James E. Davis
CEO-elect at Quest Diagnostics
Thanks, Sam and I look forward to working very closely with you. Now turning to our performance in the second quarter, total revenues were $2.5 billion. Earnings per share were $1.96 on a reported basis and $2.36 on an adjusted basis. Cash provided by operations was $402 million. COVID-19 testing revenues were approximately $355 million in the second quarter, down approximately 31% from 2021, 41% from the previous quarter. In July with the spread of the BA.4 and BA.5 variants.
We continue to see the demand for COVID-19 molecular testing, consistent with the volumes we reported in June. Our positivity rate has increased since March and approximately 25% of the tests we performed in the first two weeks of July were positive. We believe that the COVID-19 trends since March contributed to the softness we observed in the broader health care utilization. As you've seen, we're successfully executing a strategy to increase our share of COVID-19 molecular testing. A key element of our strategy is to increase the number of testing access points through retail relationships. In addition to our CDS and Walmart relationships, we are now also collecting specimens at Rite Aid locations and the number of access points will continue to grow.
Approximately half of our COVID-19 volume in the quarter came from retail channels. Quest is proud to have been selected by the CDC to participate in it's increasing community access to testing or iCAD program for COVID-19 testing. Through this program qualified uninsured individuals can access COVID-19 molecular diagnostic testing for zero out-of-pocket costs. In addition, we're pleased to be the provider of COVID-19 PCR testing for qualified insured and uninsured customers of Rite Aid nationwide for zero out of pocket expense.
We now have approximately 6,000 COVID 19 patient access testing sites through retail relationships, as well as our own patient service centers. Through these efforts, we estimate that we are performing approximately 8% of COVID 19 molecular testing in the U.S. up from approximately 4% in March. Finally, the Public Health Emergency was extended into October, which will help us maintain our current level of reimbursement. Based on these factors, we raised our COVID-19 revenue guidance for full year 2022, to between $1.5 billion and $1.30 billion.
Now turning to our base business, in the second quarter, we continue to make progress executing our two strategy to accelerate growth and drive operational excellence. Here are some highlights from the quarter. Our M&A funnel remains strong. We are in late stage discussions with several hospital health systems on the purchase of their laboratory outreach business. This is in addition to our normal conversations we have with C-suite leaders are performing reference testing and providing professional lab services. While this pandemic paused some of these discussions.
It has also created opportunities because of the financial and labor pressures that many hospital health systems are facing, we continue to accelerate growth through health plan access excluding COVID-19 health plan volumes and revenues grew faster than our overall base business in the quarter. Our health clients continue to see the value of working with us over the last two years, we have renewed 12 national and large regional health plan contracts with price increases. We expect more renewals with price increases this year and we're proud to be selected as one of the United Healthcare's Preferred Lab Network Providers for the fourth consecutive year, providing physicians and patients with improved access, quality and value.
Finally, we're pleased to share today that we have renewed our strategic relationship with Florida Blue. Florida continues to be an important large and growing state for us. Earlier this month, the CMS transparency and coverage final rules became effective to help consumers know the cost of a covered item or service before receiving care. Beginning July 1st, 2022 group health plans and issuers of group or individual health insurance are required to post pricing information for covered items and services, we are leveraging that data to ensure patients and employers are aware of the value we offer.
This trend will continue to gather momentum as more pricing transparency requirements will go into effect in the next two years, we believe that pricing transparency favors Quest Diagnostics which powers Affordable Care. We do this by offering clinical innovation enabling better clinical outcomes through our quality speed and accuracy of test results, improving the patient experience with accessible and easy-to-use patient resources, and finally, reducing the cost of care. We continue to ramp our investments in advanced diagnostics capabilities.
In the quarter, we saw growth from hematology, prenatal genetics, and pharma services. We also introduced Quest AD-Detect, a blood test to aid in the early assessment of Alzheimer's disease. We are seeing good early adoption from both primary care physicians and neurologists. Finally last week, we launched a lab developed molecular tests to aid in the detection of monkeypox. The test can differentiate monkeypox from other orthopoxviruses and we will be able to perform nearly 30,000 tests a week by the end of July.
In addition, we can expand testing to other laboratories in our network to further increase capacity, if needed. We continue to see growth in direct-to-consumer testing, thanks to our COVID-19 offerings and more importantly, our base business testing. Within the base business testing category, we saw strong growth from testosterone, comprehensive metabolic panels, and Lyme disease. We're excited about the upcoming improved digital experience, which we expect to debut later this year.
We believe this improved experience will help us acquire, convert, and retain more customers who visited QuestDirect digital platform. We expect to have much more to say about our improved digital experience before the end of this year. The second part of our two-point strategy is to drive operational excellence. We remain focused on improving our operational quality, service, and cost, thereby driving productivity gains. We have several initiatives underway to make this happen. Focused on attracting and retaining our people, optimizing our network, automating and digitizing our processes, and getting paid for the work we do.
Here are three examples, one, we're partnering with universities to help build our pipeline of expertise in medical technology, cytology, and histology, we're also teaming up with the learning and development recruiting company to provide phlebotomy certifications to pre-screen the candidates in exchange for a two-year commitment to work at Quest. Two, our scheduled check-in initiative, which encourages patients to make appointments has now expanded to a 1,000 of our patient service sites, in one area which is implemented the program, we are seeing a 20% decrease in average wait times as well as an improvement in patient satisfaction.
We're also building the payment process into the digital customer experience, which frees up our phlebotomists to focus on specimen collection, thereby increasing their capacity and improving the patient-employee experience. Three, we continue to implement digital technology to provide end-to-end specimen tracking including the arrival patterns that enabled load leveling across the network, which improves our productivity and provides greater transparency for our clients. We're not immune to the current inflationary environment and are managing through rise in fuel and labor costs. Like many companies, higher than normal.
Employee turnover in some job categories is impacting our ability to drive further productivity gains. However, these increased costs are in line with our expectations and are built into our guidance. We are expecting another year of solid Invigorate savings and productivity improvements to help offset these pressures. Finally, I'm very proud of our recently released 2021 Corporate Responsibility Report and invite you all to download it. You can find it on our website. Among the highlights, in 2021, we launched our first formal materiality assessment to help identify the most significant ESG topics to the company and our stakeholders.
Also, to enhance the level of our ESG disclosures we began reporting in accordance with the SASB guidelines. But we're very proud of the contributions Quest is making to empower better health and grateful to our 50,000 colleagues who are making that vision a reality every day. Now Mark will provide more details on our performance and share more insights on our updated guidance for the remainder of 2022.
