Inspire Medical Systems at UBS Global Healthcare: Strategic Transition to Inspire 5

Published 10/11/2025, 19:08
Inspire Medical Systems at UBS Global Healthcare: Strategic Transition to Inspire 5

On Monday, 10 November 2025, Inspire Medical Systems (NYSE:INSP) took center stage at the UBS Global Healthcare Conference 2025, sharing both triumphs and challenges. The company emphasized its successful transition to the Inspire 5 system, while acknowledging the complexities of market dynamics and reimbursement strategies.

Key Takeaways

  • Inspire 5 has reduced surgical time by 20%, enhancing physician experience.
  • Revenue guidance reaffirmed for 2025 with low double-digit growth expected next year.
  • Transition to new reimbursement code 64568 is progressing well, with Medicare reimbursement set at $28,000.
  • Inspire 6 aims to automate therapy, improving patient adherence.
  • $200 million share repurchase authorization, with $150 million remaining.

Financial Results

  • Q3 2023 Performance:

- Strong results driven by Inspire 5 transition.

- Gross margin improved due to elimination of pressure-sensing lead production.

- EPS guidance raised for the remainder of the year.

  • Future Outlook:

- Revenue guidance reaffirmed for 2025.

- Initial forecast of 10-11% top-line growth for 2026.

- Formal guidance expected in January.

  • Capital Allocation:

- $200 million share repurchase plan, with $50 million completed.

- Focus on organic investment in sales, innovation, and medical education.

  • Spending Strategy:

- Increased direct-to-consumer advertising.

- Disciplined spending throughout the organization.

Operational Updates

  • Inspire 5 Transition:

- Over 98% of centers trained, with 90% completing contracting.

- Inspire 5 clinical data shows 20% reduction in surgical time.

- Sensor now integrated into neurostimulator, simplifying procedure for ENTs.

  • Physician Engagement:

- Emphasis on positive patient outcomes to drive adoption.

- Training Advanced Practice Providers to enhance efficiency.

  • Reimbursement:

- Transition to code 64568 progressing, aiming for consistent payer coverage.

  • Commercial Organization:

- Adjusting field ratio towards a one-to-one of territory managers to clinical reps.

  • Ambulatory Surgery Centers (ASCs):

- 20% of implants currently in ASCs; expected to rise with improved reimbursement.

Future Outlook

  • Innovation:

- Inspire 6 aims to automate therapy, turning on and off with patient sleep cycles.

  • Market Expansion:

- Targeting general ENTs and surgeons, with focus on community-based care.

  • GLP-1 Influence:

- GLP-1s changing sleep physician practices, increasing OSA awareness.

  • Growth Factors:

- Growth driven by new centers and same-store sales.

Q&A Highlights

  • Physician Experience:

- Inspire 5 procedure simplification appeals to ENTs.

  • Market Tailwinds:

- GLP-1s boost awareness of OSA.

  • Reimbursement Strategy:

- Focus on achieving uniform coverage policies.

  • DTC Advertising:

- Campaigns measured by web activity and patient implant numbers.

Inspire Medical Systems presented a robust strategy at the UBS Global Healthcare Conference 2025, focusing on innovation and market expansion. For further details, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - UBS Global Healthcare Conference 2025:

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. I’m Danielle Antalffy, the U.S. MedTech analyst for UBS. Very lucky to have with us Inspire Medical Systems, Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Ezgi Yagci, Head of Investor Relations. So, guys, thanks for joining.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Danielle, thanks for having us. It’s so great to be here.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: I guess a good place to start, you did just report earnings. You had a good quarter. Maybe just some quick hits on the quarter and some of the drivers, and then we can dig into Q&A.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Yeah, it was a very important quarter for us to report back. There was so much tension that we had after the end of the second quarter. That was quite a challenging quarter for us, working through the transition from Inspire 4 to our next generation Inspire 5 system. We made tremendous progress with that during the third quarter, had very good pickup that showed with our results as well. Most importantly, we were able to report the patient outcomes associated with the new device, Inspire 5, both in a clinical study that we ran in Singapore, as well as the first commercial experience here in the United States. That outcome stayed so strong, and it really sets us up moving forward.

