able to deliver on that, but delivered on many other strategic priorities that we have been executing on within the year.

So as we went through this integration, as we were running our core business, we were also reestablishing a 45-year agreement with Washington University School of Medicine, which, again, is a core business.

part of the history of BJC.

We've entered into a variety of joint ventures.

We're looking to expand our children's hospital beyond St.

Louis.

And so to be able to do the things that we did as a leadership team that has 44,000 caregivers

And also do the things that we did to set ourselves up for success just in terms of the core operations and expanding on the core operations and building on relationships that we've had is really a remarkable feat that our leadership team has been able to put together.