Earnings Labs

OptimizeRx Corporation (OPRX)

Q4 2014 Earnings Call· Tue, Mar 31, 2015

$6.39

-0.39%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day everyone and welcome to the OptimizeRx Corporation 2014 Annual Earnings Conference Call. Following the initial discussion, there will be time for question from the participants in the call. Just as a reminder today’s conference is being recorded. A transcript will be available for 90 days or those interested parties who want a copy, please contact Doug Baker, in our Rochester, Michigan Headquarters. Now for opening remarks and introductions, I would now like to turn the conference over to Doug Baker, Chief Financial Officer for OptimizeRx.

Doug Baker

Management

Thanks, Victoria. I would like to start off by welcoming everybody to the conference call. And as you know, I'm going to start off by reading the Safe Harbor statement. This conference contains forward-looking statements within the definition of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended and such Section 21E of the Securities Act of 1934 amended. These forward-looking statements should not be used to make an investment decision, the words estimate, possible and seeking and similar expressions identify forward-looking statements, which speak only as for the date the statement was made. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements whether because of new company information, future events or otherwise. Forward-looking statements are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties, some of which cannot be predicted or quantified. Further events and actual results could differ materially from those set forth and contemplated by or underlying the forward-looking statements, the risks and uncertainties to which forward-looking statements are subject include, but are not limited to, the effective government regulation, competition and other material risk. At this point, I am now going to turn the call over to Dave Harrell, our CEO for some opening remarks.

Dave Harrell

Management

Thank you, Doug, and thanks everybody. So today I wanted to just talk about we’re going highlight today four key buckets, the first key bucket is how we’re expanding pharmaceutical brands and budgets and how we not only did in the 2014 but how we’re going to move forward very aggressively in 2015. The second bucket we’re going to talk about expanding physician utilization in our current EHR Network. The third bucket we’re going to speak to is how we’re going to have expanded our promotional network in other EHRs and platforms. And then our last bucket focuses on our fourth objective which is to expand infrastructure and resources to fully support and exploit each of our three opportunities that I just listed. So with that I wanted to make some opening comments as it relates to pumping out our success in each of these key areas and then bringing it to each of the leaders in our departments, so that they can speak to how we’re further going to ramp it up. In regards to sustaining the pharmaceutical brands and budget as you may have realized that looking at our 10-K, we were successful expanding our sales overall by 39% over 2013. We also increased promotional transactions of approximately 26% over 2013 and Doug will speak a little bit more about our financial performance that did improve. Secondly, we continued to acquire new pharmaceutical manufacturers and brands that were promoted through our platforms and distributed through our EHR Systems and have worked with approximately 80 different brands which the sizable increase from last year. We also hired a former global marketing director from one of the leading pharma company AstraZeneca to lead and assist us on our East Coast sales in our overall marketing efforts so you’re going to…

Doug Baker

Management

Thanks Dave. So as Dave mentioned our revenues last year were 6.5 million, we finished the year strong with revenues of over $1.9 million in the fourth quarter alone, that was an increase of 17% over the fourth quarter of 2013. For 2014 in total we generated operating income of approximately 400,000 excluding non-cash expenses. In the fourth quarter of 2014 we had actual net income of approximately 230,000, this really demonstrates the operating leverage of our business and how it generates profits and cash flow as sales ramp up. On the expense side we continue to watch expenses very closely, we have well over 1 million in expenses in 2014 that will not reoccur in 2015. There are however two areas where we are willing to increase spending when justified. The first really is opportunities we get in front of potential customers and allows us to increase revenues; this includes things like conferences, marketing, additional sales personnel and other similar expenses. The second area is on product development integration. These items are related to technology allow us to expand our regional outlets to offer additional products and applications. First quarter of 2015 is just about over and it looks like it’s falling in line with our expectations. There's some seasonality to our business as pharmaceutical companies often get off to a slow start but we expect to easily exceed the revenue levels for the first quarter of 2014. The year is off to a good start and -- our goal to exceed expectations. With that that I’m going to turn it over to Terry Hamilton, our Senior Vice President of Sales.

Terry Hamilton

Management

Thanks Doug. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak with all of you today, and let me begin by introducing myself. As Doug said my name is Terry Hamilton and I’m the Senior VP of Sales for OptimizeRx. I’ve been at OptimizeRx since January 2000 and I lead the team that calls on and manages the pharma manufacturers and brands. A little bit about my background, my background’s in the pharma biotech area spending around 20 plus years with several companies including GSK, EMS and [NetImmune], involving several leadership positions in sales, marketing and managed markets. I also have a very key member of my team Ed Berger our VP of Sales in the East on the line and allow him now to personally introduce himself.