We did work through quite a bit of the transition in the third quarter, getting the majority of the centers up and running. I think we reported, over 98% of our centers have been trained, and we talked about over 90% have completed the contracting portion of the transition, and 75% have completed the Sleep Sync portion of the preparation for Inspire 5. Over 75% of our centers are ready to go on five.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Mm-hmm.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: We exited the quarter with the majority of centers doing five. Not only with strong numbers during the quarter, but very good progress with the transition of five.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Just on that point, with the transition from four to five, do you have a sense of how much four inventory is still out there?

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Yeah, that was another big concern that we had coming exiting the second quarter, and that centers in the United States need to burn down their Inspire 4 inventory as they ramp up five. It’s really neutral, overall. As they burn down one inventory, they’ll re-supplement that with Inspire 5. At the beginning of the third quarter, it was predominantly all Inspire 4 inventory in the field. As we exit the quarter, it’s predominantly all Inspire 5.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Five. Yeah.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: We have kind of done the transition. We will continue to work through that here in the fourth quarter and look to clean most that up. There will still be some sites that will continue to implant Inspire 4 even going forward.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Okay. Maybe talk a little bit about the physician experience for Inspire 5, because that’s a key, a key advantage relative to Inspire 4, time of procedure, ease of procedure. Is Inspire 5 starting to break down some of the barriers in getting more ENTs to implant?

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Yeah, let’s start with that one. I think that is the biggest feedback that we’ve heard universally. A very important part of the Inspire system is you need to sense respiration and time stimulation when the patient inhales. We’re the only system that does that. It’s an essential part of the therapy to optimize outcomes. The key is we used a sensing lead that would be placed between the intercostal muscles with Inspire 4. A significant technology jump going to Inspire 5 is we incorporated the sensor inside the neurostimulator. The ear, nose, and throat surgeon no longer places a sensor in the intercostal muscle. That was the one part of the procedure that was the most uncomfortable for an ENT.

We think a factor on why, while many ENTs would not do the procedure or would not do many of the procedures. Now that five is out and the clinical data did show a 20% reduction in surgical time, that allows them to do more cases in the day. I think with the 20% and without having the pressure sensing lead, we can go back to surgeons that we trained early on in the process and re-energize them, saying, now, without having that pressure sensing lead, it’s time for them to start doing Inspire again. For those surgeons who are used to doing Inspire, now they can stack more cases in a day, and they can grow their own volume. When we enter talk to new general ENT surgeons, it’s a much different conversation, not having them operate outside of their comfort zone.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that makes sense. I guess one of the sort of gating factors to adoption has been ENT Mindshare, just getting these, they’re busy physicians, you know, they have a lot of procedures to do. How are you guys working to continue to gain Mindshare amongst your current physician base? Sort of what’s the playbook?

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: I think the key is, number one, being obvious patient outcomes.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Right.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Positive experience. The safety profile is tremendous with 100% implants, through the Inspire 5 with Singapore study, as well as the limited market release in the United States. The confidence that when they prescribe this to a patient, that that patient’s gonna have a positive outcome is really the key driver to the whole thing. That experience, a much simpler procedure, kind of really takes it to the next step. It is a competitive environment for them.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Mm-hmm.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: They have to take care of patients. A lot of our surgeons are oncologists, and you can’t just walk away from the cancer patient. We need to work with those surgeons so they optimize their practices so they can spend their time in the operating room. One example is we train APPs, Advanced Practice Providers, individuals who can communicate with the patients, can provide them the guidance, the instruction of what to expect with Inspire, and can be a navigator, can help them schedule the appointments they need to work through the process, and thereby free up the surgeon so the surgeon can just focus on the surgical procedure, and then the sleep physicians can do the post-op longitudinal management. Really optimizing around that.

We talk a little bit about direct-to-consumer, in this regard as well, because patients come to the ENTs, and they don’t come just for Inspire. They will need numerous procedures.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Mm-hmm.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: We’re really bringing a patient population to these ENTs. It’s an opportunity for them to hone the rest of their skills as well and build their practice, but absolutely focusing on Inspire.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Okay. You guys have mentioned in the past sort of the service and support. I’m asking this question less from a competitive perspective. We can talk about that later. The service and support that you provide to these centers, another friction point has always been reimbursement and just getting these payers aligned and regularly reimbursing, less pushback. Can you talk a little bit about the handholding you are doing at these centers to help grease the wheels a little bit?

