Tim Herbert: Perfect. Thanks, Rich. I’m going to let, Rick, handle the second question there on profitability. But let me address the prior authorization and how do we work back with our centers to recapture those patients? And it’s a combination of working the field team, getting in with the centers to make sure that they’re taking care of the patients, who have a right to work with their healthcare provider to be able to be provided therapy if they qualify. So the field team is working directly with the sites to make sure that we have the proper team in place of the site, make sure the patient navigators and the healthcare providers are tracking those patients to make sure that they get the information necessary to get the prior authorizations put together.
Our internal prior authorization team is supportive of these centers to make sure we get timely, accurate submissions in. So we will capture a lot of these patients. Now the question that you ask is really about when. And so the key is going to be, we know the time from insurance approval to implant is variable, but it tends to run a little longer because of, again, our capacity with ENTs, which we’re working to improve and train additional ENTs, get optimization in the procedures, as well as open new centers. But we’re going to work hard to make sure every patient has an opportunity. It’s going to be challenging for us to capture all of those patients in the fourth quarter. I think we will see some of those patients even move in where already scheduled in cases, not only later in the quarter, but we are scheduling cases in Q1 today already.
So I think it’s a combination of the two. But the focus is, we’re committed to the patients, we’re committed to giving each of those patients the best opportunity.
Rick Buchholz: Yeah, I’ll follow on with what Tim said, Rich. I mean, we’re going to continue to run our playbook. We know profitability is important. We continue to make investments in our business, because we really want to focus on long-term top-line revenue growth with our strong gross margins. We know profitability will follow. We’ve made some good strides year-over-year, quarter-over-quarter. Our net loss in the third quarter was $8.5 million compared to $16.8 million a year ago. We continue to be positive EBITDA. We were about breakeven on that metric in the first quarter, but we’ve continued to improve that, improving our leverage. In the third quarter, our adjusted EBITDA was $6.6 million, and that compares to a $2.4 million loss in the third quarter of last year.
So we are making those investments, yet we are still showing leverage and improving leverage, and we know it’s going to be important. And we’ll give more clarity on that as we get closer to 2024 or into 2024 when we provide our guidance around next year.
Tim Herbert: Thank you, Rich.
Operator: Thank you. And I show our next question comes from the line of Adam Maeder from Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.
Adam Maeder: Hi, Tim. Hi, Rick. Good evening. Thank you for taking the questions. I’ll keep it to one. I just wanted to follow-up on PREDICTOR. You presented the first dataset, I think, a month or two ago. Have you started to dialogue with payers yet? If so, how have those initial conversations been going? And how do we think about the pace of policy changes and any impact to the business in subsequent quarters? Thanks.
Tim Herbert: Absolutely. PREDICTOR now we’re still working with the physician group. The first 300 patients closely aligned with the feasibility study that was performed by Dr. Weiner a year ago. And so we are in the process of enrolling the next 300, we’re making very good progress with that. We’re over half the way through that enrollment and expect to be close to finishing that enrollment by the end of the year to be able to give us a really good dataset to predict what patients will not have complete concentric collapse and, therefore, not require a sleep endoscopy procedure. So we’re still kind of refining that work and then that will be brought forward to the payers when we have that. In the interim, the prior auth market access team is communicating with the payers and we just mentioned Aetna and Humana.
We had another payer come through today with an updated policy on the high AHI, high BMI, and pediatric population with Down syndrome. So we are making progress on both fronts and starting communications even with CMS on the Medicare side. So really looks good, we’re happy with the data that we see we want to collect the second group of 300 patients, and then we’ll really be able to communicate with the payers finding the proper course forward for the patients. So thanks, Adam.
Operator: Thank you. And I show our next question comes from the line of Chris Pasquale from Nephron Research. Please go ahead.
Chris Pasquale: Thanks. One question on the prior auth issue and then one on margins. Tim, it sounds like basically you attempted to wean centers off of a service the company was helping them with and they had a hard time making that transition and then the fix was to go back to helping them a lot. So is that right? And, obviously, there was a reason you guys tried to do this and push them off on their own to begin with. So how do you get to that point and to your point put yourself in a better position to scale?
