Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes form the line of Kevin Campbell with Avondale Partners. Please proceed with your question.
Kevin Campbell – Avondale Partners
Thank you, good morning and thanks for taking my question. I wanted see if you guys could give us a little bit more color on the MedMal reserves here this quarter, is that at all related to the higher reserves you had in the fourth quarter or in the first or are these two new cases. So if you could provide some detail there that would be helpful?
Richard Hallworth
Let me start that first and then ask Mike to give you the details on that Kevin. First, I want to put the malpractice into perspective to you because we do get a number of inquires from investors on that.
Our malpractice reserves are as a result of patients finding claims against us. We have millions of patient encounters that we conduct in the course of the year. And the population we serve is a very needy population, a much more medically needy than the general population.
With millions of patient encounters adverse outcomes are inevitable. Our job is to minimize those, but it is inevitable in healthcare delivery that there will adverse outcomes or unfortunate results. With a litigious prisoner population our job is to make sure that we manage that risk as well as possible.
We have several actions that we’ve taken over the last several years that are helping us, and we continue to focus our efforts on containing that risk going forward. Many involve such activities as stepping up the hiring and the training of our staff to issue better guidance for clinical protocols, best practices that we expect our practitioners to deliver on a daily basis, doing testing of that through our quality assurance programs, and then standardizing the care as much as possible based up on best practice clinical protocols, and things like our catalyst system are helping us there.
As you know, we have launched catalyst system at several sites, but we have a long way to go as we launch that catalyst system it will help us force function the standardization of care as well. So I want to try to put into perspective a little bit, we have had three quarters where we’ve taken malpractice hit here in a row and ask Mike to give you some specific commentary.
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