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Mm-hmm. We, there’s kind of two different avenues to that one. We can, we can talk about the support at centers, and we also need to talk about how we communicate and educate the payers as well.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Yeah.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Maybe let’s go down that pathway first, ’cause now that we have coverage by all the major players and Medicare and military and VAs, what’s most important now is to drive consistency of the coverage policies. If you go to all the different payers and the Medicare local coverage determinations, they are all pretty consistent. There’s just those little things out of everything. We want every policy to really be uniform so it’s really consistent and makes it quite easier. There’s no confusion from the physician side.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Sure.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: When they’re going for coverage and identify what’s important.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Sure.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: The transition with Inspire 5 going to the new code, 64568, which is actually going back to the old code, has, that transition’s gone really well. We had challenges in the second quarter, as you all recall, with CMS not having that on their computer systems. That was cleaned up on July 1 and since, it’s really been streamlined. Most recently, that reimbursement’s gone up. On the physician side, we do provide service. We are in every surgical procedure, and that’s really a quality control for the patient. We wanna make sure that we provide the technical expertise to make sure that procedure goes well. That being said, the people that we prefer in there are our field clinical reps, not necessarily the sales reps, not the territory managers, right?

We want the territory managers running logistics upfront, patient referrals, driving capacity at centers, making sure that we have the engagement of the C-suite, making sure that we’re looking to add surgeons, add centers. The field clinical reps who get paid less than sales reps, obviously, but their job is case coverage, individual coverage in the operating room, training the centers how to do the programming and the patient follow-up. Build efficiencies into those practices as well, not only from our standpoint, but educating centers on how to be more efficient as well.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Yeah. Do you have, sort of best-in-class centers that are already, you know, there from an efficiency perspective? I guess how easy is it to replicate center to center? You know, can you go into a center and be like, "Here’s a case study of, you know, how they’re doing it and how much the ROI is for that?

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Just a, another comparison. Academic centers really have a lot of ENTs who are dual boarded in sleep. And so these are the surgeons, sleep physicians who do everything themselves. At academic centers, that’s great ’cause they do the clinical research, they do the early adoption, and they will grow, they will trial new devices. Those aren’t the centers that drive the growth. The centers that drive the growth are the large and the community-based hospital systems.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Mm-hmm.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: When we all go to the doctor, we go to our community-based doctor. Those are the centers that have the teams. They have one, two, or three ENT surgeons, and their patients are managed by many sleep physicians in the community. Everybody knows the role. They come in, the patients are diagnosed, they have the Inspire procedure done by the surgeon, and they immediately go to a sleep physician for their longitudinal management. The whole team works together with Sleep Sync to collect all that data so all the players of the team can track the patients, they can see the benefits that these are providing, make sure they give the feedback to the referring physicians. We make those case studies. We make those, these are the centers of excellence, and this is what we want new centers to emulate. This works best.

The centers that do the most procedures have the best outcomes. Not a surprise. They’re practiced.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Right.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: They know how the system works. Yeah, we certainly, as we continue to grow, it’s about community-based care. It’s about emulating the most proficient centers.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: You do continue to add new centers. I appreciate you’re not giving that number anymore. When you look at the components of growth, new centers versus, call it, same-store sales, can you talk a little bit about what you’re seeing or how that’s changed over the last few years as you guys have gotten much bigger?

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Sure. Back up to the Q2 call again. We talked about that in the first half of the year, we knew the transition was starting. We did not wanna start a lot of new centers on Inspire 4. We were just holding them to start on 5.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Yep.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: We also held back on DTC in the first half, waiting for the transition to happen. Third quarter, we opened up a number of centers back to what you would call normal, ’cause we had a built-up demand. I think you’ll see the same thing in the 4. We’ll continue to add centers. That’s gonna be a very important part of the process, albeit with the number of centers that we have, it’s a less of a major impact, right?

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Right.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: As a percentage of the overall number of centers, it is still very important to go back and open the centers. The centers that we open emulate what we just got done talking about.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Right. Right.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: They start up with a full system, and they start up with an expectation of this is how many patients a month it takes to be efficient with Inspire and to make it work for everybody.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Yeah.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: I think we’re a little bit more selective, to kind of build practices in that realm.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: When you think about the number of potential surgeons to go after, can you talk about, I know you’ve framed this before or in the past, you know, number of surgeons that are out there that could potentially be doing Inspire, and we have a ways to go, I think.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Let me—can I jump in?

