5/16/2022

speaker
Justin
Conference Operator

Welcome to the Payer Therapeutics first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. My name is Justin, and I will be your operator today. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent background noise. This call is being recorded. A replay of the webcast will be available in the investor section of the company's website approximately two hours after completion of the call and will be archived for 30 days. I'll now turn the call over to your host, Mira Murphy, Senior Director of Corporate Communications.

speaker
Mira Murphy
Senior Director of Corporate Communications

Thank you, Justin. Welcome to our first quarter earnings call, and thank you for joining us today. With me today are Corian Pan, our President and CEO, Chris Guifre, our Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Erin Brenner, our Chief Product Development Officer, Yuri Maricich, our Chief Medical Officer, Ronan O'Brien, our General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer, and Julia Strandberg, our Chief Commercial Officer. To start the call, I'll turn it over to Ronan for the Safe Harbor Statement.

speaker
Ronan O'Brien
General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer

Good afternoon. Some of the statements we make in today's call may constitute forward-looking statements. This includes statements concerning our future business, operating results, management's intentions, beliefs, and expectations about future results, events, strategies, operating plans, performance, or financial conditions, all of which are forward-looking statements within the meeting of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 as amended. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements due to a variety of important factors. Additional information regarding these factors is included in our annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. Except as required by law, PEAR assumes no obligation to update or revise these forward-looking statements, even if actual results or future expectations change materially. With that, it's my pleasure to turn the call over to Corey.

speaker
Corian “Corey” Pan
President and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Ronan, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today as we discuss PEAR's first quarter 2022 results. PEAR's goal is to transform healthcare by pioneering software as a mainstream medical treatment. We're making meaningful progress toward achieving that goal. To date, our commercial products have demonstrated value to patients, clinicians, and payers, including robust patient engagement, strong clinical outcomes, enhanced access for underserved and marginalized patients, billing and coding infrastructure for clinicians, and real-world cost savings for payers. The future is bright for PDTs. The present looks good too. We're off to a solid start in 2022. Building on the momentum we saw last year, revenue grew 108% quarter over quarter. We saw growing demand with more than 9,200 total prescriptions this quarter. We moved closer to making PDTs a mainstream medical treatment with HCPCS codes from CMS and integration into Epic's electronic health record. We also broadened our reach to underserved patients with the launch of Reset and Reseto in Spanish. This momentum continues into the second quarter, and one great example is how our pay or value proposition continues to advance with our first 12-month and 24-month data demonstrating durability of clinical outcomes and reduction in healthcare resource utilization. Those are just the headlines. Julia and Yuri will provide details in just a moment. Then Chris will share financial and operating results and update you on the work we've done to simplify how we report our progress. Finally, all of us will wrap up by answering your questions. Julia, please take it away.

speaker
Julia Strandberg
Chief Commercial Officer

Thanks, Corey. I'd like to underscore our commercial momentum by highlighting a few market-moving events. First, Let's talk about our progress expanding demand. We are seeing both more prescriptions from existing customers, as well as new customers coming on board. We see demand growing in the future through our engagement with large addiction clinics, health systems, and states where we're creating access. We believe our progress is fueled by our product optimization for clinicians. This includes streamlining workloads via integration into EMRs like Epic. It also includes clinicians gaining opportunities for reimbursement via newly granted CPT codes. Second, let's talk about our progress with states. Last year, we initiated access for RESET and RESET-O in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio. followed by Massachusetts becoming the first state to cover our PDTs for all Medicaid patients. Already this year, we announced Michigan and Oklahoma to our growing list of states focused on addressing the worsening addiction epidemic by providing patients in recovery access to Reset and Reset Up. All these states provide references for coverage of our PDTs. I'm also pleased to share there is a growing number of states like Delaware, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, and New York with proposed or passed legislation supporting access to PDPs. Third, let's talk about our activities at the federal level. We convened a bipartisan, bicameral lead sponsor who introduced the Access to Prescription Digital Therapeutics Act of 2022 in March. If the bill is enacted, it would have a significant impact on pair because it would create a benefit category for our products by Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial payers. It would also mandate coverage under Medicare. Additionally, the White House released its National Drug Control Strategy, which specifically mentions FDA-cleared digital tools to treat addiction and deliver contingency management. We believe RESET and RESET-O remain the only options fitting these criteria. And finally, we've worked to make PDTs mainstream through our continued efforts to establish simple and consistent product coding. Effective April 1st, CMS has made a HCPCS code available for all three of our commercial products. CMS has stated that only FDA cleared Prescription digital behavioral therapies can be billed using these codes. The new HCPCS code provides a clear pathway to code, cover, and bill PDTs across major payers. Now, there's an option for PDTs to be reimbursed through pharmacy or durable medical equipment benefits. This benefit type optionality increases the number of payers who are able to cover PDTs and ultimately our impact on patients. Now I'll turn the call over to Yuri, who will walk you through the continuum of data for all three of our commercial products.

