IntegraMed America's CEO Discusses Q3 2011 Results - Earnings Call Transcript

On the fertility center acquisition front, we’re maintain an active process of pursuing deals. We remain highly disciplined on valuation and return on investment criteria in these efforts to ensure new acquisitions deliver appropriate returns and present the right risk/reward profile. It’s difficult to predict when the next acquisition will occur but we remain confident that IntegraMed offers the best strategy for a standalone fertility center to gain the scale necessary to be competitive in today’s changing healthcare market.

We do believe the market is overdue for more consolidation. One example is Florida which is a very fragmented market where consolidation seems destined to take place given the challenges in obtaining organic growth and the high fixed costs of maintaining a fertility center. On a more general scale, markets across the US continue to be impacted for a third consecutive year by the overall softness in the economy, which we believe is causing physicians to rethink their operational strategies and goals. We have a variety of structures that can work including in-market mergers or outright acquisitions of mid-sized and large centers.

In summary, the fertility business is performing well despite the headwinds the fertility market continues to face. These challenges create opportunities for our firm and we will remain focused on operational performance and on expanding the business as prudent opportunities allow.

Moving to vein clinics, this segment delivered very strong top line performance, principally from the contribution of $3.7 million in incremental revenue from new clinics on top of stable mature clinic performance. Overall vein clinics posted record revenues each month of the quarter, underscoring the benefit of our new clinic expansion activity.

As for mature clinic revenue, the major issue there is that many of our clinics are at or near capacity both in terms of labor resources as well as physical capacity. To address these issues we’ve started to expand the footprint of certain of our clinics, adding additional personnel and implementing some operational changes that address treatment bottlenecks. As we gain experience from these changes we’ll be in a position to apply them to other facilities.

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