Jon Cohen
Analyst · Ted Tenthoff from Piper Sandler. Ted your line is now open
Thanks, Steve, and good afternoon, everybody. I am pleased to report that BioReference Laboratories continues to make progress towards its goal to improve top line and bottom line results. We’re beginning to see the positive impact of the organizational changes we put in place to specifically grow our oncology, urology, women’s health and genetic businesses. In addition, our plan to develop a vigorous business development infrastructure to identify, develop and pursue a pipeline of new strategic partnerships to deliver large books of businesses is beginning to bear fruit. We have seen growth in our accounts related to Accountable Care Organizations, IPAs, clinically integrated networks, federally qualified health systems, prisons, large medical groups and physician office labs. We are in various stages of discussions with some additional strategic partners and hope to make some very positive announcements in the next several months. The centerpiece of our strategy remains a commitment to the best possible patient-centric experience and to differentiate ourselves in the market with an obsession to patient service and convenience. The journey is significantly to improve patient experience has just begun and over the next several months we will announce new technology investments and partnerships in this space. We continue to make progress with our initiatives to improve payer access with new in network relationships to an increasing number of health plans. This includes increasing our access to Medicaid patients by a new and expanded contracts with Aetna Better Health, AmeriHealth, Centene and Molina. In addition, we have had successive gaining in network status with local and regional plans such as the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Health Net, TRICARE West, Centera, and always health plans for GeneDx. At the same time, as a result of our UnitedHealth preferred provider lab relationship, we continue to aggressively pursue out of network providers and targeted specialty programs. As Phil mentioned, Medicare coverage for 4Kscore resumed on January first this year as a result of the new local coverage decision by Novitas. January, the first month with coverage saw an increase of 16% in test orders compared to December. We continue to invest in the 4Kscore salesforce, and we’ll be doubling the number of sales reps within the next couple of months. In addition, I am pleased to report that in December, the FDA accepted our premarket approval application or PMA for the 4Kscore. We expect to receive a determination from the FDA this year. With regard to GeneDx, this quarter saw volume increases in Q4 compared to Q4 of 2018 and year-over-year growth we saw an increase of 9%. GeneDx continues to strengthen its relationships with leading children’s hospitals and academic medical centers around the country to drive increases in growth and revenue. And as a result, our actual business increased 16% for the year. I want to briefly mention the coronavirus outbreak. We have been in constant contact with the CDC, FDA and various state departments of health. Currently, only the CDC and other public health labs are authorized to provide testing for the virus in the United States. No commercial lab – no commercial test for the virus is currently available. We are prepared to launch the diagnostics of the virus and depending on the advice from the state departments of health as to when commercial testing for the virus will be permitted. With that overview, let me turn it over to Adam for a discussion of our fourth quarter financial performance. Adam?