Ed Berger

Management

Thank you so much Terry and welcome everyone, as Terry said my name is Ed Berger and I am the Vice President of sales for East Coast Accounts, my background is I spent over 25 years working within pharma marketing brands prior to joining OptimizeRx. I joined OptimizeRx because I believe that the ERX and EHR channel is going to become a really critical channel for pharma marketing success in the future, and I think having come from pharma has helped me better position our services here at OptimizeRx to clients as we continue what I think is great growth, Terry.

Terry Hamilton

Management

Thanks Ed. Our sales team's goal is to be laser focused in 2015 and I thought I would share our team’s brand vision, our market strategy and the strategic drivers with all of you on the call. First of all our brand vision is to become the number one solution provider in electronic healthcare pathway to improve stakeholder results. Our market strategy is to be the first owned eCoupon space to expand support solutions and we’re going to do that by four strategic drivers. First we want to protect and grow our existing brands business; second we want to secure new brand business from our existing accounts; third we want to establish new pharma business accounts; and lastly we want to grow additional revenue in business from our additional capabilities such as drug filing integration, training and messaging. I’m going to talk in a little more detail in regards to these four strategic drivers. The first strategic driver again was to protect and grow our existing brands business. Currently we have secured purchase orders from our existing clients that would in itself improve sales over the last year; those strategic clients include Lilly, DSI, Alcon, Astellas, and Pfizer. The second strategic driver is to secure new brand business from existing accounts. The sales process can be very tedious and long, so we really want to leverage the accounts where we have MSAs and legal approval to expedite getting the brands integrated. Some of these accounts where we see good leverage are Alcon, Pfizer, Shire, Novartis, NAV. We really see the strategy as a great way to add additional brands in the short period of time. The third strategic driver again is to establish new pharma business accounts. As I mentioned the sales cycle can be longer with these accounts, but…

Ed Berger

Management

Sure Terry would be happy to. As Terry mentioned last week optimize our [ex-sponsor] over the two days seminar entitled eRx EHR promotional opportunities, how to leverage and we called it the new frontier. It's important to note that had this conference, we had 23 different pharmaceutical company sending representatives to this event, that’s no small accomplishment because having come from pharma I would tell you to spend two days at an event, it has to be something that’s meaningful to them. And so we were pleased with the attendance and we had just about as many pharmaceutical communication agencies and consultants in attendance as well. The two-day event focused exclusively on how the eRX and EHR platform is what we believe fundamentally changing, how patients are being treated by HCPs. And I will say that, that pharma marketers are seeing the EHR as a new channel to communicate with their audiences and at this meeting customers were coming up to ask, they were asking for our direction and we were totally inundated at the booth by customers asking us like how do we get started, where do go from -- in terms of the next step. And lastly I will say you know I mean we established so many new contacts and are following up on requests that we believe will generate new business. And I will close by just saying I mean we were clearly seen as the leader in ePrescribing and in the EHR platforms and it’s events like this that help really cement our leadership position where we develop relationships and move marketers into what we believe is this really important new frontier. And so with that Terry I’ll turn it back to you.

Terry Hamilton

Management

Thanks Ed, great comments. I would only add that not only will the conference significant lever for pharmaceutical manufacturers and brands it was also a great lever for our potential EHR clients, there were several EHR, ePrescribe participants in the audience and as Ed said we were seen as the leader in the conference. I’ll touch on the last two critical success factors that impact sales and really meet the managed pharma by alleviating their Medicare concerns through our ability to target their offers to patients under the age of 65. Also we’re making every effort to shorten the pharma sales cycle. As I mentioned several times pharma is very slow moving through their industries, so through our extensive pharma knowledge we need to expedite brands in the EHR channel. Lastly we will really need to leverage our partnership with Grey, DrFirst, Allscripts and Practice Fusion. I will conclude -- I’m very, very confident in our team, our sales plan, our pipeline in our EHR growth. With that I’m going to turn it over to David Lester who’s going to expand upon the EHR strategy and growth.

David Lester

Management

Thank you Terry and thank you Ed, greatly appreciate that. As Terry and Ed and Dave have been discussing, as have highlighted, one of the things that we wanted to focus on and changing my responsibility was to continue building out and working with the current channel partners to expand promotional utilization of the current network, make sure that we’re getting the most out the current partners that we have, that we leverage every opportunity that we have within those channels and the next piece obviously of my focus is to expand within new platforms, looking at who those new channel partners are to expand the extent of our network. To address the first one under promotion utilization under the current network, one of the first things that I did as I sat down with our team here within OptimizeRx and we did a review of each one of our current channel partners, major topics of review were identifying again their total size of the prescribing base, making sure that we have covered and we understand the percentage of that prescribing base that in fact have access to our eCoupon solution. We looked at average utilization by doctor, we looked at physician specialty makeup and started pouring some of these key indicators together in a review and started scheduling meetings with each one of our key partners. Further we centered around what are some of the lost opportunities, what are the finance implications by -- as an example not maximizing the reach across all prescribing physicians and started to also build additional suggestions where we could leverage the opportunity with each one of those partners. We’ve scheduled the meetings, began meeting with each one of the key partners and a couple of examples of the collaboration that we got, we…

