Inspire Medical Systems at Bank of America 2025 Healthcare Conference: New Beginnings

On Tuesday, 13 May 2025, Inspire Medical Systems (NYSE:INSP) showcased its strategic advancements at the Bank of America 2025 Healthcare Conference. The company unveiled its latest innovation, Inspire five, a new sleep apnea treatment device, while reporting a robust first quarter. Despite a temporary slowdown due to patient warehousing, the company anticipates a strong performance in the latter half of the year, driven by increased patient marketing and operational efficiencies.

Key Takeaways

• Inspire Medical Systems launched Inspire five, simplifying surgical procedures and reducing operating room time.
• Q1 2025 saw a 23% revenue growth, marking the first positive earnings for the quarter.
• The company plans to enhance patient adherence with future innovations like Inspire six and SleepSync.
• An increase in direct-to-patient marketing is expected to drive demand for Inspire five.
• Inspire Medical aims to expand its reach by partnering with general and oral surgeons.

Financial Results

• Q1 2025 revenue increased by 23%.
• Positive earnings were achieved for the first time in Q1.
• Sequential growth for Q2 is anticipated to be in the mid to high single digits, approximately 11% to 19%.
• Continued investment in R&D remains in the mid-teens percentage range.
• New code increases payments in ambulatory surgical centers.

Operational Updates

• Inspire five was launched nationwide after a limited market release to gather feedback.
• The transition from Inspire four to Inspire five is expected to be smooth, with updates required for contracts.
• Training for surgeons is conducted on-site using a tablet-based program.
• The average time from initial patient contact to implant is around six months.
• Surgical time is reduced, with potential for top surgeons to complete procedures in 30 minutes.

Future Outlook

• Inspire six will offer a software upgrade focusing on sleep detection and auto-activation.
• SleepSync, a remote patient management system, aims to provide utility to sleep physicians and generate subscription-based revenue.
• Future devices may include auto-titration capabilities.

Q&A Highlights

• Patient warehousing is expected to decline as Inspire five becomes widely available.
• Surgeons are likely to switch from Inspire four due to reduced workload with Inspire five.
• The transition involves destocking Inspire four inventory and restocking Inspire five in Q3.
• Focus remains on centers with higher utilization rates for increased device use.

For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Bank of America 2025 Healthcare Conference:

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: Travis Steed, the medical device analyst at Bank of America. Next up, at the Las Vegas Healthcare Conference, we have Inspire Medical. We’ve got the whole dream team here, Tim, Rick, and Neski. So, further ado, do you want me to open up with anything or I can jump into questions or?

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: No, I’ll jump in. Tim Herbert, the Chairman and CEO of Inspire, really thank you very much for having us again this year. We’re really excited about this, have a chance to talk to quite a few people. We got a lot of things to get to today with Inspire, great stories. We, update from our earnings call last week is, we have launched Inspire five.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: Okay.

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: And so we are live, so it’s available to, all the patients in The United States. So we need to kind of work through the steps to get product available at the sites. But that’s a big change. And we’re very excited. We’ve worked many years on this new platform and I’m pretty excited to get it going here.

You want to introduce yourself?

Rick Buchholz, CFO, Inspire Medical: Yeah, Rick Buchholz, CFO. Happy to be here. Very excited about the rest of 2025 and the launch of Inspire five. We’re ready to go, we’re just getting started with the low penetration that we have and excited for the future.

Ez Giajia, Vice President, Investor Relations, Inspire Medical: Ez Giajia, Vice President, Investor Relations.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: Maybe to start out big picture. You guys have been here a long time. You know, we’ve all been around the company a long time. You’ve kind of gone from rapid growth to what I’d call more mature, but growth still. And, you know, higher growth, I mean, more profitable now.

Like where’s Inspire at and its kind of growth journey today at this point? Where do you kind of see Inspire looking back and kind of looking forward?

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: Sure. I mean, it’s been a great journey since approval back in 2014, doing the IPO in 2018, and really getting to a point now where we continue to see strong growth, and we’re very excited about that. And now having Inspire five is a tool to really focus in on. It’s going to make some significant changes to really help patients, really help surgeons to be able to increase their own capacity. So we’re going to keep investing in growth.