speaker
Yuri Maricich
Chief Medical Officer

Thank you, Julia. Our PDTs are supported by a growing body of data and evidence, including robust randomized controlled trials, real-world clinical data, and real-world health economic data. The combination of these types of evidence enables PAIR to show value to key stakeholders, and we believe this has accelerated our progress with clinicians and payers. I will now walk through the top-line summary and look forward to taking a deep dive into our data at our Investor Day that we will host on June 6th. Let's start with our product, Reset, for substance use disorder, or SUD. Reset is indicated to treat patients with SUD related to alcohol, stimulants, cannabis, and cocaine. For Reset, we have two successful randomized control trials in more than 1,000 SUD patients. Top line results from the pivotal trial showed that Reset doubled rates of abstinence for SUD patients. We expect to soon publish the first real-world engagement and clinical outcomes data for RESET. We are also proud to share that our first real-world health economic data for RESET has been accepted for publication. We expect to announce results of this six-month data prior to our investor day. Now let's move to our product, RESET-O. RESET-O is indicated for use in combination with medication-assisted therapy to treat opioid use disorder, or OUD. We have three successful randomized controlled trials in more than 450 OUD patients, including two with RESET-O plus buprenorphine and one with RESET-O plus methadone. These studies evaluate outcomes out to 12 months. we published real-world clinical data in two peer-reviewed manuscripts, each with over 3,000 patients who were prescribed Reset-O across the U.S. These analyses found a positive association between product use and clinical outcomes. Furthermore, these results demonstrate that Reset-O is readily and broadly used by patients with OUDs with 85% of patients retained in RESET-O treatment at 12 weeks. We have new 12-month real-world health economic data for RESET-O, building on prior publications of encouraging results at 6 months and 9 months that is being presented today at the Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research Annual Conference, known as ISPOR. This study has also been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Here we followed more than 900 patients with OUD for at least 12 months after initiation of Reset-O. The study showed a durable treatment effect with sustained reductions of inpatient hospitalization and emergency visits, among other findings of importance, and cost savings data, which we look forward to sharing upon publication. Our evidence suggests long-term, durable clinical outcomes for those with SUD and OUD treated with RESET and RESET-O respectively, while also reducing the need for many of the more costly consequences of addiction. We are eager to share cost savings data in the coming weeks, which suggests that payers who are not providing access to RESET and RESET-O are not only denying patients effective treatments, but are also failing to realize cost savings that are meaningful to their business and the communities they serve. Finally, Somrist has been evaluated in more than 3,000 chronic insomnia patients across 29 completed or ongoing studies. Data showed a reduction in insomnia severity symptoms and durable effect on insomnia, depression, and anxiety up to 18 months. A real-world clinical evaluation of more than 7,000 patients was recently published, which demonstrated consistent outcomes when compared to rigorous clinical trials. We will present 24-month real-world health economic data for somers at ISPOR tomorrow. These data show, in a real-world cohort of 252 patients with chronic insomnia and Treatment with Somerist was associated with clinically meaningful improvements in insomnia symptoms, as well as reductions in the use of healthcare services through 24 months. Additional results, including cost savings, will be presented at ISPOR tomorrow, and the full results of the analysis have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Our products work, as demonstrated by RCT data, real-world clinical data, and real-world health economic data. And because PDTs collect data with every treated patient, our data sets continue to grow. Stay tuned for a deeper dive at our Investor Day on June 6th. With that, I will hand it off to Chris.

