Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator instructions). Your first question is from the line of Larry Solow with CJS Securities.
Christopher J. Reading
Hi Larry.
Lawrence Solow – CJS Securities
Hi, good morning, Chris and Larry. How are you doing? Just a couple of questions. Could you maybe talk a little bit about the visits through the quarter? I know they kind of go off to a slow start. And I imagine that had to some to do with the economy and also maybe some severe weather year-over-year, and how they kind of progressed through the quarter and how they looked in April?
Christopher J. Reading
Yeah. As everyone will remember, we've got a little bit of seasonal effect. And I will tell you the January typically every year is a little bit slower, just I think attributed to (Dr. Boson) and to whether and what not, it’s hard for us to really look at year-over-year one of the changes, because we always have some severe whether in the first quarter early on. I think January in general started out slower than average for us. We got sequential improvement in February and considerable improvement in March. And we’ve seen that improvement carry forward into April. Now we do have a seasonal element, and second quarter usually is a good quarter for us. So, we expect some improvement anyway relative to whether that is because of the economy or reaction to it or now a more orderly progression in terms of seasonality. I'm not sure that I'm able to completely separate all of those factors, but we have seen improvement through the year.
Lawrence Solow – CJS Securities
Right. And then in terms of your average net rate, which is up a nice 3.2%, and I think you expressed on the Q4 call that you did believe it was going to be up and kind of the patient visits was more the question marks there, but?.
Christopher J. Reading
Right.
Lawrence Solow – CJS Securities
Did this number kind of even exceed your expectations or, and its pretty nice number, and it sounds like its sustainable and sounds like the growth trajectory has more legs to it.
Christopher J. Reading
Well. For me, no, it didn’t exceed my expectations. I don’t think it exceeded the team's expectations. This is something we’ve been working on for a while. We’ve gotten good traction with our partners on some of the service offerings that we initiated this year. And as Larry mentioned our cash has been very, very strong. And I think, we haven’t brung out all the opportunity just yet. I don’t know that will be north of a 100 every quarter, but I think we'll see good progression this year over the last year. And so, it’s doing what we expected it to do.
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