I think that’s a really important step. But we get to do it by also delivering profitability, and I think that’s an important part of responsible companies. So yeah, no, we want to keep leaning into the growth aspects of it. We’ll talk to you a little bit what we’re doing with Five as we kind of roll this out. Now that we’re launched, we’re going to do a little bit more patient marketing, an increase in our direct to patient marketing, as well as increase in direct emails to patients who have given us their information and continue to expand Inspire going forward.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: I guess in Q1, you know, it’s actually a really strong quarter. Growth was 23%, really strong, good operating leverage. First time Q1 had positive earnings. So I think that’s pretty impressive benchmark for a company. But I think the focus on the call was, you know, kind of what you saw at the end of the quarter with some of the patient warehousing and stuff like that.

So coming out of Q1, you know, kind of big picture, you know, what do you think the business was? Anything to kind of call out on some of the patient warehousing and kind what you saw at the end of the quarter?

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: Sure. Well, I think Q1’s always our seasonality core. We come off the fourth quarters, which are always strong, primarily driven by the commercial insurance or the high deductible insurance plans and people really pushing to get their procedures done before the end of the year. So then we always start out a little bit soft in January. That’s our seasonality.

That’s when we conduct our national sales meeting. And then we tend to ramp back up February and March. And we did so and delivered on a very strong quarter in the first quarter of ’twenty five here. As we progressed late in the year, we also in concert with that, we’re doing our limited market release of the Inspire five system. And as we worked longer into the quarter, we’re able to add additional sites because we weren’t gonna launch the product until we had sufficient inventory to be able to launch it and support supply for the rest of the year.

Now, course, we’re so happy to announce that we have launched. But as we got late into March and then early into April, we started to see a little bit more patients saying, you know what, I want Inspire, but I’m going to wait for five. And so we started to see that. Usually we have time when we’re scheduling our cases, so it doesn’t really have a big impact in the first quarter. But we saw that kind of going in and we knew we were going to have a little bit of warehousing going into the second quarter, not to mention the transition of going from five to four and with a little bit of inventory burned down as well.

That would second quarter would be our transition quarter, but really sets us up for an exciting second half of the year.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: You said Inspirefly is fully launched now. What was the update? When did that happen? I guess it was this week?

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: Yesterday was the day.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: Okay.

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: We had earnings call last week, and the team’s all aware that yesterday was a formal launch date five.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: What does that mean, though? Like it’s fully launched?

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: That means all the sites Inspire five is available to them. They need to get their contract updated, and we have pricing contracts with all of our centers. And what we need to do is just a short addendum to add a new serial number for the Inspire five device. It’s the same system level pricing, so we don’t need to go back through the value ad committee and they could just do a contract execution and then they’re able to order Inspire five product. We do train the surgeons and we do that right on their site with just a tablet where they take themselves through a training.

And really, it’s a more simplified procedure than for us. Simply put, they no longer implant the pressure sensing lead. And so it’s an easier procedure for them. But we also updated the physician programmer. That was approved last year, but that really kind of streamlines the programming approach and the intraoperative testing.

So there are some features in there that make it a little bit easier. So once they have the contract done, they can start communicating with patients and we will have them burn down their Inspire four inventory for the most part. That’s not many units at all the sites, and we expect a smooth transition.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: So does that fix the patient warehousing aspect then if everybody has Inspire five available?

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: I think that does. Then the centers can call those patients back saying, I know you were waiting for Inspire five. It’s now available. Let’s set up an appointment. And then they come back in and enter the funnel.

So they still have to have the first appointment, be screened, sleep and ask, we work their insurance and get a schedule for an implant. So a little tight to see how many of those will still get implanted in the second quarter, but we’ll be seeing those third quarter and through the year. Okay.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: And because you kind of gave guidance for Q2, you know, said mid to high single digits sequential growth, which is like 02/11 to 02/19. You know, I think the Street’s at, you know, 02/15. What were the assumptions in that range? Because it feels like if Inspire five was fully launched now, like that range could be a little bit better at this point.

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: Well, I think we want to make sure that we looked at the transition period. And so now that we’re launched to get through the contracts, get through the training, and to be able to get the patients therefore scheduled and work through the Inspire four inventory, but that you still use the second quarter as transition and still have confidence as we go into Q3 and Q4. A little bit longer to do the launch, it gave us the opportunity with the limited market release to really get the experience and get the payers on board as well. And by getting the payers on board, meaning that they were part of the limited lodge and we’re able to work prior authorizations, we’re able to get their policies updated such that when we now do this broader lodge, that insurance isn’t going to encumber patients transferring over to Inspire five.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: Why was the assumption take the Q2 revenue and, you know, move it to Q4 and not to Q3?