speaker
Chris Guifre
Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer

Thanks, Yuri. Corey, Julia, and Yuri shared some value-creating highlights from the quarter. Now I'll talk about financial results and operating metrics. Then we'll open the call up for Q&A. We reported $2.7 million of revenue in Q1, up 108% over the prior quarter, and roughly seven times Q1 of last year. This growth was driven by progress in our most important operating metrics. One, total prescriptions. Two, fulfillment rates. three, payment rate, and four, average selling price, or ASD. Because of the importance of these four operating metrics, we now will provide guidance and quarterly updates on all four of them going forward. You can see the definitions for these metrics in our earnings release and in the MD&A section of our 10-Q, which will be filed tonight. Now let's walk through each of the four metrics. First, total prescriptions. We have more than 9,200 total prescriptions in Q1 in line with our expectations. Because of the solid start to the year, we feel good about the rest of 2022. Second, fulfillment rate. In Q1, we had a 57% fulfillment rate also in line with our expectations. That fulfillment rate is another reason to feel good about the rest of 2022. Third, payment rate. We received payment for 50% of fulfilled prescriptions in Q1. We are adding payment rate as an operating metric for which we provide guidance and quarterly updates because of its importance to forecasting our commercial progress. We previously used covered lives as a proxy metric for payment rate. Payment rate, however, is the actual metric, and it reflects the rate at which we convert fulfilled prescriptions into paid prescriptions. We forecast payment rate for fulfilled prescriptions for this year to be in a range of 50 to 65%. Finally, ASP. Our ASP in Q1 was $1,353. ASP is another important operating metric for which we will provide guidance and quarterly updates going forward. We forecast full year ASP per paid prescription to be in a range of $1,150 to $1,350. We see these four operating metrics as useful in understanding our commercial model and in estimating future product revenue growth. So I'll spend a minute making sure you understand how they relate to one another. First, total prescriptions times fulfillment rate equals fulfilled prescriptions. Again, total prescriptions times fulfillment rate equals fulfilled prescriptions. Second, fulfilled prescriptions times payment rate equals paid prescriptions. Let me say that one again too. Fulfilled prescriptions times payment rate equals paid prescriptions. And third, paid prescriptions Times ASP is an indicator of potential total product revenue, which of course is not the same as GAAP net revenue, but which we think should help those of you who are trying to model our product revenue growth. Further financial results to note, on March 31st, we had $137.8 million of cash cash equivalents and short-term investments on the balance sheet. That will take us well into 2023. Our operating expenses were $37.5 million in the first quarter, which is higher than expected, primarily due to investments to build infrastructure for the PDT category and stock compensation charges associated with annual equity grants. We expect a small decline in quarterly expenses for the remaining three quarters of this year. With that, Justin, let's open the call for questions.

speaker
Justin
Conference Operator

And thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you'll need to press star 1 on your telephone. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. Please stand by. We compile the Q&A roster. And once again, that is star 1 if you have a question. And our first question comes from Michael Cherney from Bank of America. Your line is now open.

speaker
Michael Cherney
Analyst, Bank of America

Good afternoon, and thank you for the detail so far. Maybe I don't know if this is a question for Corey or anyone else who wants to jump in, but I would love to know a little bit more as we learn more about your business and the role you're playing in PDTs on how you think about the evolution of marketing spend. And in terms of the channels, what have been the most successful opportunities that you've had? Where do you continue to focus your spend? Are you working with the likes of some of the physician organizations like Doximity, Medscape, et cetera? Let's just know a little bit more about where you're seeing the best returns as you continue to work on increasing both the fulfillment and payment rate.

speaker
Corian “Corey” Pan
President and Chief Executive Officer

Michael, thank you so much for your question. We appreciate you dialing in. As we think about the business, Really, we see a world where software is a mainstream medical treatment and is ultimately applied across most of these conditions. What we are working to build at PAIR is really a company which has both the deepest pipeline of PDTs and all of those PDTs roll up to the same infrastructure. Again, we use something called PAIR Create to build our PDTs and PAIR Connect to house them all in the same infrastructure. As we think about the economies of scale inherent in that infrastructure, we believe that there's a tremendous opportunity for cross prescribing. And what I mean by that is we see what are quite high rates of clinician engagement with our back end clinician dashboard. Those are engagement rates before the CCT codes, which we mentioned today, came online. And we see opportunities really where clinicians are able to cross detail our PDTs to many if not all of the patients that they might see. And so as we previously articulated, our next stop from a pipeline and portfolio perspective is the build out of all things mental and behavioral health. That includes assets like major depression as well as alcohol use disorder. And to that end, we see the ability to continue to reduce what is marketing spend, and ultimately marketing spend per unit patient, really as we're able to develop selling efficiencies across multiple products.

speaker
Michael Cherney
Analyst, Bank of America

Got it. Helpful. And then I guess on the real-world evidence data, clearly a couple important milestones as you present that data. Who is looking for the data most, I guess? How quickly does this get communicated through to your payer partners, to your state partners, in terms of how they think about the approach to further supporting your expansion?

