Keith Sullivan
Analyst · Adam Maeder with Piper Sandler. Your line is open, please go ahead
Thank you, Steve. 2021 was a critical year for Neuronetics and we believe the strategic pieces are now in place to drive the accelerated adoption of NeuroStar. We have demonstrated the superiority of the clinical outcomes. We have a proven, unparalleled ability to support our practices by helping them educate patients and raise awareness to drive long-term success. And we have invested heavily in developing the industry's largest and most talented commercial organization. While we face challenges in late 2021 from Omicron, which continued into the first quarter of this year, our physician offices remained open, which allowed us to continue training customers and deploying marketing efforts. Because of this, we believe we are well-positioned to execute through the remainder of the year. To that end, we have several key initiatives in place to help capitalize on the solid foundation built last year and support growth in 2022 and beyond. This year, our key focus areas to drive growth are as follows; one, drive increased awareness among customers and patients; two, the continued optimization of the commercial organization; three, leveraging exclusive partnerships; and four, executing on the clinical and regulatory strategy. Beginning with driving increase awareness among customers and patients. In 2021, we hosted several successful NeuroStar Summits. These summits focused on providing prospective customers an in depth understanding of our technology and the different customer programs we offer. As a result of the success of prior events, we will host four summits during 2022. We recently hosted our first summit of the year in San Diego, which was completely sold out and included over 85 prospective customers, making it our largest event to-date. Events like these are just one of the areas we are investing in to increase awareness and better educate physicians. We are also expanding our efforts to drive awareness among patients and psychiatrist through the marketing partnerships. Last quarter, we announced a partnership with Dr. Melissa Shepard. Dr. Shepard is a Board-certified psychiatrist and psychotherapist who is an active mental health advocate. In addition to being a key opinion leader in the industry, she is a well-known social media influencer with over 1.1 million followers. During the fourth quarter, we also partnered with Drew Robinson. Drew is a former professional baseball player who has battled with depression most of his life. At the start of COVID his symptoms escalated and resulted in a suicide attempt. Fortunately, he survived. And after his recovery, he is now a passionate mental health advocate, and also a NeuroStar success story. He completed his course of therapy earlier this year and is now working with us to help spread awareness. We expect our partnership with Drew will provide a voice with an incredibly powerful story to amplify Neuronetics' name through earned media opportunities, video content, and paid and organic social media. As part of our marketing expansion efforts in 2022, we recently introduced a new marketing campaign called Tap into Possibilities for Depression. This new campaign is designed to reach a broader audience, including a larger target age demographic, as well as a focus on families and caregivers of patients suffering from mental health disorders. We are continuing to leverage high impact channels such as digital and social media to accomplish this and now are targeting incremental touchpoints like digital TV, health portals, podcasts, and partnerships with influencers. This campaign will also include improved practice support materials and a new look and feel. Our ability to make this kind of investment into marketing differentiates Neuronetics from others in the industry who are not interested in supporting the long-term success of their customers. A new component of our educational strategy is the launch of a state-of-the-art training center that educates our practices on the 5 Star solution, which includes operationalizing, their NeuroStar practice, staff training, and patient marketing. In April we will open NeuroStar University or NSU in Charlotte, North Carolina, and host our first training class. During the two-day program, customers will become experts in our proven methodology by focusing on how to achieve the best clinical outcomes for their patients and how to market their NeuroStar business. We believe the benefits of this program, reinforced by our practice development team, will help ensure the success of NeuroStar within our customers' practices. Our second focus for 2022 is the continued optimization of our commercial organization. As a part of the planned expansion of our salesforce, we have opted to rebrand our NPCs to practice development managers or PDMs to more closely align with our strategy of supporting the growth and development of our customers practices by enhancing patient awareness and access to care. We now have 42 PDMs in the field, five of whom are dedicated to fixed price accounts and the remaining 37 are focused on our per-click customers. Each practice development manager will have a smaller number of accounts to allow for more focus in each office and to better support. In January, we kicked off the year with our national sales meeting in Phoenix, Arizona. The theme of the meeting was simplifying everything. Our goal is to simplify everything from clinical training to marketing support, in order to make working with Neuronetics as seamless as possible for our customers. To that end, we trained our new -- our team on the new MT Cap and other technologies in order to make the patient journey simpler. Included in the event were the recently added PDMs who are now out in the field helping customers treat more patients. Turning to our third focus for 2022, exclusive commercial partnerships. As noted earlier, we have seen good early traction so far with the national accounts signed during the fourth quarter, and expect to see an increase in capital and disposable revenue as a direct result of these contracts. We will continue to evaluate additional exclusive partnerships with providers across the country. Our fourth and final focus is the execution of our clinical and regulatory strategy and we continue to be encouraged by the recent interactions with the FDA regarding additional potential label extensions and new indications. Over the past 18 months, our organization made significant investment in the reorganization and reinvigoration of both the commercial and regulatory teams to drive long-term growth. As we look ahead to 2022, we expect to see the accelerated positive impacts of these investments, as well as the variety of growth drivers we put in place. We are incredibly excited about the position we are in to take advantage of the opportunity that lies ahead to help treat patients suffering with mental health disorders. With that, I'd like to open the line for questions.