Boyd Douglas
Analyst · RBC. Please proceed with your question
Thank you, Benjamin. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. During this conference call, we may make statements regarding future operating plans, expectations and performance that constitute forward-looking statements made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. We caution you that any such forward-looking statements only reflect management expectations and predictions based upon currently available information, and are not guarantees of future results or performance. Actual results might differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements as a result of known and unknown risk, uncertainties and other factors, including those described in our public releases and reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to, our most recent annual report on Form 10-K. We also caution investors that the forward-looking information provided in this call represents our outlook only as of this date, and we undertake no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect events or developments after the date of this call. Joining me on the call this morning is David Dye, our Chief Financial Officer. I’d like to begin by taking a few minutes to speak in some depth about our fourth quarter and full year 2014 results. Clearly, our system sales results for the fourth quarter fell below expectations. However, while we are disappointed with our end of year financial performance, we are more than satisfied with our execution during the five years since the passage of the ARRA. Meaningful Use represented an accelerated paradigm shift in electronic health record adoption for hospitals and providers, not only did we meet this challenge, we excelled as our numbers have borne out since day one with the most important of those numbers being the 100s of millions of dollars received by our customers for achieving Meaningful Use success. The slowdown in system sales we had anticipated occurred sooner and more dramatically than we expected. With the benefit of a large degree of hindsight, we can point to several reasons that this occurred. As many of you are aware, the Meaningful Use attestation period for 2015 was increased from 90 days to 365 days. The 2015 attestation period for hospitals began on October 1, 2014. We believe this caught a number of hospitals unprepared to start a year-on attestation period on October 1. With that being the case, they made the decision to completely forego attestation for 2015 and focus on attestation in 2016 instead resulting in a delay of software purchases necessary to meet the Stage 2 requirements. It’s worth noting that CMS announced yesterday their intent to consider a change in the attestation period for 2015 back to 90 days. Should this occur and all signs indicate that it will, we believe this will positively impact attestations in 2015, though to what degree remains to be seen. Also by midyear of 2014, the vast majority of hospitals in the country, including rural and community hospitals had implemented an EHR system in order to take advantage of the Meaningful Use program. Based on this fact alone, Greenfield opportunities for new system sales are few and far between. In addition, there are a couple of additional factors that are acting to further exacerbate the situation. Obviously, all of these hospitals have at least attested to Stage 1 year 1, and many are in their second or third year of Meaningful Use attestation. Therefore, there is great reluctance to undergo a conversion process and new system implementation in the midst of a year-long attestation period that would put at risk losing Meaningful Use funds for the year. However, the CMS announcement yesterday could also have a positive impact on this situation. Finally, community hospitals in particular have invested a great deal of capital in EHR systems since 2009 for many of those even more proportionately than their large counterparts. Given that level of investment, they are hesitant to spend additional funds and resources on a new system at this time regardless of what their level of dissatisfaction may be with their current vendor. With the uncertainties around the effects of the Affordable Care Act and other potential reimbursement changes in the future, building and preserving capital is at a forefront for community hospitals. All these factors have combined to create a post Meaningful Use market that is soft at best and with few exceptions is yet to materialize. As stated earlier, we are pleased with our execution around the factors that we can control namely our win rate in competitive new client deals and our current client retention rate were both at five year highs during 2014. Our continued success with Meaningful Use Stage 2, which I’ll detail in a moment remains the best in the healthcare IT industry. Impressive TruBridge growth, which David will address in his comments continues as a result of execution both within and outside of the CPSI customer base. We continue to develop new products, services, and markets that will offer future system sales growth in 2016 and beyond. Regarding new customer contracts, we continue to win more than 50% of the deals we are involved in. Earlier this week, we executed a system purchase agreement in excess of $2 million as a result of the competitive process in which it we’d be a long time competitor and are displacing another. But as I stated before, these competitive deals are few and far between. We do expect the displacement market to heat up at some point in the short to mid-term future based on the satisfaction levels with current EHR vendors and expected vendor product version sunsets in conjunction with Stage 3 Meaningful Use. Regarding new products, our recent implementations of our emergency department system have done extremely well, and as a result, the install schedule for this application is picking up steam with 10 installs scheduled for the first quarter and a potential 12 starts for the quarter beginning in April. Another recently developed product, a medical practice management her, has been favorably received and is selling well to physician clinics that are under managed by our client hospitals. As a result of this success, we’ve made the decision to offer the products to the standalone physician practice market in several different models with the primary one being a single monthly fee cloud-based offering. Our initial target market will be all of those practices in the communities where our hospitals are located. We believe our ability to offer integration with the hospital EHR thereby ensuring a single patient record and the consistent user experience for the physicians between their practice and the hospital will give us a significant competitive advantage. Two additional products currently in development that we plan to rollout in 2015 are physician iPad app and a nursing documentation content solution that will be available on a subscription basis. And finally, with regard to the new products, I’d like to spend a moment on the progress of our predictive analytics project. We are making good headway and expanding our knowledge base of the technical aspects involved in manipulating and using big data every day. Every day also conforms for us further not just the possibilities around the use of predictive analytics in healthcare, but the necessity of it. HHS obviously feels the same way with their announcement on Monday of their intent to move away from fee for service to quality of care based payments at a very accelerated pace. The use of data analytics is going to be a key component for providers in transitioning to this payment model. Our immediate focus is around some acknowledged needs such as identifying patients most likely for readmission at or before discharge. We believe potential applications though are wide and far ranging from day-to-day operations and revenue cycle management and enhancing clinical decision support to broader applications around population, health, management, and new reimbursement models. What functionality and services we will make available and win will be market driven, but we fully expect to commercialize on initial offerings sometime late this year. Before I turn the call over to David, I’d like to provide a little more detail to our industry leading Meaningful Use success. From the most recent CMS figures as of November 2014, CPSI leads all vendors with a 195 hospitals through successfully attested two Stage 2 of Meaningful Use under the complete EHR inpatient hospital designation. In addition to surpassing those vendors to operate in the large hospital space, we continue to dominate our traditional competitors in the rural hospital market with more than doubled the Stage 2 attestations of any other vendor. From a more current perspective as of January 23rd, a total of 220 of our clients met and attested to Stage 2 requirements of federal fiscal year 2014. Clearly, we are very pleased with this level of success. As you may remember, a reference before the significantly higher standard that is required to achieve Stage 2 of Meaningful Use. As a follow on to that, it is interesting to note that approximately 20% of our prior hospitals who were eligible for Stage 2 in 2014 shows either not to attest in 2014 or take the exemption offered by CMS and attest the Stage 1 objectives. Without a doubt, this is indicative of the increased difficulty in meeting the Stage 2 measures. We also were certain the 365 day reporting period for 2015 was going to have a detrimental effect on attestation numbers for the upcoming year. With the CMS decision to revert to a 90-day reporting period, this is no longer concerned and there is no doubt of positive development. Regardless, we are extremely proud of the 80% of Stage 2 eligible customers who accepted the challenge and achieved Stage 2 in 2014. We are more than confident our success rate compares favorably across the industry and fully expect the continuation of that performance in 2015. With that, I’m going to turn the call over to David for his comments.