Dan Gladney
Analyst · Northland Securities. Your line is now open
Thank you, Greg. And thank you all for joining us this morning. We are very excited to talk to you about some of the strategies we are implementing here at EnteroMedics' to deliver on the promise of vBloc Therapy as a treatment for obesity and its co-morbidities. vBloc Therapy stands out as the highly innovative ground breaking treatment option for patients with obesity, bridging the gap between the short term options of diet, exercise and pharmaceutical interventions to traditional restrictive bariatric surgery. How this translates into practice is that the patients who want to see meaningful weight loss, weight loss that can’t for example address their high held risk related co-morbidities such as diabetes and hypertension and the expense associated with these now have an option, an option that doesn’t pose with often severe social lifestyle and natural health consequences, consequences of restrictive bariatric procedures and that may include irreversible changes to the anatomy. While our experience in the commercial setting has been limited since I joined a few months ago, anecdotal evidence from the field suggest that vBloc is delivering on exactly this profile, with outcomes that deliver on our promise to our physician partners and their patients. Our opportunity as a company is to share this message with the right audience. Physicians, health care professionals, payers and patients and to continue revolving our product to meet the demands of our target audience. So how do we win? We’ve made a fundamental shift in the company’s 2015 post approval strategy which at that time was focused on broad, national efforts center and position training to drive adoptions and patient coverage via the prior authorization appeals process to one that today 2016 employs highly focused regional, direct to patient marketing tactics, targeting cash pay patients aligned with our KOL or key opinion leaders and center specific partnering initiatives to drive our revenue goals. Combined with a multi faceted reimbursement strategy that addresses surgeon and patient demand, clinical outcomes and cost affect to this data, societal support and lastly creating noise in the payers minds with several initiatives including our IDN or Independent Delivery Network and vBlock institute partnerships. We are almost two months into the execution of our direct to patient marketing campaign to build vBlock awareness in our strategic markets. As mentioned, we are targeting cash paying patients in high income regions in managing these patients from initial contact all the way through surgery. This focused effort is supported by the KOL surgeon partners integrated delivery networks for IDNs and our vBlock institutes. In less than two short months this program has been in place we’ve seen significant response in terms of filling the top of what we call our patient funnel. With over a thousand individuals taking the first step of responding to our advertising and media campaigns. Beginning to end this process takes some three to six months to flow from the top for an inquiry or kicking the tires into the call center to where the patient is scheduling a surgery with support from each step designed to minimize attrition. Many if not most of these calls are exploratory, and only a small percentage actually are planted. Let me walk you through this process for a moment. What I’d like to do is I’m going to have Greg play a radio ad that’s being played right now by Winthrop hospital in the New York City area concerning vBlock. Go ahead, Greg. [Audio advertisement Clip] Thank you Greg. After the initial inquiry is made, we screen these patients who may be good candidates. Those that are transferred to our patient relationship coordinator or what we like to call our PRC and are further engaged about their journey to seek a surgical solution to their obesity. PRCs are the custodians for the patient when they make the contact or the telephone call all the way to surgery. Most importantly, the PRC makes patients aware of a cash pay scenario they must face and what options that they have available. Those patients that have met all the criteria in discussions with the PRC are then ready to schedule an appointment with our physician. To streamline this process further, we offer to make an appointment for the patient. From here we discuss payment options and options to address payers. Patients are then scheduled and ready to have surgery to have a surgery consult with their doctor. The last step of course is surgery, the implant. Again, this process takes some three to six months beginning to end. With the kind of attrition at each step that one would expect with an elective surgical treatment. Today, we are very happy with where patients are tracking through each step which is in line with our models and projections and hope to see the pay off of this strategy starting in the late second quarter timeframe. Because of the relationship this process fosters between the Company as providers, we have the ability to execute on only those opportunities that are synergistic and will quickly and efficiently expand our commercial reach. As we discussed in our last call, we are focusing our efforts on 12 centers in 10 geographies to perfect our processes. This includes major population centers in New York, Delaware, Connecticut, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Minnesota, California, Colorado and Washington. Our focused commercial strategy is also designed to be synergistic with our reimbursement and coverage strategy. We believe that not only will focusing on select geographies allow us to identify patients able to use their own resources for a vBlock procedure, it will also allow us to generate vBlock’s patient demand with payers through our IDN partnerships and build upon our ongoing interactions with payer policy decision makers and our continued support of the prior authorization process. Through these efforts, we expect to see two main effects. First, we will establish vBlock as a medically necessary value based treatment which meets an unmet need in the care continuum, for treating obesity and metabolic diseases based on clinical outcomes data, economic evidence, societal support and physician and patient demand via independent delivery network partnerships and prior authorizations and appeals. Second, the program will increase our products visibility with these targeted payers to the point of creating a critical mass with the potential of leading to a positive coverage decision. We must demonstrate the value of proposition for vBlock to support its use for a specific patient population. To that end, in 2015 we presented data from our FDA study supporting the efficacy and safety of vBlock at two years and data that demonstrate the patients with moderate obesity with an obesity related co-morbidity achieved excess weight loss of 34%. This data provides us insight into which patients are likely to be the most successful with our technology and therefore provides another data point to support our belief that in the commercial environment vBlock has the potential to be able to deliver a higher level of weight loss. Also as part of building key opinion leader support, in January of 2016 we announced the publication of a physician statement on vBlock in the ASMBS Journal or American Society of Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery Journal, which is called the surgery for obesity and related diseases. The ASMBS position statement reflects a strong level of support for vBlock within the bariatric community and an eagerness to continue exploring its potential in the clinical and commercial settings. On the pharmacoeconomic front, we are working with experts in the bariatric field to publish the results of an economic bottling report that supports the cost benefits of vBlock therapy treating the diabetic patient. In an anecdotal point, I’d like to make here is from one of our early commercial patients that was implanted in late 2015. This individual who was treated at Winthrop-University has seen an over 50 pound reduction in weight in his first three months. 50 pounds in three months and as and [ph] a discontinuation of his diabetes and cardio vascular medications that previously cost as insurance provider over $15,000 annually. We look forward to continuing to publish data from both our clinical trials and commercial experience in addition to seeking out independent assessments with a goal of providing greater support of a long term efficacy and safety of the vBlock therapy. We are very excited about our IDN and vBlock institute partnership strategy which is an avenue for bridging the gap between a self pay environment and national payer coverage. Our independent delivery networks or IDNs are networks of typically self insured hospitals that ensure their staff directly as well as offer coverage plans to other employers in their market for new technologies and IDN many times will conduct a small trial in a short time frame to validate the results and then add this technology as a covered benefits for all their lives under contract in a matter similar to currently covered bariatric procedures. In January, we announced our first of hopefully several successes in our independent delivery network and vBlock institute partnership program with the Winthrop University hospital in New York becoming the first employer in the United States to add vBlock as an included benefit for its nearly 8000 eligible employees and their spouses. These partnerships have generated a lot of excitement as vBlock differentiates providers, like Winthrop in the market they serve. We are engaged in negotiations with other IDNs and look forward to providing you with updates as these discussions progress. With that, I will now ask Greg to make a few comments about our current financial position and other company developments.