The Pennant Group (Nasdaq: PNTG) saw home health and hospice reach an “all-time high” during the first quarter of 2021, as the company awaits the outcome of a potential deal to acquire divested locations from Amedisys (Nasdaq: AMED) and UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH).

The Pennant Group’s total revenue for Q1 reached $209.8 million, up 33.7% year over year. The company’s home health and hospice segment accounted for $159.9 million, a 37.2% increase from the first quarter of 2024. Pennant’s average daily hospice census rose 28.1% to 3,794, or 832 more patients compared to the prior year’s quarter.

“Our first quarter success can be attributed to our consistent focus on initiatives, leadership development, clinical excellence, employee experience, margin improvement and growth,” Pennant CEO Brent Guerisoli said in a Q1 earnings call. “As we make progress in each of these areas, the flywheel also continues to turn in each of our business segments, allowing us to opportunistically add and transition new operations as our existing operations drive strong performance and organic growth.”

Pennant is the holding company for a cluster of independent hospice, home health and senior living providers located across 13 states. Year to date, the company has added more than 60 CEOs to its portfolio agencies as well as 40 internal clinical leaders.

The company in January acquired Signature Healthcare at Home’s hospice and home health assets for a price tag of $80 million. The company also completed some senior living transactions. Thus far, the Signature integration is ahead of schedule, according to Guerisoli.

“Signature’s leaders have joined clusters with existing Pennant leaders, allowing them to share best practices and peer accountability. Leveraging Pennant’s locally driven operating model, Signature’s operations have quickly and successfully integrated, and as a result, the Signature transition is ahead of schedule,” Guerisoli said. “We have proven countless times over many years that our model works well when applied to single-site protected acquisitions, and the Signature experience is proving that it also works well at scale in multi-site and platform acquisitions.”

More acquisitions are expected before the year is out, according to Guerisoli.

Also on the M&A front, the home health and hospice company Amedisys Inc., as well as the insurance giant UnitedHealth Group, is divesting a number of its home health and hospice locations to Cornerstone Healthcare Inc. and Tensaw River Healthcare LLC, affiliates of The Pennant Group. The deal is contingent upon closure of the purchase of Amedisys by the UnitedHealth Group subsidiary Optum. 

Few details are available on the potential transaction due to confidentiality agreements among the parties.

“We see these as high quality assets, and it does give us an opportunity to expand in new and compelling markets,” Guerisoli said.