Jon Cohen
Analyst · Jeffries
Thanks, Steve, and good afternoon, everyone. BioReference's core clinical laboratory business continues to make progress to return towards 2019 levels as more physicians' offices reopen, our salespeople are allowed back into the offices and patients feel more comfortable with in-person visits. Many of our existing clinical accounts have rebounded through Q1, while at the same time, we have added new business in women's health in oncology. Although oncology practice patient visits are still at 80% to 90% of pre-COVID levels, our liquid tumor hematology offering continues to thrive and has bounced back to pre-COVID levels, and our solid tumor offering is almost at pre-COVID levels. In addition, our somatic genomics offerings has nearly doubled in Q1 versus Q1 of 2020. Our larger accounts, including large medical groups, FQHCs, ACOs and health systems are also seeing increases in in-patient visits month-over-month. We expect these improving trends to continue throughout the year as vaccines are administered and the number of COVID cases decreases. Our volume exiting Q1 is now down 7% versus prior year. Our payer relations team continues to make remarkable progress, increasing our access across the country as 10 new health plans will be added within the next 30 to 60 days. Our investment in the hospital reference business and in a sales force to deliver on that business is beginning to pay off with several new reference accounts having been added this quarter. In addition, we are expanding our partnerships with several large physician groups in managing their physician office laboratories. At GeneDx, in the first quarter, our genetic testing volume grew over 10%, driven by our industry-leading exome testing offerings. There is a substantial interest in our genome offering across our existing client base, driven by our recently launched rapid genome offering. In January, we also partnered with Tempus, a leading precision medicine company, to combine a customized hereditary cancer panel with our somatic cancer offering as a way to expand our commercial reach without investing in a broader commercial organization. Finally, our adult neurology testing is growing as a result of our recently launched ataxia testing offering. While reimbursement headwinds continue to impact revenue growth, we expect the accelerating growth in volumes to result in this business to be a growth contributor as the year progresses. In January, we formally launched Scarlet Health, an in-home diagnostic service to expand digital health access. Scarlet brings diagnostic services to patients' homes, offices or other preferred locations, delivering on-demand, safe and convenient diagnostic experience for patients. Scarlet has been designed to be similar to tools that consumers use daily in order to provide a convenient, ease-of-use, innovative, flexible mobile alternative to the traditional patient service center experience. We believe that a significant part of the future of health care is at home. Our plan is to make in-home health care real for millions of Americans by bringing diagnostic services directly to the patient. Now let me turn my attention to COVID. Since the start of the pandemic, we have now performed 14.4 million COVID-19 PCR tests. In the first quarter, we performed approximately 4.3 million COVID-19 tests compared to 4.7 million tests performed in the fourth quarter. We are averaging about 40,000 to 50,000 tests a day. BioReference continues to provide COVID-19 solutions to meet testing needs of numerous customer verticals, including physicians, health systems, long-term facilities, governments, schools, employers, professional sports teams, entertainment venues and the general public through our retail pharmacy chain relationships with Rite Aid and CVS at over 1,500 locations around the country. BioReference remains the laboratory of choice for professional sports leagues as we expand our ongoing relationship with the NFL, NBA, Major League Soccer, National Hockey League and now, Major League Baseball, which we kicked off in April on opening day. I'm thrilled to announce today a COVID-19 testing agreement with the Women's NBA league to support all players of staff for their 25th season. Across the sports portfolio, we performed approximately 1 million COVID-19 tests, including 150,000 point-of-care tests in Q1. We provide customized solutions to 200 professional sports clubs across 40 cities with perhaps the most experienced on-site services organization in the country. In Q1, BioReference successfully supported a large-scale testing program for the Super Bowl in Tampa, the Women's and Men's Big East Basketball Championship in March, U.S. soccer national teams, the USA swimming team and the USGA and multiple universities. We are performing fan testing at several stadiums and arenas around the country through our growing point-of-care testing capabilities, which includes both point-of-care PCR and antigen testing. Speaking of point-of-care rapid testing, we continue to rapidly expand our delivery of COVID-19 point-of-care testing. We have performed more than 270,000 COVID point-of-care tests, including 200,000 rapid PCR tests using the Mesa Accula. We use point-of-care PCR for multiple sports leagues at over 400-plus testing sites with 3,000 point-of-care devices. We performed a large-scale arena testing at Madison Square Garden in New York and the Chase Center in San Francisco. As I mentioned on our last call, point-of-care devices are expected to play a larger role in COVID testing with the shift in demand from screening with timely results. We have validated multiple point-of-care platforms and have developed proprietary software to deliver the result -- deliver the report result in a timely fashion in order to provide customized solutions for many different industries. In March, we announced the expansion of our COVID-19 school testing program to support a return to in-person classroom instruction around the country. We are working with 2 of the 3 largest school systems in the country, New York City and Chicago, by providing testing services for over 1,400 schools, testing nearly 300 schools every day. To date, we have performed almost 500,000 individual tests on public school students, principals and teachers. We expect to announce expansion of our school testing programs to at least 4 more school districts in the next several weeks. In February, we announced a unique program in partnership with New York State to provide COVID-19 rapid testing to help reopen the New York State economy. The New York Forward rapid testing program is designed to provide New Yorkers and those visiting with inexpensive and rapid COVID-19 testing. The New York Forward program is a collaboration with The Empire State Development Corporation, The Real Estate Board of New York, REBNY, the city's leading real estate trade association and CVS Pharmacy. To date, we now have 31 of these retail locations open. Using a mobile device or a computer, an individual can schedule a rapid COVID-19 test, pay in advance using a cashless experience, get tested and receive the results within 30 minutes or less, sent by a secure e-mail, allowing them to show proof of a negative COVID-19 result. As cases have decreased and vaccination has increased, we are seeing a shift from diagnostic testing to screening and surveillance. In anticipation of this trend, BioReference strategically positioned itself several months ago by adding specific point-of-care personnel, developing specific point-of-care workflow for high-throughput events and developing customary -- custom proprietary software to schedule and report of 6 different point-of-care platforms. As a result, we're able to address simple and complex surveillance programs across multiple different venues. We continue to see a significant demand for testing for travel, hospitality, employer return to work programs and large venue events in addition to the sports testing and school testing we already mentioned. We believe that many of these entities will continue their surveillance and screening programs through the end of 2021 and in many cases, through the first half of 2022. Our custom solutions utilizing both lab-based PCR and point-of-care test has positioned us as to maintain our position as the nation's leading provider of large-scale COVID screening programs. In addition, our improved business -- base business and strengthening our specialty testing services should continue to bolster our performance throughout the year. And now let me turn it over to our CFO, Adam.