RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:2020 - My take Nov 5/20
Q3 CC:
Brooks O'Neil
Good. So I have a couple of questions, I just try to limit myself a little bit here, but first I'm curious, as you look across the business in the things you're working on, what do you see is the most significant constraints on growth and moving forward?
Casey Hoyt
Well, presently it's still access to the hospitals. I mean we're fortunate to be seeing an uptick in referrals but we still can't get into about 50% of our facilities right now. So that's currently. I mean as you look down the road, the number one priority and focus is always growing the vent business, Brooks, and that's beefing up recruiting, that's advancing our training programs and protocols and hiring more people, and so it's no different than it has been in the past just getting our hands on the right people and getting them trained to walk and talk the Viemed way.
donmayne wrote: Yes, LSCFA.
In addition, management put forward these reasons during the Q2 CC:
1. What's happened is if we have noncompliant patients, that really—they go on hold, and we're not able to bill those patients. It doesn't really contribute to revenue. Our policy has always been to have our therapists get in there and do everything we can to try to get that patient utilizing the vent so that we can get the therapy going and we can then start billing again. This quarter, there was such a huge need for ventilators during the pandemic that if we couldn't get compliance going, we were picking those up. Obviously we sold vents and rented vents to the most appropriate place. While our active patient count was down slightly, we didn't have any impact from that loss to our revenue line.
2. As we reported during the last quarter, new patient referrals have slowed as a result of slower hospital admissions with the ongoing pandemic, but we continue to admit new patients into our program.
Perhaps with non-compliant patients, it suggests they may have been over-reporting in earlier quarters?
They did report minor improvement between Q2 and Q3 but not what might have been expected given the lull in the pandemic during those months.