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: We do. So, inception to date, we’ve probably trained a little over 1,600 surgeons, ENT surgeons. We know that there are probably around 12,000 or so general ENTs out there, about 8,000 are head and neck specialists.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Right.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Historically, that’s been our bread and butter and who we tend to go after. To Tim’s point, with Inspire 5 and the simplified procedure, we think we can continue to make headway with the head and neck specialists, but also start to target the general ENTs. There’s also a very significant general surgeon opportunity where we haven’t even scratched the surface longer term. That’ll be—there’ll be more to come on that probably next year and beyond.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Okay.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: We’re very excited about what we’re seeing so far. Okay. Okay. We’ve talked a lot about the sort of areas of friction, but let’s talk about the tailwinds right now.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Mm-hmm.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Actually, like, I know you guys have talked about GLP-1s as maybe a little bit of a near-term headwind, but actually, you know, it seems like it’s just really increasing awareness of OSA.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Mm-hmm.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: You know, you talk to sleep med physicians, and their waitlists are just growing and growing and growing.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Mm-hmm.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Maybe talk about, as best you can, like, what you’re gonna—what you guys are seeing at the start of the funnel and how much bigger that has gotten over the last two years.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: I can put a comment and hand off to—I think what GLP-1s have done to the sleep market has really just changed the way sleep physicians conduct their practices. That’s what the real positive is. If you just go back 7, 5, 7, 10 years to a sleep physician, the world was a CPAP.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Mm-hmm.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Period. If you’re diagnosed, you’re going on CPAP. If you don’t use your CPAP, try harder, you can use your CPAP. That was always a challenge that we had with Inspire. With the data that we’ve had, we started to change that and influence the sleep physicians to understand the patients who are not gonna be compliant, there is a viable option with Inspire. Now what GLP-1s have done with an indication for sleep apnea, now patients will go to their family practice doctor, and they wanna have a GLP-1 ’cause they wanna lose weight, they wanna feel better. If they get a diagnosis of sleep apnea, they might get their insurance company to pay for it. The sleep physicians are getting requests to do these sleep studies, but sleep physicians are not gonna do that.

They’re gonna make sure that these patients are taken care of. They’re bringing the patients in, conducting full assessments and doing sleep studies. For those patients that have moderate to severe sleep apnea, they’re not allowed to just go on a GLP-1 alone ’cause it could take a year.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Right.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: The compliance.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Right.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Isn’t necessarily where it needs to be to show that it’s gonna be worth the while and make sure they properly take care of that moderate to severe sleep apnea. They put them on CPAP concurrently. In order to maintain the insurance coverage, you gotta track those patients. We’re actually gonna identify patients who are not compliant to CPAP sooner. This is a new phenomenon. What really is important about this is the sleep physicians now look at treating sleep apnea with an array of tools.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Mm-hmm.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Not one favoring the other. They know that CPAP will go first, but they can look at what patients are good for Inspire. How do we get patients on a GLP-1 to lose weight to qualify for Inspire? ’Cause we know they’re not gonna use their CPAP anyways. It really is gonna come full circle, and that’s what we’re excited about.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Yeah.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: I think it’s really gonna be a positive for the patients having access to the therapy, and we’ll continue to lean in on that.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: One of the parts of the story that’s always been compelling to me is the fact that, you know, I appreciate the ENT mind share, that’s an issue, what have you. If the patients are coming, and I hear that the patients actually, once they’re in the funnel, are very, very motivated to stay in the funnel and get their Inspire, you go to an ENT, that ENT is like, "I don’t have time for this," but they’ll get treated somewhere, right? Why is that thesis wrong? Is that thesis wrong?

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: No, it is not. I mean, the key to it is understanding the baseline, how they all started.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Yeah.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: You have to think about people who have sleep apnea. And this is moderate to severe sleep apnea. They do not sleep well. They do not get restful sleep, right? You come to a conference. If you stay out too late, you are not going to get restful sleep. The key to it is, they get diagnosed with sleep apnea, they try a CPAP, they feel better, they just cannot benefit from CPAP long-term.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Yeah.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: They’re motivated to find a solution to their sleep apnea because they know when they feel good, how well they can operate. That’s the premise of the whole therapy. When we do our outreach programs to patients, we rely on that. We rely on patients who are looking for a therapy. They come in, they go to the website, they get educated, and they can say, "You know what? This might be for me." They find a way to a doctor. We like them to call our ACP, Advisor Care Program, which is a call center, because we can directly help them get an appointment with a healthcare provider. A lot of times, patients will say, "You know what?

