Kevin Sayer
Analyst · JPMorgan. Your line is open.
Yeah, this is Kevin, I'll take that. Some of the actions we put in place, first of all, we obviously met with the leadership of all those companies and listened to them and heard what they had to say. By and large, these partners have served us well. And as far as getting along day-to-day, we do very well. Where we disrupted the apple cart, Robbie, again, is relationships in the field, where we changed literally every single sales territory, the DME rep relationships were lost frequently between our rep in their territory and the DME rep in the corresponding territory. In addition to that, with respect to channel balance, one of the things we learned and one of the perceptions of our DME partners is that we were not balanced that if we had an opportunity to send somebody to the drugstore, we sent them to the pharmacy immediately without checking the DME channel. So we've now encouraged our team to be a lot more channel-agnostic. And if there's an opportunity to go to DME, and it looks like that's going to be a very good alternative for a lot of our patients, we'll pursue that opportunity for those patients and put more business into that channel. These partners and these companies, as I've spoken with them, my conversations have not centered around price, they centered around volume. What these guys want is more patients. We need to get more prescriptions. We need to get more prescriptions sent through that channel. We need to get more prescriptions referred to us through that channel. As we send more their way, we're confident we'll get more back the other way. As we said last call and I'll say again, while we think we stabilized, this is going to take a while to build back up, it's not going to happen overnight. And so we -- but we needed presence in the Type 2 market as well because many of these patients are Medicare Type 2 patients and we haven't been calling out a lot of the physicians in that primary-care community who serve them. Add all those pieces back up, we think we've taken very good steps to shift it in the other direction. We've taken very good steps to get more referrals to put into the pipeline and serve more customers and we believe we're on the right track. One of the other things we've done, by the way, with our DME partners, as we talked about in the call, we've offered them Stelo. They serve a lot of Type 2 patients who may or may not be on insulin, who have other medical conditions. By offering Stelo to these guys, they have an opportunity to market and sell to their very large patient bases even outside of typical diabetes therapies with respect to their help. So we're looking forward to them being a great additional Stelo distribution channel for us as well.