Dave Harrell

Management

So in summary, OptimizeRx continues to be a great growth opportunity and helping all key stakeholders pharmaceutical manufacturers, doctors and the patients we all try of serve. In other words, all stakeholders win with our technology and our story is getting better and better and more compelling to each one. OptimizeRx is the first move and the leaders in this extensive growing field. The number of brands have grown the number of distributions have grown, the number of doctors have grown and the operating model has significant leverage. Again, we feel like our model is poised for great growth in the near and longer term future and we will invest in both sales and customer facing opportunities and product development and integration so that we can fully capitalize. So with that, I would like to open it up for questions and ask that we keep questions to one and maybe a follow-up if necessary. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. You first question comes from the line of Brian Murphy with Merriman.

Brian Murphy

Analyst

I think this is for Doug, Doug just a couple of housekeeping questions. Can you give us the depreciation and amortization and the stock comp for the fourth quarter?

Doug Baker

Management

Brian, I don’t have those right on my figure tips, but I can get back to you with all.

Brian Murphy

Analyst

And I had another question and maybe this is for David Lester just about some of the improvements you’re trying to make just in terms of utilization. So I guess just from language in your filings pre-Practice Fusion I guess you’re reaching about 300,000 physicians and it’s still early days it looks like in terms of adoption. So you have only about 20,000 physicians that are actively engaged right now. So that sort of an engagement percentage of less than 7%. And realizing that that’s going to take some time to kind of ramp up, I am wondering how should we think about where that engagement number can go over time?

David Lester

Management

Well, I can speak to that. First of all our engagement is higher than that but again there is a significant portion of doctors that haven’t engaged that next number one because A, they may not have brands that they’re highly utilizing, that we're promoting coupons for. So again as things start to ramp up on the brand side that’s going to certainly ramp number of users. And the second opportunity is again making sure that all of our entire network has access to the eCoupon and that’s opportunity. I think clearly I would say that between those two we should be reaching closer to 70% to 75% over the next 12 months and down. I think that’s tremendous growth opportunities in our network.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. Your next question comes from the line of Kevin Tracey with Oberon.

Kevin Tracey

Analyst · Oberon.

First there was a note in your 10-K that shows that your two biggest customer biggest customers in both 2013, 2014 revenue when down. In 2014 from 2013, I think the biggest customer from 1.8 million to 1.3 million and the second biggest customer from little over 1 million to just under 800,000. Can you explain I guess why that was the case as I would have expected you to be growing with all of your customers as you continue to add brands?

Dave Harrell

Management

Yes, so the key thing with Lilly though they are fully ramping up with us, is one of their largest brand Cymbalta lost patent. So that had a significant impact, they do have all of their promoter brands in our system and have secured purchase orders for significant growth as we ramp up. Once again in the Cymbalta that represented a very, very sizeable amount of Lilly's programs. Yes, I can’t -- Alcon was the other one -- Alcon was after the first quarter of -- and you recall they wanted to join ROI study on that just to validate the influence on left. So since then I think the quarters have been probably stronger than ever.

Kevin Tracey

Analyst · Oberon.

And then it's my understanding that Practice Fusion caters primarily to primary care physicians who are presumably writing high volume brands as their prescriptions; is because of that -- would you expect greater share of the 35,000 to 40,000 doctors be actively using your coupons or can you talk about that a little bit?

Dave Harrell

Management

Yes that’s good insight and you're right. Some of the networks have higher specialty versus primary care, so again Practice Fusion has had great success in offering their -- primarily their free EHR and then building from there to primary care physicians. I think the mix is more like 50%. So I think our utilization will be higher and again we’re looking forward to once its launched really look at the metrics and work with again like we’re doing with our existing platforms. Their technology, management and sales force to fully ramp up that opportunity.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. And there are currently no further questions in queue. I’ll turn it back over to the presenters for any closing remarks.

Dave Harrell

Management

So again thanks everybody for taking the time. I am very pleased that you got to meet other key members of our management and sales and marketing team. We’re very, very excited about the future; we’re very excited about our ongoing discussions with both our existing and future network partners. And we feel very, very excited about the momentum that we’ve created at the pharmaceutical conference and feel the market has finally caught up to the opportunities that we’ve been evangelizing and we look forward to further scaling up in 2015 and having even greater results. So thank you and anybody that has any direct questions, feel free to reach out to Doug Baker after this.

Operator

Operator

Again thank you for your participation. This concludes today's conference call.