I gotta see what my family doctor’s gonna say." So they go to their family doctor first, or they need a referral with their insurance, so they go to their family doctor. Many may have a sleep physician, so they go to their sleep physician. but they find their way.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Yeah.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: They’re motivated to get their way into the practice. Now, this time of year, you add the factor in that they may have a high deductible insurance plan, and they just got through their payment. They wanna get their procedure by the end of the year.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Yeah.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: ’Cause their high deductible will reset. That’s our seasonality period. That’s why we’re so busy at, at between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. It’s probably the busiest time of the year for implants, really to take care of those commercial cases before they reset.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Yeah.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Patients are really motivated, and then they hear more and more about Inspire, and they hear about the ambassadors talking about the benefits and the positivity around the therapy. Yeah, that kind of builds on itself.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: You did talk on the call. With all that said, you talked on the call a little bit about how to think about top-line growth for next year. You sort of level set everyone in the.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Mm-hmm.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Low double-digit range. I think you, I think you guys said 10-11.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Mm-hmm.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Yeah, yeah. Maybe talk about what the components of that are, given, you know, all the tailwinds we just talked about, but balanced with the headwinds from Inspire 4 inventory still being out there and getting centers accessible.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: I think the key word in that discussion is balance.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Yeah.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: I think that while we did not provide early guidance, we did provide an early indication, and that is kinda important. We did say that we would provide guidance in January. We reaffirmed our revenue guide for the rest of this year, and things are progressing very nicely. We love the transition that we have going on with Inspire 5. There are a lot of questions about what about next year. We know that was a debate that was on the street, both with the analysts kinda looking at what they should expect with a lot of investors and discussions.

We thought it was really important to kinda level set everybody and say, "Here, let’s give everybody an initial indication where everybody can zero in on, and we can grow from there and look at what are the puts and takes around each of those items, everything that we’ve just talked about.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Yeah.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: With the benefits of Inspire 5 and how the GLP-1s are continuing to evolve, do we have any competitive threats? We kinda made sure that we built that in. As we finish the year and build our plan going into January when we come out with formal guidance, I think everybody is now kinda together now on a level set for that discussion.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: It sounds like that I’m, I don’t wanna put words in your mouth, but it sounds like that would be like worst case, and that is base case for you guys, not.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Again, we don’t wanna put out guidance now, and it’s just an early indication.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Yeah.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: I think we wouldn’t necessarily wanna go backwards.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Right.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Right?

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Right.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: We’re gonna be careful as we do our assessment to look at what it is that we wanna do in 2026. We know our goal is just to continue to take care of patients, and we know we are so lightly penetrated.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Right.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: In our overall TAM, our opportunity is still in front of us.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Right. Okay. The other important point out of the call was on the OpEx and the spend, and you guys really crushed the EPS number. I guess one of the questions coming out of the call was, you know, in Q2, you cut EPS guidance. In Q3, you’re raising EPS guidance. Maybe talk a little bit about what changed between Q2 and Q3 to make you more comfortable with how you were spending, how efficiently you were spending.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: I think the key coming out of Q2, we just had a lot of one-time challenges.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Yeah.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: That we had to address, and we got those all out on the table. That did require us to back down our EPS guide. We have remained disciplined all year. That being said, we’re investing in growth. We significantly increased our direct-to-consumer spend.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Mm-hmm.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: We have a whole new ad campaign that we’re running that’s really kinda fun, helping patients sleep. They sleep so well, they can dream again. We are continuing to invest in the future, but we’re being disciplined in the rest of the organization. We get a little bit of a gross margin boost when we go to Inspire 5. Again, back to that pro, we don’t have to make that pressure-sensing lead anymore. Yeah, a little bit of a nice, nice bump to EPS in Q3. We did give us the ability to increase our guide for the rest of the year. We’re gonna continue to be more disciplined with our spend and invest in growth and continue to remain profitable going forward.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Okay. Gotcha. Maybe talk a little bit about the commercial organization. You guys are also changing your approach to territory managers and how that is impacting the commercial execution side of things.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: I think the territory managers are what we call our sales reps, and they’re really the high end. They’re the front end of the practice. They represent us with the centers, the physicians. And it’s their job to drive capacity at centers.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Mm-hmm.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: To be able to make sure that we have sufficient number of surgeons, make sure they have the system with the sleep physicians, make sure the referral networks are sound, make sure that if patients are coming through the call center to make an appointment, that doctors have appointments available in the practices. What we do not want that group of people to do is do the case coverage, to do in the operating room, to do the training of titrations of individual patients. We have field clinical reps that we want to handle that.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Mm-hmm.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: The good news is, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna modify our field ratio. Right now, we’re maybe three territory managers for every two field clinical reps. You’re gonna see that grow closer to one-to-one.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Mm-hmm.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: One example on the Q3 call, we did not bring in new territory managers. We did promote some field clinical reps to territory managers, but we hired nine field clinical reps to start to build that forward a little bit.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Mm-hmm.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: We are gonna continue to have some more efficiencies in the field going forward to really leverage that. If you think about the cost efficiencies with that, we get the proper care for the right part of the elements at centers in the field.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Right.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Yeah, we can do this in a next efficient manner and still don’t leave any patients alone. Make sure patient outcomes remain our number one concern, but we have different individuals who can focus on what their jobs are.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Yeah.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: To grow the overall capacity of Inspire.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: On the capacity point, can you talk a little bit about ASCs and what role they play right today, but, you know, especially going forward because reimbursement is actually improving in the ASC?

