Boyd Douglas
Analyst · Wells Fargo. Please go ahead
Thank you, Amanda. 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. David and I have a few minutes of prepared comments and we will be happy to take your questions. I would like to start by speaking about our market in general for a moment. Clearly, and as expected, the EHR market for rural and community hospitals continuous to be in a low that started in the second half of 2014. As we mentioned in our last call, this was by no mean unexpected though it did happen sooner than we anticipated. How long this will last and to what degree remains to be seen. However, we believe the condition is short-term and that market activity will increase. We are already seeing signs of that based on our second quarter installation schedule. As I mentioned in our press release, we are currently scheduled to implement seven new client EHR systems and 15 Emergency Department Information systems in the second quarter. Obviously, this is an encouraging sign and we feel optimistic about our prospects for the remainder of the year. One other factor I would like to touch on that could have a positive effect on the market in 2015 is the proposed change in the rule regarding the required attestation period for 2015. CMS has backed up their requirement of 365-day attestation period for 2015 and reverted to the previous 90-day. Under new proposed rule, a hospital can start their 90-day attestation period for 2015 as late as October 1st. Any hospital who might be considering a change in vendors, can now do so without contending with having to go through an implementation in the middle of a 365-day attestation period. While this change might not have a noticeable impact on larger hospitals, because of the much longer timeframe needed to implement, in the rural hospital space we believe it will. We have a proven track record of being able implement our system with a minimal amount of lead time and still have hospitals attest successfully using their go-live date at the start of their attestation period. Given this fact, when the rule is finalized, this has the potential to create replacement opportunities for us this year. Beyond 2015, based on initial reviews of the proposed rule for Stage 3 Meaningful Use our opportunity for both add-on sales and new customer sales through competitive replacements will be significant in 2016 and 2017. As you all hopefully know by now, on April the 13th we formed a new company for our EHR business, Evident. I won’t go into all of the reasons for that as those were covered in the accompanying press release, and David and I have the opportunity to speak to a number of you about the formation of Evident at [indiscernible] that we announced. Our launch of Evident has also coincided with our National Users Conference that was taking place in Destin, Florida, that same week. We did an extensive presentation for our clients about the new company and while this was a positive move for them and for us. We followed that up with a series of executive town hall meetings and open the floor for questions from our clients. The feedback we received from them was very upbeat and enthusiastic about our move and our plans for the future under the Evidence name. While I won’t go into the level of detail that we did with our customers, I do want to spend a little time on what is different about our EHR business as Evident. From a system perspective, we determined as part of the new company it make sense to have a name for our system, so our system is now known as the Thrive EHR. The first of several changes plan for Thrive is a new unit -- new user interface application that will be called Thrive UX. Data testing for this new application will begin in May. Thrive UX overlays the entire system and create a completely new user experience for our customers. It includes a home screen concept with multiple display and organization options to make it unique to each user. Among the features in each users home screen is a messaging application, a system generated task list based on individual user settings, workflow automation, new navigation options and direct access to a new Thrive user area that provides contextual help. Our new Thrive [indiscernible] and their ability to chat with support staff. Our customers who previewed Thrive UX at our User Conference gave it great reviews and were ready to get their hands on it. Going forward beyond Thrive UX, we are already well into development of the incorporation of data analytics into Thrive. Our pilot project with IBM is nearing completion and we are now evaluating where it makes sense to incorporate analytics into the system. The initial demand from our customers is more on the retrospective use of the data that we believe the demand for predictive analytics especially around population health management will be significant. The other immediate area of focus for Thrive is around patient engagement. While we currently have patient portal product, the opportunity exists to expand the scope and offerings through the portal as patient engagement becomes more of a factor in rural areas. The other key area of differentiation with Evident is our new support model called LikeMind. We have always believed the quality of our support has been our biggest strength as the company but with Evident, we are dedicated to taking our support experience to the next level, hence the creation of the LikeMind model. The underlying premise of the LikeMind concept is that we are now providing teams of support managers and professionals who are dedicated specifically to individual sites. We believe this approach will enable our support staff to have a much higher level of familiarity with their individual site system configuration, organizational structure and personnel. Not only will this allow us to respond quicker and more effectively on support request, it will enhance our ability to be proactive in working with clients based on having a dedicated support team, consistently engaged with the same clients on a long-term basis. We did a proof of concept of the LikeMind model with 22 of our most active sites related to support resource utilization starting in January. When we met with these sites in April, the response was unanimously extremely positive. We are now in the process of reallocating our support resources to rollout LikeMind to our entire client base by the end of the year. Overall we believe the time was right for this move and we're absolutely committed to providing our customers and prospective customers, significant, tangible benefits as evident from a system perspective, from a support perspective and from a new development perspective. We have enjoyed 35 years of remarkable success and as we told our customers the formation of Evident is all about positioning us and them for even greater success in the future. At this time, I’d like to turn the call over to David for his comments.