The other thing, unfortunately is that these are “Metastatic Cancer Patients” and sometimes the doctors takes the attitude that, they are going to die from their cancer anyway, I am not sure I can do much for them whether I want to run this test, so we have to overcome these types of objections and we are doing that and you will see that when I talk more about our sales results. Importantly, we have medicare coverage and that’s not easy to get and we are proud we have it. Medicare pays thirty five hundred dollars a test and in addition we are starting to see more and more payments from commercial payers. As we look at the marketplace in the US about 45% of our cases come from medicare patients, the rest comes mostly from commercial payments, so that’s why any payments from commercial payers is critical and so we are starting to see that increase we brought on-board. I had a reimbursement in February and we are really starting to see some process being made in getting payments from the commercial payers. Today we have over hundred and seventy million covered lives, we have got a managed care contract with one blue plan, and we are looking to get more of those contracts in place.
So as I mentioned before, we have our own selling efforts , we have our own 12 sales reps, strategically positioned around the country where the key hot spots are for cancer .Our biggest states where we see the biggest penetrations are in Florida, Texas, New York, California is at work in process but we are making progress. For all intention purposes, we put the commercial pieces in place most of them in the fourth quarter of 2013 and so we really have the theme in place starting in the year and we saw revenues grow to over half a million dollars in the first half, which was a significant growth over the first half of 2013.
Gross billings is another metric we look to which is simply the number of units we sell at times the price we bill out for, we do not collect on everything that’s what we are working towards on the commercial side, so the difference really is between I am in those commercial claims, we built forth and you will see that growing significantly a 3x increase in the first half of this year verses the first half of the last year, so are making progress. As I mentioned we have other tests that we offer through our lab in Philadelphia. I just point you to the accuracy of this test. We have a “Kidney Cancer” test that sub classifies the primary kidney tumor into the four main sub classifications we have some samples for this we are not promoting it heavily because we haven’t got medicare coverage yet, we are working towards getting medicare coverage for this test this year. 95% accuracy our lung cancer test also sub classifies primary lung cancers into the four main sub types 95% accuracy and then we have a “Rosetta Mesothelioma Test” which differentiates from other cancers in the long and plural approaching a 100% accuracy . That really speaks to the accuracy of Micro RNA as biomarkers and we see that throughout our testing.
We have recently announced a deal with the company called “Admera” . Admera is a spin off of a leading contract research organization that has built a very nice business in the sequencing space. The company is called “Genewiz” .They decided that they did not want to commercialize in the clinical space so they really were looking for partners so we have partnered up to take these sequencing tests into the clinical market place for them. It is a great opportunity for us to leverage our relationships with oncologists and it also offers us an ability to offer more full answer to the oncologist it’s not only do they want to know where did the tumor start but then what are the relevant mutations for that tumor. So if it’s a lung cancer does it have a high level of PJFR it does there is a certain drug perceive for example that you might put a patient on. So it reflects and fits nicely with our cancer origin test but also opens up new segments unrelated to our cancer organ test.