speaker
Corian “Corey” Pan
President and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Mike, for that question. Also, certainly we view our real-world health economic data as really a fundamental pillar of the value that we're able to create for payers. And we've seen both commercial payers as well as state payers be highly receptive to that data. We saw that receptivity really come through as we released our first data sets for Reset-O, which were our Reset-O six-month data. And we've really seen a continued audience for the nine-month data, and we believe that 12 months is an important milestone within this space. So that's a very long-winded way of saying one of our fundamental advantages is our data collection. We will continue to collect data per unit commercial patient-treated, and that is data at the patient-reported outcome level, it's data at the clinician-reported outcome level, and it's data that rolls up to claims and health economic outcomes really will continue to push this data and publish this data in order to help us bring on additional covered lives and open up market access for additional patients.

speaker
Michael Cherney
Analyst, Bank of America

Awesome. Thank you so much.

speaker
Justin
Conference Operator

Thanks, Mike. And thank you. And our next question comes from Charles Reeve from Cowan. Your line is now open.

speaker
Charles Reeve
Analyst, Cowen

Great. Hey, thanks for taking the questions. I wanted to talk about, obviously, the agreement you have with Michigan and Oklahoma, you know, that you signed. You know, you talked about last quarter as well. I think Massachusetts is the only one where you, from a state Medicaid perspective, is on the formula and is covered. Can you talk about the other states, you know, where you're at in terms of getting, you know, full coverage? Because the way I understand it right now with these states, they kind of buy bulk licenses and make it available to physicians. I just want to understand, you know, how that process works for patients to get access to the prescriptions in those states and maybe talk about sort of the the uptake that you're seeing as a difference when you kind of get full coverage in Massachusetts versus the models that you're having so far in these other states? Thanks.

speaker
Corian “Corey” Pan
President and Chief Executive Officer

Charles, thanks for the question. And as you rightly point out, we have a number of different arrangements with different states, including Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Massachusetts. The majority of those arrangements provide access to a subset of patients in a given state. We're very excited about the steps forward that the state of Massachusetts has taken. And Massachusetts is, in fact, the first state where all Medicaid patients in the state have access to RESET and RESET-O. I think agnostic of the type of access agreement It is our goal to then pull through in these given access agreements. And what that means is really very much something that resembles an enterprise software sale where we're educating large health systems and large groups of providers in order to help them to understand the benefits of prescribing our PDTs, but also to understand the mechanics of prescribing our PDTs. And I think as you rightfully point out, as we move forward, we'll continue to operate under a number of these different types of access agreements. And that's why we've really tried to simplify the modeling by focusing on payment rate here, which is something that we believe is very material both to our business as well as to revenue generation going forward.

speaker
Charles Reeve
Analyst, Cowen

Yeah, I appreciate that, Corey, and certainly, you know, the guidance you gave and the reiteration, you know, is all positive. Just I guess what I'm trying to get at is, like, how close are we with these other states, you know, to move from subsets to give, you know, broad coverage? You know, are they seeing, you know, I would imagine they're seeing the value, you know, in their patient population and their costs, namely, right, and the outcomes, given what Yuri talked about in terms of, you know, what you're already seeing in the real-world evidence studies, you know, is that a focus for you guys to push to get, you know, more broader access the way Massachusetts has? And I guess the question is, do you see a material difference in when you have broad access versus the way the other states are doing? Because if not, then maybe it doesn't really matter, I guess, is my point.

speaker
Corian “Corey” Pan
President and Chief Executive Officer

And Charles, I think it's probably a little bit beyond the scope of what I can speak to today to speculate on the positions of individual states or individual payers in determining their access status. I think that said, it's very fair to think about this as a story which is very deeply based in real-world clinical data. And as you've seen us continue to do quarter over quarter, As I mentioned, each patient who utilizes the products in the real world adds to our dossier of data, allows us to look at particularly efficacious and effective subsets of patients, and ultimately continue to demonstrate our health economic value to payers. So I think the inference that you made is an apt one. where in many of these arrangements we have the opportunity to demonstrate not just to a particular state that we're able to bend the cost curve and generate real-world health economic outcomes, but those projects become demonstration projects, which really help us to then radiate more broadly into additional states.

speaker
Charles Reeve
Analyst, Cowen

That's helpful. And maybe just one follow-up for Chris. You said that obviously we take fulfillment rate times payment rate times ASP, and that gives you a good approximation of net revenue. What would be the delta of, what could be different that would affect net revenue from just following that formula?

speaker
Chris Guifre
Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer

Sure. So, if I could, just one sort of bit of setup. When you think about multiplying those four metrics, each of them is an important part Together, they get you an estimate of revenue. And as you point out, there is a difference between estimating forward-looking revenue and calculating revenue looking back under GAAP. The biggest drivers, of course, are number one, our revenue recognition policy under ASC 606 requires us to defer some of the revenue that we earn in any quarter. And then number two, There are gross-to-net adjustments, which I won't discuss here because we don't provide non-GAAP financial measures, but that is the other main category of delta between the number you would get by multiplying the four of those things together and what you see us actually report as GAAP net revenue.