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: Just to make sure we have the right step up as we kind of work. We know that we’re going to increase our direct to patient marketing and people who see awareness now come to our website. There’s a time period. Usually it’s up to six months from coming to the website, the call center to getting implant. So increasing that, that naturally is implants in the fourth quarter.

So it kind of it’s a good steady step up to really bring Inspire five online.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: Okay. One question that we’ve gotten a lot is, you know, why it felt so sudden, you know, the patient warehousing and inventory stuff. They kind of said for a while it wasn’t going to happen and then it seemed to happen pretty quickly. And it’s like, why was such a sudden change in late March?

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: Well, I think that as time went on, again, we did our national sales meeting in January. That’s when we trained the Salesforce on Inspire five. And we really opened the second site in the limited market release right after that. And so most of the LMR limited market release was going through the February timeframe. We added numerous sites geographically positioned, make sure that we had both academic sites as well as some of our highly implanting community health or commercial sites.

And it created more awareness and having we weren’t going to launch five until we had the proper stability of the manufacturing, good yields, as well as proper inventory levels to make sure that we could support implants for the rest of the year. So that added time gave us the added experience with the payers and with the centers, but it also created awareness. And with that awareness, that’s when we started to see more patients saying, you know, I think I’m going to wait till five. They’ll come into a doctor and they’ll say, I want Inspire, but I want the five. Right.

Okay, and doctors communicate a little bit more with some patients. So that’s when we really started to see it late March, early April that, yeah, there are patients who are going to wait. So once we get the lodge completed, they can get scheduled with their physicians and prepare for receiving Inspire five.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: Sounds like it was more on the patients delaying, not the doctors saying, Hey, let’s wait here.

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: I think it’s probably a little of both. I think there may be some doctors who would communicate with some of their patients, but yeah, we think it’s probably a balancing act, but probably more so the patients kind of hearing about it and want to wait.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: When did they want to wait for Inspire five, like the benefit for those patients? Like what was it about Inspire five?

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: Well, new and improved, I think. I think the word gets out because when we talk at conferences here and at different meetings and there, people are astute and they read and they look at the benefits of Inspire five. We talk today, we’re so excited about the new technology and not having ENT, ear, nose, throat surgeon, putting a sensor in the pressure wall or into the chest wall is really a game changer. And it’s really a platform technology that lets us move to the next steps with Inspire, Inspire six and seven, eight, SleepSync on board. So I think people hear about the excitement we have with the new technology, and it’s really a new beginning for Inspire.

We’re very excited about that. As Rick said in his opening comment that at the national sales meeting, our theme was we’re just getting started. And Inspire five is really the tool to be able to take that next step.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: When you think about the kind of the step up in Q4, you know, the confidence in getting these cases rescheduled, I know in the past, like, has been a challenge and there’s kind of been delays in getting cases rescheduled that have missed. And so, like, how are we getting the confidence that these cases are going get rescheduled this year and into Q4, and then the doctors are all going to get trained and, you know, ready for Inspire five?

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: Yeah, I think that’s the exciting part of it. I think the physicians or the surgeons in the limited market release have pretty much university come back with such positive feedback on the experience of implanting the device or not implanting the pressure sensing lead. And we’d like to see that excitement around there and then wanting to do more. And so by us increasing our patient marketing throughout the year and bringing additional patients forward, that’s going to really help the surgeons really understand that they need to do more cases. And the reduced OR time gives them capacity to do more cases in a given case day, but it also shows them the number of people that are wanting Inspire therapy, and it’s time for them to train their partners.

And you can no longer say that this is the Inspire doctor in our practice, not anymore. We need to say we’re gonna have multiple doctors that take care of Inspire patients. And so we’re gonna train not only the surgeons, existing surgeons, and to encourage them to do more cases, but we’re gonna show them the demand and without placing the pressure sensing lead, able to train additional surgeons in their practice and of course, continue to open up new centers as we continue on. And when we open those new centers, we want to make sure that there’s multiple surgeons there. And again, the focus as it was last year as it is this year is continue to keep growing capacity for five, but now we’re doing it without the pressure sensing need.

When, just stepping back, like you assumed kind of

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: a destock of inventory in the guidance, but wouldn’t that kind of restock to with Inspire five over the next few months?

