Jason Bednar : Hey, good afternoon, guys. Thanks for taking our questions. And apologies in advance for any background noise here. the backlog you had here is impressive. It’s obviously even stronger taking in account the Chindex order you have here in the first quarter. Questions that we often get on your business are, in some cases, paradoxical, asking when book-to-bill will decline and hope that the denominator there starts to improve, that the backlog conversion gets better. It’s a bit of a bigger picture topic, but can you talk about how you’re thinking about converting this backlog with respect to either backlog conversion rates or book-to-bill rates you’re anticipating as we look forward over the next few years?
Scott Drake : Yeah, Jason, thanks for the question. I think it’s actually — you’re right. It’s kind of a paradoxical one because we want to have our order book continue to grow rapidly. That’s a great leading indicator. And I would tell you that interest in MRIdian is definitely increasing. We really don’t have much of a demand problem anymore or an interest problem. It’s really urgency of getting these systems in the ground. And a lot of that is out of our control as we’ve highlighted here. And it is our motivation and we’re having more conversations with customers expressing urgency of getting their system in the ground. What I can tell you, if you take a step back and we attempted to address this a little bit in our prepared remarks.
But if you look at the transformation of this company over the past four years, and then to your point, you try to project that forward, you see a pretty interesting set of things unfolding. Four years ago, MRIdian was really perceived to be a niche technology. Not so today. We had virtually no clinical data, prospective Phase 2, Phase 3 data. Compare that to today, and you know what the clinical compendium is both now and what lies ahead. We had a throughput problem four years ago. I would say we don’t have that today. And then you add the benefits of A3i, and we are very, very well positioned there along with an innovation pipeline that is incredibly rich that we have not talked publicly about nor will we hear today. And again, four years ago, we were in virtually exclusively academic centers, and now we have about 40% of our customers that are community hospitals.
So I think when you look forward, Jason, it’s very difficult to predict with those very significant changes and improvements that have taken place when would things ultimately slow down a bit and the book-to-bill would come down. We don’t really see that happening here in the short term. And I think when you look at adoption of technology that’s so different across many different parts of medtech, I think you would also see in those instances, it’s very difficult to project what that adoption curve will look like. Our customers believe this is the future of radiation oncology, that you cannot unsee things and that the addition here to the field of very meaningful clinical data in both tough-to-treat and more common cancers is kind of a dawning of an age.
So I agree with them in their characterization of MRIdian. And I think it’s very difficult to characterize and quantify your question, but I appreciate it.
Jason Bednar : Yeah. Thanks, Scott. I mean, maybe as a follow-up just to that, I mean, I’m wondering what changed the trajectory of the revenue piece, that denominator. Because that could also then shrink that book-to-bill, not that we want to see that, but I think a lot of folks are sitting, looking at your backlog and saying, that’s really darn impressive. But also saying, we want to see that backlog convert. So I mean, is there something we can look at as far as backlog conversion rates may be over the next few years? What’s maybe — what’s a normal look at that backlog conversion rate when we — if we ever get back to normal?