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: We are still at the very beginning of ASCs, and just probably 20% of our implants remain in an ASC setting today. If you look at what we were talking about earlier about looking to go in more general ENT surgeons, many of these private practice surgeons, they spend their entire time in an ASC because they own part of that ASC.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Mm-hmm.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: They’re part of the overall business, and they would love to do Inspire. It’s an, would be an important part of their business. It’s gotta, but it’s gotta make sense. I think going to the new code 64568 really increases the reimbursement to ASCs. I think the national average Medicare reimbursement starting January 1st goes up to $28,000 with 64568. That creates an opportunity to really start leaning in a little bit more on ASCs. Especially with Inspire 5, back to not having the pressure-sensing lead again, it makes it a more straightforward, streamlined procedure that really lends itself to ASCs.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Mm-hmm.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: It’s about time to really start looking at building a program and starting to lean in on that ’cause that is the opportunity. That’s really the untapped opportunity that’s still in front of us.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Yeah. What would be the, how is the go-to-market strategy different at an ASC versus a hospital, or is it not different?

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: It starts with outcomes, right? And the key to it is, as long as you can show that you have the strong outcomes and the confidence, conviction that, that when they introduce this practice, that these are what they can expect from a patient outcome, and they’re gonna take care of patients. That’s always the check in the box no matter what. Two, it does get into the economics.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Mm-hmm.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: As long as we can show, the Medicare economics are good, commercial economics are always far better than the Medicare reimbursement, and that makes a big difference.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Yeah.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: If we can combine those two key elements, it’s a pretty cool procedure for ENT to conduct, right? It’s not just general ENT surgery.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Yeah.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: It’s bringing technology in. It’s taking it to the next level. That’s always been the attractive part. We just had to make the economics work. The new code kinda introduces.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Oh, yeah.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: that along with the simplicity of the Inspire 5 procedure as compared to 4.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Right. Okay. All right. Another question I get quite a bit is on the DTC advertising. How do you guys sort of measure ROI of your campaigns, and what are the metrics you, without you, if you wanna give us.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Without going out.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: If you wanna give us the metrics.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: How do we?

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: I’ll take them, but.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Generally, how do we tackle it? Yeah.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Yeah.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: We usually work backwards as we kinda look through. We know, can DTC campaigns, we know what kinda activity we’re gonna get on the web. From the web, we know how many patients will spend time to become, real kinda highly qualified leads. We kinda know also from that how many will reach out and attempt to make a, find an appointment.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Mm-hmm.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Either through the ACP or through one of the other referral channels. We track that. With the ACP, we actually can track how many of those patients get an appointment, and we can extract how many of them go on to implant. We know our conversion rates all the way through. What we can do is we can reverse back for the cost of acquired patients. We do run our metrics that way, knowing that when we set our expectations or our guidance, we know, look back, and we know what we want that DTC to be.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Mm-hmm.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: We know with Inspire 5, we’re re-energizing the awareness campaign. We have the new campaign that has started out, and we track that very, very closely.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Okay. Gotcha. So capital allocation, you guys did buy back some shares.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Mm-hmm.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: How are you as you look ahead to, you know, ending this year, entering 2026, balancing share repurchase versus investment, organic, inorganic investment? Maybe talk a little bit high-level strategy there.