speaker
Charles Reeve
Analyst, Cowen

Great. That's helpful. Appreciate that.

speaker
Justin
Conference Operator

Thanks, Charles. And thank you. And our next question comes from Nina Petrito-Garg from Citi. Your line is now open.

speaker
Nina Petrito-Garg
Analyst, Citi

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the kind of demand metrics during the quarter and what you think really drove the strength to get to 9,200 scripts. Were there any sort of one-time events or anything like that that we should be aware of as we think about kind of the cadence of scripts moving forward through the rest of the year. Thanks.

speaker
Corian “Corey” Pan
President and Chief Executive Officer

Nina, thank you for your question. And I'd like to turn it over to Julia Strandberg, our Chief Commercial Officer, to speak just a little bit more about volume and demand generation.

speaker
Julia Strandberg
Chief Commercial Officer

Thanks, Corey. So as I mentioned, our demand efforts are certainly maturing. We are seeing expansion in two ways. So more scripts from existing customers with large potentials and as well as bringing new customers on board. And when we think about our strong integration and our scale through the year, our focus is on large addiction health clinics that span interstate as well as multiple states. Second is engaging in large health systems where there are multiple states, multiple locations, and multiple disease states within those large systems. And then third is deeply engaging in states where we've already created access. And as we spoke earlier, both with MassHealth and SoonerCare in Oklahoma. So we continue to make progress, and largely that progress is fueled and that growth is fueled in demand by simplifying or optimizing our integration and ease of use with our clinicians. So that is integration into EMRs like Epic. It is current state and future states. as clinicians have opportunities to be reimbursed through CPT codes. And then, of course, that is further emphasized as we continue to layer on a growing body of evidence and data to suggest value for PDTs. So, garnering access in key locations, continuing to grow within current customers, expand to new customers, continue to create optimization pathways for prescribing, layering on data and evidence to support further prescribing behaviors.

speaker
Nina Petrito-Garg
Analyst, Citi

Got it. That's helpful. Thank you.

speaker
Justin
Conference Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from Eric Percher, Nephron Research. Your line is now open.

speaker
Eric Percher
Analyst, Nephron Research

Thank you. A question on the operating metrics, the new metric of payment rate now at 50%. Do you expect that payment rate increases over the course of the year given guidance simply with more coverage? And then with ASP, The guidance suggests it comes down over the year. Is that also related to the type of coverage? You just mentioned addiction versus health system, state, and commercial. What are the dynamics underneath those two?

speaker
Corian “Corey” Pan
President and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Eric, for the question. Chris, would you be willing to speak to that one? Sure, thanks.

speaker
Chris Guifre
Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer

So, Eric, I'm going to take ASP second and try and knock off... your question about payment rate first. But before I do that, since this is new to everyone, if you'll indulge me, I just want to do some multiplication just to make sure that everyone's got how this works. So assume we have 100 total prescriptions and a 50% fulfillment rate. That means we have 50 fulfilled prescriptions. Then we have a 50% payment rate. That means we have 25 paid prescriptions. It is the paid prescriptions that you would multiply by AST to make that rough estimate of total product revenue looking forward. So just to make sure that that sort of foundation is set, let's talk about payment rate. Payment rate is the percentage of billed prescriptions that are paid. So the way that we can drive payment rate up to the middle or hopefully the high end of the range that we forecast is in a number of areas. Number one, we can continue to drive progress with traditional payers in the way that we've been doing since we took over the launch of these products. And as you heard, I think both Corey and Julia mentioned, we do that through a number of mechanisms, the largest of which we tried to highlight on this call. which is this remarkable body of evidence we have with RCT data plus real-world clinical data plus real-world health economic data. And that real-world health economic data we have found to be quite powerful. But in addition to driving payment rate up with traditional third-party payers, we also have had some success with these access agreements that you've heard us talk about. That is a situation in which a state typically, it can be a commercial organization too, but for the most part we've seen it with states, prepay for a certain number of scripts. They buy scripts from us and then they allow doctors in their state to provide those scripts to patients. Obviously the payment rate there is quite good because of the fact that the scripts are prepaid. So I want to make sure the payment rate explanation makes sense before I jump to ASP.

speaker
Eric Percher
Analyst, Nephron Research

I'm with you. Thank you.

