Astrana Health (NASDAQ:ASTH) CEO and President Brandon Sim said the value-based care company is seeing early benefits from its acquisition of Prospect, while reporting stronger-than-expected first-quarter trends across medical costs, free cash flow and revenue.
Speaking at a Bank of America healthcare event hosted by analyst Craig Jones, Sim described Astrana as a company focused on “realign[ing] the system” through infrastructure intended to improve patient outcomes at lower cost. He said the company has grown rapidly over the past six to seven years, including more than 50% year-over-year growth last year, while remaining profitable and free cash-flow positive.
Sim said Astrana’s recently reported first-quarter results came in “pretty well ahead of expectations,” with free cash flow up roughly three times year over year and revenue growth “well over 40%, 50%.”
Prospect Integration Tracking Ahead
Much of the discussion focused on Astrana’s $707 million acquisition of Prospect, which Sim noted closed about nine months ago after being acquired out of bankruptcy. He said the integration has been “on track to ahead of schedule,” despite the challenges of a transaction of that size.
Sim said Astrana has integrated more than 1,500 Prospect employees into a single operating and reporting structure. The company has also aligned care plans, clinical protocols and technology systems, including Astrana’s unified data layer and care management tools. Prospect brought a substantial membership base, which Sim said included 600,000 members.
According to Sim, Astrana is tracking toward the high end of its previously discussed $12 million to $15 million synergy range. He also said the company has begun realizing revenue synergies by combining contracts with payers where Prospect and Astrana had previously held separate arrangements.
Sim said one key underwriting assumption was improving Prospect’s medical cost trend by 50 basis points annually. Legacy Astrana had been running at about a 4.5% trend, while Prospect was roughly 200 basis points higher. Sim said Prospect’s trend improvement in the first quarter was already better than the 50-basis-point target, though he added the full impact of the care model may take 18 to 24 months.
Technology Seen as Driver of Medical Cost Control
Asked by Jones about Astrana’s ability to manage cost trend, Sim said there is “no magic” to the company’s model, describing it as a services business centered on patient care. He said the company’s software helps ensure patients do not fall through the cracks by maintaining a longitudinal data record and prompting or automating follow-up actions.
Sim cited transitions of care as one example, saying missed follow-up after hospital discharge can lead to unnecessary readmissions. He also pointed to preventive care, blood pressure and hemoglobin A1c management, and helping patients secure specialist appointments as areas where automation can capture incremental improvements.
“When you kind of automate and ensure that all of those basis points are being picked up, ultimately you get 50 basis points maybe of improvement,” Sim said.
Medicare Advantage Trends and Rate Outlook
On Medicare Advantage, Sim said Astrana had a successful year controlling medical cost trend in 2024, running just under 4.5%. For the current year, the company underwrote a 5.2% medical cost trend across the business, reflecting a mix of legacy Astrana and higher-trend Prospect membership.
Sim said first-quarter trends came in better than assumptions across Medicare Advantage, commercial and Medicaid. He noted that Astrana has significant membership in California, Texas and Nevada, and said weather and flu did not have a large impact on the business. He also said the company saw lower admissions and no anomalous spikes in any specific area.
Discussing the final Medicare Advantage rate notice, Sim said Astrana views the effective average rate impact for its book as closer to 4%, reflecting the 2.5% net average impact plus an approximately 1.5% impact tied to disallowed diagnoses such as unlinked chart reviews and audio-only calls. Sim said those practices are not part of Astrana’s model and should have “very minimal or basically zero” impact on the business.
Sim said Astrana expects its rate to be in the 4% to 6% range, depending on its ability to improve risk adjustment factor scores, while trend is around 5.2% and expected to come down with Prospect improvements. He said the company feels 2027 could be margin neutral to margin accretive.
On potential future CMS risk adjustment changes, Sim said Astrana estimated that coefficients from the initial rate notice would have created about a 1.5% headwind for Astrana, compared with an industry average impact of about 2.5%. He said that would still be a negative but less severe than the broader industry impact.
Medicaid Enrollment and Margins
Sim said Astrana initially expected Medicaid disenrollment of 0.75% to 1% per month, or roughly 10% to 12% for the year, along with a 150-basis-point headwind from rate and acuity mismatch. The company had originally sized the combined impact at about a $25 million EBITDA headwind.
In the first quarter, Sim said disenrollment was closer to the high end of the range, around 1% per month, but acuity effects were less negative than expected. He said the two dynamics have broadly offset each other, with more members dropping but the remaining membership not showing a statistically meaningful deterioration in acuity.
Asked whether Medicaid margins are at a bottom, Sim said he hopes so but is not assuming a quick recovery. He said the pressure could last into next year and that he would feel more comfortable calling 2028 a better year. Over time, he said Medicaid could return to margins in the 5% to 10% range once states adjust rates and budget dynamics stabilize.
AI Tools in Care Management
Sim also outlined Astrana’s approach to artificial intelligence, emphasizing that AI requires a unified data foundation across the enterprise. He said Astrana integrates provider groups, joint ventures and other additions into a common data layer and semantic framework so that AI tools can act across the business rather than remain isolated in silos.
He described tools that allow providers to view quality, risk adjustment, population health, prior authorizations, claims and explanations of payments in one platform because Astrana operates in both provider and delegated payer functions. Sim said AI agents can fill out prior authorization details from chart information and that Astrana’s back-end payer agents are auto-approving 70% of prior authorizations, often returning approvals within seconds.
Sim also said the company uses technology to follow up with patients discharged from hospitals across its 1.55 million members, checking whether they are at risk for readmission, have obtained medications and have follow-up appointments. He said the approach is helping reduce general and administrative expenses, citing a 70-basis-point year-over-year improvement in the first quarter, and could help reduce medical costs over time.
About Astrana Health (NASDAQ:ASTH)
Astrana Health, Inc, Inc, a physician-centric technology-powered healthcare management company, provides medical care services in the United States. It operates through three segments: Care Partners, Care Delivery, and Care Enablement. The company is leveraging its proprietary population health management and healthcare delivery platform, operates an integrated, value-based healthcare model which empowers the providers in its network to deliver care to its patients. It offers care coordination services to patients, families, primary care physicians, specialists, acute care hospitals, alternative sites of inpatient care, physician groups, and health plans.
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The article "Astrana Health Says Prospect Deal Is Ahead of Schedule as Q1 Trends Beat Expectations" first appeared on MarketBeat.