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: Absolutely. But I think it’s a little bit more of the timing. And so if they’re doing some more of the destocking for it, some of those actually come back and get procured in Q3, right? And so it’s really the timing of that and just working through the transition of working down the four. I think you’ll see a lot of sites will kind of transition slowly and do four and five at the same time.

And they’ll still keep offering four to some patients if they want to go that way.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: Why would the patient want to go with four?

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: Patients that are coming in for therapy and for their experience, I’m not sure they see a great difference in four. And depending upon how the physicians want to work it with reimbursement, they may use four for some patients and five for others.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: Okay. That’s kind of leads me to the next question on the doctor fee reimbursement. And it’s like, I think one of the first things I was taught when I first joined medtech was follow the money. And so, you know, why is this not going to have some sort of impact, or what are you seeing kind of in the field with doctors? Is that some reason why they might still do some fours and some fives here and there?

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: We’re going to ask that question as we get going. And we’ll ask that question, how many of those surgeons are still doing Inspire four for the $200 to place the pressure sensing lead? I think the answer is gonna be very, very few. And I think the key is gonna be, well, you always follow the money. We’re doing, there’s a pretty good trade off here when we’re asking, again, an ear, nose, throat surgeon to not place a sensor in the chest wall.

So it’s significantly reduced work and the reimbursement is commensurate with the reduction of that work. So it’s fair payment on a per minute basis, but that allows them to do more cases in a day. And by doing more cases a day, they can actually generate additional income for their practice. So I think it’s going to be a real positive trade off. I think they’re gonna have really great confidence by placing the Inspire five because it’s really more in their sweet spot.

And the pressure sensing lead has always been kind of a little bit of that awkward part of the procedure, right? And I think that also is going to open the door for some surgeons who in the past didn’t want to do Inspire, but without the sensing lead. Now they feel comfortable kind of coming back to that. So we’re going to sit and monitor that closely. Four is going to be available for a period of time as we do the transition, and we’ll monitor how many of those surgeons are actually going to choose to do so.

But following the money also means that there’s an increased payment in ambulatory surgical centers associated with the new code too, where it increases the payment at ASCs by $1,000 So it may be an impetus for surgeons to say, you know what, we’re going to do some more cases in the ASC now. And that also gives them a flexibility of scheduling and can help them also balance their own schedule and be able to take care of more patients. So there’s a positive trade there, too.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: What’s the mix again? Remind us of ASC outpatient.

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: I think right now we about 24% of our centers are ASCs, probably less than 20% of the procedures are done in an ASC. And that’s what I think we want to push as we kind of work into ’25 and even further into ’26 to make this more available because it’s so conducive to an ASC setting, especially now with the reduced OR time and simplifying the procedure dramatically with Inspire V.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: Are you seeing evidence of doctors adding more cases per day with Inspire V yet?

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: A little early. I think that in discussions with the doctors and the limited market release, we think that, yes, that’s true, and they can see the ability to do so. But again, pretty early with a number of centers that are doing five so far.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: What are you seeing about a time savings and initial launch for procedure and like, because you’ve got the pre op and post op and stuff like that, with the procedure time, like, how is the time savings, like, showing up, you know, that you’ve seen the initial launch?

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: Well, I think the actual surgical time we’re seeing is reduced. I think that we always talk about the averages being sixty to ninety minutes, we’ll go down to forty five to sixty minutes. We do know that a lot of our top surgeons are much less than that in the thirty minute range, but they’ve been doing a lot of cases and they’re seeing improvements themselves. I think what sets them apart is how they do the pre op and the post op and how much time do they spend, not only just the day of surgery, but as the surgeons come in and how do we build those efficiencies into their practices? And one of the evidence we always talk about is APPs or advanced practice providers who are PAs that can educate the patients and they can do some of the post op and they can do the programming and therefore they can have the surgeons really focus on doing what surgeons do.

They’re the only ones that can actually do surgery. So we’re spending a lot of time training APPs and teaching efficiencies in the practice such that allows the surgeons to build capacity and do more cases and generate more revenue by focusing their efforts in the OR. Anything to add on that APPs?

Ez Giajia, Vice President, Investor Relations, Inspire Medical: No, I think that’s right. We’ve trained about 400 inception to date. We have monthly programs where we train APPs. As Tim mentioned, they’re typically physician’s assistants or nurse practitioners, and they can really do mean, basically they can do everything for our patients besides the actual dice and the procedure itself. So they’ve been a tremendous help.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: Are you starting to see kind of more block time for your procedure? That’s kind of an initiative too. It’s like you get like one day a week in a a center and getting more time with your procedure.