speaker
Chris Guifre
Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer

Okay. So let's talk about ASP. ASP truly is a function of leverage. When we need to give large discounts and rebates, it drives ASP down. And when we don't need to do that, it drives ASP up. As we do larger and larger deals, to achieve our revenue forecast, we expect ASP to go down slightly, as you know. That's why you'll see that our current ASP for Q1 is at the high end of the range that we forecasted for this year. Put another way, I think it would be a good thing if our ASP goes down a bit over the course of the year, because that would be consistent with the size deals we think we need to hit our 22 million in guidance. Even though we want bigger deals that have the potential to drive down ASP, we're focused on continuing to generate additional real-world health economic data as well as enhancing our products. Both of those things should help us to enhance pricing power, which of course would help push up ASP. To reiterate, Our guidance is $1,150 to $1,350 for ASP this year, which means we expect to see ASP impacted positively by additional data and product features and negatively by doing commercial deals of increasing sales. Does that help?

speaker
Eric Percher
Analyst, Nephron Research

Yeah, I appreciate the math too, Lich. One follow-up, which is, We now have payment rate. Are you withdrawing covered lives, or are you saying you'll give it annually but not quarterly?

speaker
Chris Guifre
Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer

You want me to take that, Corey? Sure thing. So we are withdrawing covered lives. Covered lives is a proxy metric for payment rate. Payment rate is the actual metric. So we'll be reporting the actual metric going forward as opposed to the proxy metric because the actual metric is what really matters as we begin to unlock the true revenue potential of pair. Since you asked, though, I'll share what I can about covered lives as we know it today. Managed Markets Insight and Technology, or MMIT, reported at the Assembia conference last week that payer has approximately 80 million covered lives. We thought that number sounded high, and we let MMIT know that. Since we are no longer reporting on the proxy metric, we have not attempted to confirm MMIT's number. I think it's important to note that calculating covered lives is a tricky business. We know of covered lives under contracts when we sign with payers. But we don't typically know of covered lives when payers put us on formulary without having us sign a contract. Moreover, the whole thing just got more complicated now that we don't just have pharmacy covered lives and we're adding DME covered lives. We will continue to put out press releases announcing coverage decisions when we are permitted to do so. But I think you know, Eric, that many payers prohibit companies from disclosing coverage decisions So we can't promise you that you'll learn of every coverage decision we land. I guess maybe to try and sum all that up, we believe covered lives served us well, as we were going from zero covered lives to tens of millions of covered lives. But we're not going to continue to attempt to provide accurate reports on the proxy metric. Instead, we've started to report on the actual metric, which is payment rate, And that is a very important metric for our future revenue growth. I think maybe the last thing I'd say is it is fair to say that we are satisfied with the progress we're making on payment rates, but we understand that we will need to get that payment rate up significantly over time if we're going to unlock payers' full revenue potential.

speaker
Eric Percher
Analyst, Nephron Research

And so that was where I was going to go. So what is your feel for where payment rate should be given mature products, understanding you'll always be introducing additional products?

speaker
Chris Guifre
Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer

Eric, I think it's a great question, but I think the way I'd like to answer it may be just a smidge dissatisfying to you because I don't want to speculate. I think we're confident in putting out our guidance for this year. of 50 to 65%, and you saw that we came in at the bottom of that range this quarter. We do intend to push the number up over the course of the year, and we believe we'll be able to do that. The only way I could accurately answer your question about where it lands when we mature is to say that we certainly hope and expect it will be north of the range that we provided for 2022, because we won't get all the way there in this calendar year.

speaker
Eric Percher
Analyst, Nephron Research

All right. Thank you for the detail.

speaker
Justin
Conference Operator

My pleasure. Thanks, Eric. And thank you. And our next question comes from Key Naki from Chardon. Your line is now open.

speaker
Key Naki
Analyst, Chardon

Yeah, thanks, Kay, Chardon. I know it's a small number, but we did see cost of sales decline slightly sequentially on much higher scripts. So I know there's some rewards. what we set out, so help us kind of put all this into perspective to model this out forward.

speaker
Corian “Corey” Pan
President and Chief Executive Officer

Steve, thanks for the question. Chris, would you mind taking that one?

speaker
Chris Guifre
Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer

Sure thing. Okay. I think you're right that it's a small number. We did have modest improvements, but there's nothing notable enough to highlight for you on this call. I think you're going to see a little bit of that bounce up and down over time because we're still relatively early in our launches and in the maturation of these products and this market segment. But I don't have anything that I can point to you to say this is an important driver of that slight improvement.

