Leslie Trigg
Analyst · BofA Securities. Your line is now open
Thanks, Jim. Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us. We are very pleased to share our third quarter 2022 results, which were marked by strong revenue growth and a home re-ramp that outpaced our expectations. On the acute side, we were encouraged by meaningful Tablo expansion among current customers and adoption from new customers despite lingering staffing and inflationary pressures. On the home front, the early success of our rebuilding process validated our strong relationships with home providers and patient preference for Tablo. What’s more just following the close of the quarter, we shift our 1 million treatment for Tablo. I am immensely proud of the impact our team has been able to make in the lives of patients in such a short period of time. Based on Q3 momentum, we are raising our fiscal year 2022 revenue guidance today to reflect our continued confidence in the strong underlying market fundamentals and demand for Tablo across our acute and home end market. Since the third quarter marks the beginning of our home re-ramp, I wanted to start by sharing an experience I recently had visiting a patient using Tablo in her home. This individual had tried every form of dialysis possible from in-center dialysis to peritoneal dialysis to the incumbent home hemo machine. The first thing she said to me when I walked in the door was I love my Tablo. It's quiet. It gives me the flexibility to alter my treatment schedule when I need to. It's super simple to set up. It's been extremely reliable and I feel good on it. As I was leaving a couple hours later, I heard her and her husband discussing a weekend drive up to a festival freedom that home dialysis affords them. This individual is just one of many who now has been dialyzing on Tablo for over a year. Her experience underscores why Tablo's retention rate continues to sit far above the historical retention rates on the home incumbent hemo system. Our real world data indicates that at 12 months, the controllable attrition rate excluding death or transplant is nearly 50% lower than what is reported in the USRDS database for home hemodialysis. We believe part of Tablo's retention advantage is because patients report feeling better physiologically during and after Tablo treatments. They also report learning Tablo quickly and not feeling overwhelmed or intimidated by it. And they talk about the simplicity of managing Tablo at home with no long involved advanced preparation required and none of the space requirements that kept many of them from considering home in the past. Despite all of these advantages, we were unsure how many patients would choose to wait for Tablo through the home ship hold, particularly because the timeline was unclear and uncertain. While our information is qualitative, what we now know is that a majority of the patients decided to wait for Tablo. And anecdotally, we are aware of several patients who chose to go home on another home hemo system and then after provided a switch to Tablo after it became available again. Another card turned over in the quarter was customer reaction. Customers could have migrated back to primarily using another home device. What we learned was that all our provider customers returned to Tablo and quickly. The choices made by patients and providers enabled us to close Q3 ahead of our expectations for home growth. We sent a record number of patients home during the last 30 days of the quarter and entered Q4 with a healthy backlog due to Tablo home orders more than doubling compared to Q3 2021. Our third quarter ramp also speaks to the expertise and commitment of our service and support teams whose focus on improving the lives of dialysis patients and their caregivers is unwavering. As the number of patients who dialyze at home with Tablo continues to grow, so does our home footprint, which now covers major U.S. geographies and approximately 60% of the state. We have strong convictions around the ability to grow as we work to continue ramping our pipeline with new physicians and providers who are eager to expand the use of Tablo in the home setting. While our progress in the quarter was a positive step toward rebuilding our home order book and patient pipeline, I do want to emphasize that as early and our work to fully reestablish our momentum will continue to build. That said we do expect that fourth quarter to be another strong one for home placement given our large backlog for home consults. This visibility provides conviction in our ability to deliver on our original 2022 goal of more than doubling our home revenue, exiting the year, representing roughly mid teens as a percentage of total revenue. Turning now to a review of our acute performance. Our team executed well and continued to broaden our footprint as part of our land and expand strategy. A key highlight for the quarter was expanding within one of the largest regional healthcare systems in the country with 50 hospitals in nine states. This win represents one of the largest expansion orders in Outset history. In [indiscernible] and new sales agreements, another vital part of our commercial strategy is to drive utilization across the installed base, and we were pleased to see consistent utilization during the quarter evidence that our recurring revenue model continues to work well. The macro headwinds we discussed on our last call did persist, most notably a nationwide shortage of dialysis nurses, which we expect to extend into 2023. In addition, we continue to keep a close eye on capital spending trends. However, since our August call, we've seen positive indications of stability and similar to our home customers our acute customers continue to demonstrate strong preference and demand for Tablo. Additionally, on our August call, we talked about initiating a novel program aimed at mitigating the impact of dialysis nursing shortages on our sales cycle. I'm pleased to report that the early results of what we call the bridge program have been