electroCore, Inc. (NASDAQ:ECOR) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Nick Sherwood: Understandable. Then another question, what sort of response have you seen with your partnership with the NFL for the season, the concussion headache pain study?

Dan Goldberger: They won’t tell us a damn thing.

Nick Sherwood: Okay. Sorry to hear that.

Dan Goldberger: I keep hoping to get something to plug into my fantasy football team and they won’t tell me.

Nick Sherwood: Yes. Yes. They won’t tell you if Josh Downs using it to sort anything [ph]. All right, well, those are all my questions. I’ll get back in the queue.

Dan Goldberger: Thank you, Nick.

Nick Sherwood: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Walter Schenker with MAZ Partners. Please proceed with your question.

Walter Schenker: Hi, Dan.

Dan Goldberger: Hi, Walter. How are you today?

Walter Schenker: Is there a point I guess eventually is the answer. Where in the VA system, you have enough penetration that somebody higher up near the top says, if it’s good for 10%, 15%, 20%, 25% of hospitals, I may be near champion. We really ought to roll this out across the whole system if we’re having very good results, or you expect it’s just going to be adding hospitals every quarter for the rest of our lives till we get through the whole system?

Dan Goldberger: So that’s a very good question. I’d love to believe that there is a higher level policy making entity within the VA system. It hadn’t been my experience in other businesses, but we can certainly hope. The VA hospital administration is divided up into, I believe it’s 17 or 18 VISNs [ph], and it is more likely that there could be a VISN level, so in other words, a regional level policy decision. In parallel, the VA Hospital administration has something called a headache center of excellence in HCOA [ph], which is at a national level. And they have written gammaCore into their neuromodulation headache policy. But I don’t know exactly what it says, and I’d love to know more, but they’re keeping that close to their chest.

Walter Schenker: Okay. And on a related – vaguely related question, as you move forward, TAC-STIM and DoD, you now are in a few, okay. I’m just trying to get some senses to, I can sort of look at the metric on VA and say our penetration is X. On DoD, for high performance type applications, you still are in just a very, very small percentage of the – as opposed to all soldiers or everyone in the military in the high performance area, you are still in just a few select locations?

Dan Goldberger: Exactly right. We are in pilot deployment with a few air force special units and a few army special forces units. And then we’ve deployed one or two demonstration devices in other places. The total addressable market is roughly 3 million active duty personnel within the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Coast Guard. But then beyond that, we think there’s going to be civilian crossover to first responders to elite athletes. So the total addressable market, if you start to think about it in the context of civilian crossover or NATO allies, the total number keeps getting bigger and bigger. The total opportunity, rather, gets bigger and bigger.

Walter Schenker: Okay. And lastly, I think we discussed this lightly once before. In the VA hospital, you had mentioned before we’re opening up in some of these hospitals for more departments. Do you have the sense anecdotally that people are using it outside of headache, as they’re seeing just general anxiety, stress, sleeping, a lot of other benefits that probably are accruing to the people who are using it?