speaker
Key Naki
Analyst, Chardon

Okay. And then specifically for OPEX going forward, you know, you just posted 13 million in R&D. How do we think about that specific one item going forward? I'm sorry, I didn't quite hear that. I have to admit, would you mind just saying it again, please? R&D expense within OpEx, how do we think about that going forward?

speaker
Chris Guifre
Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer

Sure. I'm sorry, I didn't understand the question initially. So we do not, as you know, provide overall expense guidance, and we therefore don't provide it by segment. But what I think we have said previously in public And what I'd be happy to say in this public setting is that while we have significant aspirations to use pair create to drive additional product candidates through the development process, through the regulatory process and onto the market, we're also being careful stewards of our cash in what are, let's call it suboptimal conditions to raise money right now. So I think what you should expect to see us do is continue to move the pipeline forward, but in a very cautious way for now, because we think that managing cash burn in this environment is an important endeavor, and we're trying to balance that with our fervor for getting more of our candidates across the goal line with FDA.

speaker
Key Naki
Analyst, Chardon

Okay, great. And then finally, On the telehealth side, you've announced some recent activity there. I'm just wondering, on the margin, how much is this going to help in terms of adding to prescriptions?

speaker
Corian “Corey” Pan
President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, I think this is a place where we probably won't be able to provide any sort of firm guidance That said, I think one of the unique attributes of prescription digital therapeutics is that they're uniquely suited for both face-to-face, i.e., brick-and-mortar encounters, as well as telemedicine encounters. And I think if there's one thing that the COVID pandemic showed us, it's that telemedicine does not address the supply chain issues inherent in our healthcare system. And so, whereas many patients are currently able to see a telemedicine visit, once a month, once a quarter. PDTs really nicely fit in the gaps between those telemedicine visits and give them both remote and asynchronous care as opposed to telemedicine, which is remote and synchronous. So that's a sort of long-winded way of saying that we won't be able to project exactly what sort of contributions these different remote access forms may provide. But we do believe that there is a tremendous opportunity for telemedicine and PDTs to go hand in hand.

speaker
Key Naki
Analyst, Chardon

Okay, thanks.

speaker
Justin
Conference Operator

Thank you for your question. And thank you. And our next question comes from Judith Farmer from Credit Suisse. Your line is now open.

speaker
Judith Farmer
Analyst, Credit Suisse

Yeah. Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Maybe just first to follow up on the telehealth and wrapping in the Spanish language versions of RESET and RESET-O. Are there any early learnings on what the patient and prescriber profiles look like kind of in those channels? Does it make you think any differently about how docs and patients may utilize the services?

speaker
Corian “Corey” Pan
President and Chief Executive Officer

Judah, thank you for the question. I think preliminarily we're not seeing what I would characterize as fundamental differences between the Spanish language utilization and the English utilization. I think what we are seeing is a tremendous hunger both on the part of providers as well as payers to be able to operate toward health equity and inclusion criteria. And really that is one of the principal strengths of prescription digital therapeutics is to be able to extend care across socioeconomic boundaries, across racial boundaries, across ethnic boundaries, and across geographic boundaries. And we are seeing that value proposition resonate strongly with payers as this is a high point on the payer and provider agenda, and we're able to frankly be able to collect data to support that value proposition.

speaker
Judith Farmer
Analyst, Credit Suisse

Okay, that's really helpful. And then apologies if I missed this, but just as we look toward 12-month data for Reseto and 24-month data for SOMRIS, is there any color you can provide on conversations with payers and how they're thinking about this longer-duration data that is coming out? Are there kind of benchmarks for them that they'd like to see in terms of durability of effect for your products, or is it just kind of, you know, more is better and eventually we'll get to that tipping point.

speaker
Corian “Corey” Pan
President and Chief Executive Officer

Judah, thank you for the question, and we certainly believe in the power of the real-world health economic data. I'd love to tag in Yuri, our chief medical officer, who can speak to this a bit further.

speaker
Yuri Maricich
Chief Medical Officer

Yeah, thanks, Corey, and thanks for the question. I mean, I think what we're seeing from our discussions with payers is that the the sooner a value or cost savings is realized, that's important, but they want to also see that durability, right? And so we had previously published the six-month data for Reset O. We added on the nine-month data. But then the question is, does this persist? And for many payers, the time horizon is, is of a couple to maybe a little bit more years. And so this is where the 12-month data and now the 24-month data really, I think, fit in nicely. So they see we get our return from a health economic perspective, particularly around reduced inpatient and reduced ER visits very quickly based on what we've already published with the six and nine months, but then that that data continues to be durable and persists at the type of time horizons that they're typically looking at. And so then I think what's really nice as we continue to do this forward is to do this not only on a national data, but then to provide this for their specific patient populations and allow them to see how they are doing relative to their peers. Got it.