very positive. The bridge program is expected to be margin accretive and is a temporary solution designed to bridge hospitals on staffing by providing short-term dialysis nurses, who deliver Tablo treatments both in the ICU and bedside on the floor, while the hospital completes the process of hiring its own permanent staff. As permanent staff is hired, the Outset nurses also help with training and onboarding. While still in an early phase, we are seeing evidence of the program's effectiveness in giving health systems the confidence to move forward on in-sourcing initiatives. Speaking more broadly, our footprint continues to proliferate across the country, both with existing health system customers expanding to new hospital sites and new health systems adopting Tablo to begin their process of in-sourcing across their network. The value proposition behind this growth remains cost reduction and operational efficiency. As we've outlined before, Tablo generates cost savings in two ways: supply cost reduction and labor cost reduction. Accessing these significant cost savings related to labor involves the hospital using Tablo to change from outsourcing their dialysis to in-sourcing and owning in-patient dialysis themselves. In-sourcing dialysis delivers powerful cost reduction benefits. For example, one large regional player recently conducted an internal analysis demonstrating a nearly 40% annual cost savings by converting from an outsource dialysis model to in-sourcing with Tablo. As labor rates and labor shortages continue to rise amongst third-party dialysis service providers, we continue to see a long runway of opportunity with hospitals seeking more strategic ways of improving inpatient dialysis care and reducing their costs at the same time. Earlier in the quarter, we were also pleased to announce that Outset was awarded a VA contract aimed at improving dialysis care for our veterans. Specifically, the contract which was awarded by the strategic acquisition center of the Department of Veteran Affairs enables Tablo to be sold into 106 VA hospitals throughout the United States. While Tablo was already deployed in some of those facilities, this new five-year indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts will enable VA centers to acquire consults to both send veterans home and expand usage in the acute setting. This partnership with the VA will help to further our mission to bring a technology enabled patient centered approach to dialysis, both in the acute and home settings. And we look forward to supporting these patients across care settings as they dialyze with Tablo. Our recent acute and home wins were validated from a clinical perspective at the American Society of Nephrology Kidney Week meeting last week, as some of Tablo’s advantages were shared through eight poster presentations that covered a wide range of outcomes from Tablo’s performance in the ICU to treatment adherence and retention among home patients. Over half of the abstracts were submitted by Tablo customers reporting on their experiences and outcomes. For example, a 300-bed hospital, which is part of a large national IDN, reported improved nurse staffing efficiency, reduced treatment costs, and increased patient time off dialysis in the ICU all by switching to Tablo. We also presented data from the largest human factor study ever performed on a home hemodialysis device. Healthcare professionals participating in the study were tested on 7,365 tasks with an observed use error rate of just 0.5% . Among patients and their care partners in this landmark study, we observed use error rate was just 0.9% on over 5,400 tasks tested. These data support Tablo’s ease of use, which clinicians and patients tell us contribute to the higher home adoption and retention rates and stickiness in the hospital setting. To close on AFN, we came away from this conference incrementally more positive about the tailwinds driving Tablo adoption across three days, our conversations with providers, nephrologists and patients reinforce more than just interest in driving home adoption, but a real call to action, dramatic in center staffing shortages, patient experiences during the pandemic, improved outcomes at home and the comfort patients and providers now have with home health are all factors that replayed in nearly every discussion. We were also pleased with the recent updates CMS issued in its calendar year 2023 ESRD prospective payment system final rule, which reinforce the ETC model and helping to keep home dialysis top of mind with acute and home providers. Before turning the call over to Nabeel, I'd also like to briefly highlight a new product update. As we have reiterated many times in the past for an innovation company at heart, we will never stop listening and acting upon the ideas and needs of our patients and providers, nor will we stop inventing new ways to surprise and delight them. To that end, we are pleased to introduce TabloCart, which is a new accessory for Tablo. TabloCart provides additional maneuverability around the hospital and incremental pre-filtration capabilities for sites that suffer from water quality that is far worse than the national drinking water standards. TabloCart will be sold separately at an expected margin accretive ASP. We closed Q3 exceeding our internal projections for TabloCart orders indicating strong early demand for this innovative accessory. In summary, our strong Q3 was driven by significant expansion in the acute setting and a home pipeline that is rebuilding ahead of expectations. It is clear to us that Tablo remains a highly differentiated solution in one of the largest, most expensive recession proof areas of healthcare. Our performance reflects the truly incredible Outset team who I would like to thank for their courage, commitment, and conviction in all they do every day to advance our mission. With that, I’ll now turn the call to Nabeel to review our financials and provide more granularity on our updated outlook for the fourth quarter and the remainder of 2022.