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: The top centers definitely do that. Set up, this is going to be an inspired day. And it really works because while the surgeon knows they’re coming in, today is going to be inspired day, but everybody else in the center also knows, right? The OR staff knows exactly what trays to have in there, the coding and the billing people know what codes they’re going to be billing on that day, and it really builds efficiencies into the practice. And as we get into five and they can see what the actual surgical times or the procedure times are, and they know how long it takes them to clean a room, and we know that then they can start planning accordingly and adding cases based on their direct experience they have with doing the procedures.

A lot of times we’ll have surgeons be able to have two rooms side by side and they’ll go from one room to the next, alternating as the cleaning room, they’re doing another case. I think there were two doctors in The US, they were each able to do nine cases in a day by going two different rooms. Most recently, a surgeon in Hamburg, Germany did 12 cases in one day. And that was with Inspire four, right? And it’s meant to not highlight the achievement.

That’s impressive, obviously, but it’s looking at the trends of where this is going. And if we can keep the block days, now we can make sure that we maximize those days and schedule a number of cases. And with the OR days, we’ll see centers doing even more than that. And I think that will become more the norm in the future because it’s such an efficient way. If you take it to our staff, think about how efficient it is to be able to have our field clinical reps come to a site for a full day rather than doing a case and driving across town to cover another case and driving after that.

It builds efficiencies across the board.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: Is this what’s giving you the confidence to come out and say like utilization is going to continue to move higher in this business?

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: I think, yeah, because we want to focus on those centers that are delivering the highest utilization and bring centers on board that are expected to come on board and hit a certain utilization. Because we know if you hit a certain utilization, your outcomes improve because everybody’s practice, everybody knows their role, everybody knows how to do the procedure and knows what to have in place, know how to program the device, know how to communicate with patients. And so the high utilization really kind is the most effective approach. When

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: you think about the I guess one question. In the past, you’ve talked about bringing other kind of doctors in, you know, non ENT doctors. Is it still a little early for that? You know, what’s the kind of the pathway to start increasing centers through that direction?

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: We purposely have not pushed that until now we’ve launched five. And so we’re going to go to the ENTs first. We want to make sure that they expand the capacity within their own practice, but also train their partners. But how this has been successful is the ENTs have partnered with us finding general surgeons or oral surgeons that can come on board and do procedures. They are skilled surgeons that can handle the procedure even more so now that, again, we don’t have the pressure sensing need in the chest wall.

It kind of really opens the door. We want to keep doing that in concert with the ENTs because because we want them to step up. We want them to train their partners first. But that’s certainly an avenue that we can go down that pathway as well. When you think about the margin progression here going forward, and how are

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: you balancing the we need to keep growing this business but also get profitable? Because like, you know, growth has decelerated every year a little bit, which is fine if margins are moving higher, but it’s kind a titration you’ve got to work. How are you thinking about that kind of titration between group deceleration every year versus the margin upside?

Rick Buchholz, CFO, Inspire Medical: Yeah, we’re early, just getting started. And so we’re continuing to make large investments. R and D is running mid teens. We are getting leverage off our SG and A line, we expect with improved utilization, we’ll continue to increase our leverage. And so the efficiencies with Inspire five for existing surgeons will help with utilization, as well as adding new centers, new doctors, adding a second surgeon or a third surgeon at another center.

And so our customer acquisition costs are coming down. We’re continuing to spend DTC is a little bit lower in the first quarter, because of the impending launch of Inspire five. Now that we’re launched, we’re going to increase that sequentially and year over year going forward. But with that, we’re still going to have improved margin within ’25 and even stronger on a long term basis.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: The decision to kind of go back and increase DTC, was it just related to Inspire five? Or was it like, hey, we pulled back on DTC, like we probably pulled back

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: a little too far, let’s step up a little bit more. Inspire five, yeah. I think we purposely pulled back in Q1 a little bit in preparation because we knew the launch is coming. Now you can see that step up as we go through the year. A lot of that is gaining excitement around five.

And it’s not just for the patients, but it’s creating awareness with the surgeons, the sleep physicians. But don’t forget the family practice doctors who are the ones today dealing with the GLP-1s and the weight loss, and they need to understand sleep apnea, they need to understand that there’s other therapies out there other than CPAP, and a lot of our referrals will come from the family practice docs. A lot of talk about PFA and the, recurrent rates of, atrial fib with out treating the underlying sleep apnea significance, we’re educating the cardiovascular docs as well. So the direct marketing is broader than just patients, although really patients is really key. Bringing them to the website, letting them know there is an alternative therapy out there that can help them with their sleep apnea.

