Lucid Diagnostics Inc.

financial results conference call. At this time, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. I would now like to turn our I call over to your host, Michael Parks, Vice President, Investor Relations. Mr. Parks, you may begin, sir.

Thank you, Paul. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for participating in today's fourth quarter 2020 business update call. Fourth quarter 2020 business update call. The press release announcing our business update for the company and financial results for the year ended December 31st, 2022. is available on the Lucid website. Please take a moment to read the disclaimer about forward-looking statements in the press release. The business update, press release, and this conference call both include forward-looking statements, and these forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from statements made. Factors that could cause actual results to differ are described in the disclaimer and in our filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. For elicit and description of these and other important risks and uncertainties that may affect future operations, see Part 1, Item 1A, entitled Risk Factors and Lucid's Most Recent Annual Report on Form Q10, filed with the SEC, and subsequent updates filed with quarterly reports on Form Q10Q and any subsequent Form 8K filings. Except as required by law, LUCID disclaims any intentions or obligations to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect changes in expectations or in events, conditions, or circumstances on which the expectations may be based, or that may affect the likelihood that actual results will differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements. I would like now to turn the call over to Dr. Lishan Akhlob, Chairman and CEO of LUCID Diagnostics. Dr. Akhlob?

Thank you, Mike, and thank you, everybody, for joining us this morning. I look forward to giving you a positive update on our activities for the past quarter and recent weeks. As those of you who have been with us for a while have noticed, we've changed the timing to hopefully better serve our shareholders to have our quarterly calls in the morning prior to the open and our press releases the evening prior. So I'll start with some recent highlights before doing a bit of background and then diving further into details. We're really excited about the steady significant strides we've made over the past quarter. As you'll see, the e-cigar test volume growth has remained strong, and we've seen some nice acceleration, particularly in this quarter, and a rapidly increasing satellite lucid test interactivity that is now driving nearly one-third of our testing volumes. We're very excited to report that we've secured an in-network e-cigar contract with the largest secondary PPO, multi-plan, and this provides access to e-cigar to approximately 60 million consumers that participate in their networks. Our commercial payer engagement and claims history is accelerating. In-network e-cigar contracts are now averaging over $2,000 per test, and all of the PPO contracts we've secured are priced at or above the Medicare rate. I'll dive into this a little bit further later, but we've launched a really important initiative for us. We're calling it our Direct Contract and Strategic Initiative, and the goal here is to engage directly with large ASO or administrative services-only self-insured employers, unions, and other such entities. As we reported in the press release, we had a successful launch of our high-volume Check Your Food Tube events. And we have a robust near-term pipeline of additional events coming up in the next month or two. Our laboratory, we're very proud to say, handled the unexpected record peak volumes from these events. And this reflects a lot of effort we've made in enhancing our operational efficiencies. We received FDA clearance to market a non-sterile version of ESA check. This increases MAR margins and mitigates potential supply chain issues associated with sterilization. We're making good progress collecting clinical utility data, which is a key driver of future in-network commercial payer contracting. And as we'll describe in more detail, we secured financing of just under $25 million, which extends our cash runway well into 2024.