speaker
Judith Farmer
Analyst, Credit Suisse

Thank you.

speaker
Corian “Corey” Pan
President and Chief Executive Officer

And, Judah, if I can maybe just very briefly add on to Yuri's comments and tease just a brief trailer, we'll be speaking about this data as well as some of our other real-world and health economic data at our June 6th Investor Day, and we'll be releasing more information on that event.

speaker
Justin
Conference Operator

Great. Thanks, Bruce. Thanks, Judah. Thank you. And our next question comes from Marie Thibault. from BTIG. Your line is now open.

speaker
Marie Thibault
Analyst, BTIG

Hi, good evening, and congrats on a strong Q1. Thanks for sending me in. I've had some phone disconnection issues. Wanted to start here with sort of a basic question and see if I could get any detail kind of on run rate throughout the quarter or just any trends you saw throughout Q1. Certainly your guidance looks reasonable to us, but would love to hear kind of where you exited the quarter in terms of prescription volumes or any ramping trends throughout the quarter.

speaker
Chris Guifre
Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer

Marie, I always love it when you keep me on my toes with your questions. And I hate to disappoint, but I think what we'd like to do is report on the very strong quarter we had, and I appreciate you acknowledging that. Provide the guidance that we provided for the rest of the year. And I think you can read into the guidance what you want to read into it, but we're confident in the guidance or we would not have put it out there. But providing any intra-quarter or end-of-quarter information Trending guidance, I think, is beyond the scope of what I'm prepared to do today.

speaker
Marie Thibault
Analyst, BTIG

Okay, fair enough, Chris. I had to try. I will ask a question here on the pipeline. I wanted to hear if there were any sort of brief updates in terms of development milestones on any of the pipeline products, things like AUD, MDD, the SoftBank collaboration, the pain candidate. Certainly a lot going on there, so if there's one or two highlights you could hit on for us. Thank you.

speaker
Corian “Corey” Pan
President and Chief Executive Officer

Marie, thanks for the question, and I'd love to again tag in Yuri.

speaker
Yuri Maricich
Chief Medical Officer

Yeah, thanks so much, Corey. So on our pipeline, which as Corey highlighted earlier is driven by PairCreate, I think one thing just to draw people's attention to was that in Q1 we were pleased to have received the Safer Technologies Program or the STEP designation from the FDA for our product candidate Pair010, which is designed for the treatment of acute and chronic pain. And what is exciting about that is that the candidate sits within the neurology category of our pipeline and we believe is well-suited for treatment with the PDT because there's currently more than 50 million patients that are left to choose between pain and treatment by opioids. Also, as you mentioned, in March we executed a services agreement with SoftBank Corp to develop a digital therapeutic for the treatment of sleep-wake disorders. for the Japanese market as a part of our strategy to commercialize digital therapeutics in international markets. And as you know, in late 2021, we announced the FDA breakthrough designation for alcohol use disorder and that we acquired those two clinically validated assets targeting major depressive disorder for the development of our own PDT candidate there. At this time, we're not able to share timelines at the point for these three product candidates. But I do just want to highlight, and Chris referenced this also earlier, that we really believe that these assets, when developed on our PeerCreate platform, begets development scale. And then as Corey talked about around the use of the dashboard, that the commercial delivery of these assets via our PeerConnect platform generates commercial scale. So really appreciate the question. We're looking forward to sharing more as we progress.

speaker
Marie Thibault
Analyst, BTIG

Very good. Thanks so much.

speaker
Justin
Conference Operator

Thanks, Marie. Thank you. And I am showing no further questions. I would now like to turn the call back over to Dr. McCann for closing remarks.

speaker
Corian “Corey” Pan
President and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, everyone, for the questions, and thank you, Justin. Today we highlighted our commercial launches as well as the growing evidence base demonstrating the value of our commercial products. In the first quarter, we drew script volume, fulfillment rate, payment rate, and ASPs. Correspondingly, we also significantly grew our revenue. In parallel, we continued to march toward making PDTs mainstream medicine by building the critical discovery, development, and commercial infrastructure we call PairCreate and PairConnect. We look forward to hosting our first Virtual Investor Day on June 6th at 10 a.m. Eastern Time. We will provide more details about the event in the coming days. Thanks for your time. As always, please reach out to Mira Murphy, our head of corporate communications, if you have any questions.

speaker
Justin
Conference Operator

That concludes today's call. Thank you for joining.

Disclaimer

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