What

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: about Inspire six? And know, might as well ask about it now that Inspire five is out.

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: Five’s out. So now we got to start looking for what’s next. And that’s exciting, though. So five is a platform for which we can build off of. Yes, we have the accelerometer inside the can to detect the respiration rates and the data that we’re having and used with the FDA to get approval kind of shows that it’s a more stable environment for respiratory detection and we’ll be able to improve outcomes even further.

But it’s a microprocessor driven product as well. So what that means is when we go to Inspire six, it’s only a software upgrade to an existing The target for Inspire six is actually sleep detection. So the device will know when you’re sleeping, it’ll know when you’re awake. It’ll turn itself off when you fall asleep, and if you get up and go to the bathroom at night, it’ll pause itself, and if you get up in the morning, it will shut itself off. This was all initially thought about with patients who have insomnia because it’s so difficult for them to fall asleep, especially with the anxiety that my Inspire device is gonna turn on.

I gotta fall asleep quick, and then they hit pause again. Well, now we can say with six, you could just go ahead, just fall asleep and the device will turn itself on. One of the most important part of any therapy, it goes back to CPAP, and the reason we’re so successful is because unfortunately people aren’t able to be compliant with CPAP and their adherence levels are low. What we’re doing at Inspire is we’ve really showed a very high level of adherence. But now with auto activation and with sleep, we’re going to take adherence to the highest level, right?

Just think about that. When the patient’s asleep, the device is on. You don’t have to worry about the patient pushing a button to turn the device on. That’s really going to be a big significant boost. Then we can take this program even further.

Eventually, we’re going to have a device that’s going to be auto titrating. SleepSync is going to be a program to manage these patients longitudinally, and we’re going to be able to do remote programming from a doctor’s office to a patient’s home. And so we are just at the very early stages of where we’re going to be from a technology standpoint.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: When you think about the like the the profitability of this business and like your not only patient acquisition costs, but patient management costs through pathway? Like how is this pipeline that you’re talking about going to help the margin outlook for this business?

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: Well, I think what’s really nice is when we get to sleep sync and we can start building more utility into that, it’s going to really help the sleep physicians manage patients. And when we work through this capacity that we’re talking about with surgeons, and we will, now we’re going to really show that the sleep physicians have to manage a lot of patients. SleepSync is designed to simplify that process. But by us providing greater utility to it, we can help those sleep physicians in process. And that can be a subscription model as well.

I think ResMed’s pretty successful with that as well. So that will also help be able to generate revenue, helping the sleep physicians manage the patients, having the patients understand where they are with their app and where they are with their own process and that will just continue to grow the therapy.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: So you get more leverage on the sales reps as well? Revenue per rep probably moves higher in that regard?

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: In that regard, yes. And we also want reps to really focus on fewer centers doing higher cases, and that way they can be more efficient in their own practices and also be able to continue to increase their own productivity.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: Are reps now going with the sleep doctors and like helping the programming and kind of

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: handholding on that end too? We tend to like to have our field clinical reps do a lot of the case both in the Operating Room, as well as training the sleep physicians and the APPs and the sleep practices to take care of the patients. What’s important, though, is we always want them to do the programming. That’s different from NeuroStim or Pacemakers, where the company would do all the programming for the customer. No, we teach.

We teach our patients or teach our patients. We teach our physicians taking care of their own patients, do your own programming. We’re there to assist. We’re there for technical guidance, but we really want them to drive independence as well.

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: I only got through half of my questions, but I’m not sure if there’s anything else that you wanted to make sure to say before we end.

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: Oh, no, we’re excited to come here today to announce that Five is launched. We apologize for people we’ve met with this morning that we didn’t tell you that because we held it to this moment. And the team is really excited about Five. The team’s excited about where we’re going with Inspire. We’re obviously very proud of where we’ve been.

Last week, we announced we treated our one hundred thousand patient with Inspire. And we’re so excited about that and driving outcomes to the point that we say what we’re all about is we’re just getting started. So anything else you guys want to add? Great. Thanks a lot.

Thank you for

Travis Steed, Medical Device Analyst, Bank of America: having us. Of course. Thank you.

Tim Herbert, Chairman and CEO, Inspire Medical: All right. Very good. Thanks.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.