Transcript Generated by AI 00:00 Mark Parkinson back with Park Place and we're continuing our look at Arizona and 00:04 today we have one of the segments that is really one of my favorite when we look at 00:08 a state. 00:08 It's our discussion with Steven Littlehale, 00:11 who's the Chief Innovation Officer at Zimmet. Steven it's 00:14 always fun to talk to you. 00:15 But on this particular topic, it's he's very fun because he's come up 00:19 with I think an ingenious way to evaluate the regulatory environment in every state. 00:24 He's developed the state regulatory index that really provides us a way to figure 00:30 out if states are good or bad on the regulatory side. 00:34 I think most operators that I know and that I talked to think that their state 00:37 is the worst. 00:38 Obviously, every state can't be the worst. 00:41 And Steven's giving us a way to analyze where do all the 50 states in DC lie in 00:45 this scheme? 00:46 So, Steven, welcome back to Park Place. 00:49 Thank you. 00:50 Thank you. 00:50 I'm really happy to be here and I want to just explain what the criteria criterion 00:58 are and why we chose these. 01:01 As you'll see on the screen right now, there's a lot of things that many people 01:05 will recognize as being significant in the regulatory environment. 01:09 But what do we mean by significant? 01:11 Well, does it cost the provider a lot of money 01:15 to respond to these issues either financially or reputationally? 01:20 Does it pull people out of operations to be dealing with administrative oversight, 01:26 etcetera? 01:27 So you're seeing here things like the number of CMPs that are rewarded in the 01:32 state and how that compares to the nation and then the amount of what are these 01:38 actual penalties? 01:40 The criteria that I find really interesting. 01:44 And I think it gets at what you've always said, Mark, 01:47 that providers sometimes feel that they're in a really rough regulatory 01:52 environment when in fact, overall they're not. 01:56 And that would be states that if they are given a citation of a G or above, 02:03 that it's going almost automatically to an IJ level versus other states that are 02:10 not. 02:12 And and that sometimes is, I think what gives people the perception 02:15 that things are really rough in the environment. 02:17 But you can see the criteria up here on the slide. 02:20 There's many other ways we could have sliced this, 02:23 but these are the ones that seem to predict a lot of the burden. 02:27 Great. 02:27 So when you apply the criteria to Arizona, how does Arizona stack up? 02:33 Well, Arizona's interesting in that it is 02:38 overall quite favorable. 02:41 So here you'll see on the next slide that the CMP finds are in terms of our scale, 02:49 very favorable. 02:50 The scale being favorable or neutral or unfavorable in the two areas that stand 02:57 out as being unfavorable in Arizona would be the percent of G or above tags that 03:04 were at the IJ level. 03:06 So again, it's really what I was just referring to. 03:09 In Arizona, if you're going to have a G or above tag, 03:12 you're more likely to get at the IJ level. 03:15 And then also the DDPNA is also awarded at a higher amount than we see across the 03:23 nation. 03:24 But overall, which you'll see in the final slide, 03:29 Arizona is actually quite favorable. 03:33 I think. 03:34 I think with that, we've counted up, there's only 9 states across the country 03:38 that fall into the favorable category, and Arizona is one of them. 03:43 Yes, that's true, absolutely true. 03:45 This scale is updated as the data is refreshed. 03:49 But right now Arizona is favorable, has been favorable for quite a while. 03:55 And we'll monitor this through time to make sure that it remains that way or 04:00 that if there's any change, that we're able to inform the users of 04:04 this system. 04:06 Steven, thank you so much. 04:07 Really interesting and very enlightening about Arizona. 04:10 Thanks for being with us today. 04:11 It is my pleasure. 04:12 Thank you. 04:12 And so for all of you, the next time you hear one of your 04:15 Arizona friends talk about how terrible the regulatory environment is in Arizona, 04:19 you now know that's not the case. 04:21 They've done some hard work there. 04:22 The association's done some hard work there. 04:25 Providers often talk about the collaborative process that exists in 04:29 Arizona, and the data seems to bear it out. 04:32 We hope you're enjoying this segment on Arizona and we really appreciate your 04:35 continued support of Park Place.
