In order to get coverage, you need to have extensive data. And if you remember back for us to get coverage, we had to publish large studies and we had to publish five years of clinical data and Aetna was the first one to go. Remember that was back in 2018. I believe that was four years after our FDA approval. So if getting FDA approval does not bring you home, that allows you to enter the reimbursement phase of your business development. So long way to go.
Operator: Thank you. And I show our next question comes from the line of Chris Pasquale from Nephron Research. Please go ahead.
Chris Pasquale: Hi. Thanks guys. Two questions. One, Tim, you talked about new services to improve the patient experience and proactively reaching out to patients. Can you talk a bit more about what you’re doing there and what problem you’re really trying to solve?
Tim Herbert: Oh, absolutely. So we have a lot of patients that come from the Advisor Care program and have challenges getting appointments with the doctor because we either can’t work through the phone or the email. We highlighted in the script that with our electronic scheduling, we’re actually seeing a 30% improvement in the pilot centers. That means there’s a significant number of patients that are just getting hung up in that process. And so we’re doing things such as a more organized emailing program to reengage them and help them through the process and get them back in the game and get them back connected to a healthcare provider that can take care of them. So that’s just one example, but we have a significant number of other patients in our system over the many years that we’ve been working that continue to show interest in Inspire and now we’re going to be proactively reaching out to them and really kind of just giving people a better chance to work through the process because the first couple years as effective as that direct to consumer has been, we all know the challenges of that conversion and our tools are getting much better to be able to help more patients.
So really that whole team is really focused on just improving those different factors and patient communication and electronic scheduling are the two leading programs.
Chris Pasquale: That makes sense. Thanks. And I’m just curious, what was behind the decision to go direct in Japan and whether you expect that’s going to have a, a noticeable impact on implant activity there?
Tim Herbert: Yeah, absolutely. No, we love the partner that we have. They’re great, great people. But it’s a implanted product and so if you think about every company that’s successful in the United States and in Europe, they really have direct representation because you need to focus on the customer base, focus on those positions to maintain their commitment and drive utilization. And it’s very difficult for a distributor that will have 10 products, 12 products in their bag to be able to sell, to be able to provide the same level of commitment to the patients. And being there for a couple years, we saw the direction that that was heading and we worked appropriately with our partner there and we agreed the right thing to do was for us to just hire a direct force and that’s what we have done.
We have a country manager. We have the first sales rep who were in Minneapolis last week as part of inspire University, how every quarter we go through and train all the new reps together. And it’s great for them to come and be part of the new US sales force as well. We just authorized a new trainer today. We also have marketing team. We opened up the website and so we’re showing great promise and I think you’re going to see a little bit of a response when we start talking about Japan performance going forward.
Operator: Thank you. And I show our next question comes from the line of Matthew Mishan from KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
