Anthony Petrone: Thank you so much.
Tim Herbert: Thank you very much.
Operator: Thank you. And I show our next question comes from the line of Mike Kratky from Leerink Partners. Please go ahead.
Mike Kratky: Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking our question. Just really on that same GLP-1 front. I mean, can you talk a little bit more about what you’ve heard from surgeons regarding the current portion of your patients that are already getting GLP-1s and if that’s actually leading to an increase in terms of the number of patients that you’re seeing?
Tim Herbert: Absolutely. Now the key is, it’s still very low quality. It’s still when we talk about GLP-1s, we have to bring it up to our physician groups. The people that talk about GLP-1 is really from The Street, from Wall Street. And that’s where we get all the questions. And when we get our advisory committee together and we get our doctors together, we have to ask the questions about GLP-1s, because it doesn’t have presence today. And when we get to the groups that do have weight management centers and have some experience with it, they have anecdotal experience with patients who had complete concentric collapse and went to the weight management clinic and went on GLP-1 and some were able to come back. So, very low numbers now because we’re so early in the game right now.
And, I think we’re really ahead of where these GLP-1s are going to go and what impact they’re going to have. And our job in the meantime, we’re keeping our head down. We’re not worried about it. We know our patient demand is there. But if we can have patients with a complete concentric collapse find a way to be able to lose weight, relieving the lateral-wall collapse, thereby, qualifying for Inspire. That’s really going to be a benefit for the patient, and certainly a benefit to Inspire going forward.
Mike Kratky: Understood. Thanks.
Tim Herbert: Thanks, Mike.
Operator: Thank you. And I show our next question comes from the line of Mike Polark from Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.
Mike Polark: Good afternoon. Thank you. Just one on the prior auth topic. I’m curious, when you launched this pilot earlier this year, did you have an expectation that this was going to work well? Meaning like is this how therapies like this typically progress, centers become more autonomous? Or did you view your strategy as maybe more of a potential outlier outcome? And then the second piece of this is, I imagine within the pilot, some centers did well on their own, some did less. So what are the characteristics of a center that was performing well with this pilot?
Tim Herbert: Great question. So we kind of look at the evolution of therapies, we are in a pure market development program, if you will. We’re introducing hypoglossal nerve stimulation entity of obstructive sleep apnea. And that’s while the necessity to provide the guidance for the support to the centers for submitting these prior authorizations is necessary and it evolves over time. As you continue to scale the business, it’s a natural progression to be able to move forward to building independence and educating centers on the specifics of Medicare, the specifics of individual payers. What to put into prior authorizations, what to be careful of, what patients are not indicated, what do you do with the off-label patients.
It’s a pretty complex process that we certainly have expertise on. But if you go back to, well, Mike, you’ve been around forever. Not calling you old, but you’ve been our experienced in the field. Go back to the spinal cord for pain days. Those started out at Medtronic and prior authorization. Sacral nerve for urology, and the InterStim program, which I worked on way back, then that actually starts out with a prior authorization too. And as these programs evolve, it’s natural to start building independence. And that’s the natural course that we’re starting. Did we plan it out accordingly and step forward? Of course. And did we expect to have success? Because we chose centers in the pilot program to be able to, who would benefit from it.
And some centers continue to be independent today, but others, we need to provide the guidance back to them. So you’re spot on with, there are always areas of success. The characteristics of centers that can be successful are those that do the routine prior authorization for all the other procedures they perform, some in sinus, whether it be oncology or cancer, whether it be trauma, whether it be tubes for kids’ ears. So the larger centers that have experience doing prior authorization are easier to adapt to it and others just take a little bit more time from an educational standpoint. But it is just a natural transition for all new therapies.
Mike Polark: Thanks, Tim.
Tim Herbert: Thanks, Mike.
Operator: Thank you. And I show our last question in the queue comes from the line of Suraj Kalia from Oppenheimer & Co. Please go ahead.
Suraj Kalia: Hey, Tim. Rick, can you hear me all right?
Tim Herbert: Yeah. Hi, Suraj.
Suraj Kalia: Perfect. Tim, I’ll quickly throw a couple of your way. Specifically, Tim, in terms of PREDICTOR and removing DISE from the picture. On one hand, DISE reimbursement is being increased to $1,100 or whatever, right? And now you remove it, obviously, patient referrals and the flow improves. So I’m curious, how should we think about the continuum of care? Now the sleep docs are not going to get the $1,100, right? So to me, I’m just thinking the general oral learning colleges, they’d be happy to implant, but the continuity of care is broken, because they don’t want to be involved, at least to a major part in terms of titrating and the follow-up. So I’d love to get some commentary there. And secondly, I know we’ve all belabored this prior auth to death, but forgive me for this.
So Tim, what is it? Help us understand the leveragability in the model. If you can’t give up on prior authorization handholding, right? DTC is needed. Obviously, clinical reps case, they need to be present cases, help us understand the evolution of leveragability where independent cases can be done at a certain period of time. Thank you for taking my questions.
Tim Herbert: Absolutely. Okay, getting a note to make sure I capture that second question. Okay, so PREDICTOR, isn’t that ironic that, and when we’re doing the PREDICTOR clinical study to find the group of patients that don’t need to have a DISE at the same time, when the new code comes through and the new survey of that code comes through and they increase the facility payment. Now, what’s important in here is that’s the facility payment, it’s not the physician payment. And the physician payment did not increase, and that’s a smaller amount, not that significant, although if you ask your question another way, some of the ENTs can do these procedures in their own ASCs so they can get a little bit of a benefit from it.