Ezgi Yagci, Head of Investor Relations, Inspire Medical Systems: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, our first priority is organic investment, and you’ve seen we’ve continued to scale our sales organization and invest in both innovation and patient and medical education, all of which have been really important and have good returns for us. In addition to that, correct, we do have a $200 million, well, we had a $200 million share repurchase authorization. We’ve completed $50 million of that. About $150 million is still remaining. We do believe that our stock is undervalued and will be opportunistic about share repurchases going forward. In the past, you have seen us announce some partnerships that can help us accelerate the adoption of Inspire therapy. Usually, these are technology advancements that we can partner with to help either patient education or clinical efficiency.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Mm-hmm.

Ezgi Yagci, Head of Investor Relations, Inspire Medical Systems: I think you should anticipate that we, you know, we have a very strong business development function that looks at everything that’s out there and assesses the landscape. I think you should assume that we’re continuing to do that.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Okay. This is kind of, you know, a long-term question, but as you think about the R&D and the investment, technology, innovation, etc., where do you see Inspire therapy going? Like, what are the next innovations from here? I don’t, I don’t wanna force you to talk too much about your pipeline.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Mm-hmm.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Just what your company’s sharing.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: No, we’re excited about our pipeline because it’s about driving patient outcomes, making it more comfortable for the patient and making it more comfortable for the end user. What Inspire 5 does, how many times did I say pressure-sensing lead removal today?

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Right.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: That is really a significant change for the ENT surgeon, makes it such an easier procedure. What’s so important, though, closed-loop stimulation is essential for high outcomes. That’s number one premise of Inspire therapy. You have to know when a patient’s inhaling to provide stimulation synchronous with respiration to optimize the outcomes. Inspire 5 sensing is better than Inspire 4. We showed statistical significance with our Singapore study that Inspire 5 is better than 4, and our ability to synchronize with respiration is up to 85%, if not higher. That really makes a difference in patient outcomes. The next step is if we can get patients to use the therapy all night, every night, that just takes outcomes a step higher. Inspire 6 is intended to have automation. When the patient falls asleep, the device turns itself on.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Mm-hmm.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: When the patient wakes up, it’ll shut itself off. We’re working on Inspire 6 as we speak. Now we’re gonna have strong outcomes, and then we’re gonna take therapy adherence to the highest level. Think about CPAP. The challenge with CPAP is people don’t use it.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Mm-hmm.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Now, if we have a device that can provide outcomes with high utilization, that’s really important. One last point on this. At the ENT conferences, two papers came out that showed significant improvement in cardiovascular health with patients using Inspire. This is a large database of over 4,500 patients and over a 10-year study independent of Inspire. These are independent centers doing this research. If we can show improvements in cardiovascular reductions in the comorbidities and improvements in cardiovascular health and ischemic stroke, and there are several other elements in that paper, that’s a game changer.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Right.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Now you’re driving health outcomes along with quality of life with, treating obstructive sleep apnea. Now we’re taking it to the next level.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Is that the kind of data that is gonna help with payers and getting them more, like you said, uniformly covering this?

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Two things. Payers always will say outcomes are first, but they also there’s always an economic element to it.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Of course, yeah.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: If you can show improvements in cardiovascular health, that’s an overwhelmingly powerful argument for the economic side as well.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Okay.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: As we have support today from payers, that only further reinforces that.

Ezgi Yagci, Head of Investor Relations, Inspire Medical Systems: All right. We did have time, so.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: Good way to end on that one.

Ezgi Yagci, Head of Investor Relations, Inspire Medical Systems: I know. I was gonna ask you if you wanted to summarize, but we’re out of time, so.

Tim Herbert, President and CEO, Inspire Medical Systems: We just did it with cardiovascular health. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Danielle.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Thank you.

Ezgi Yagci, Head of Investor Relations, Inspire Medical Systems: All right.

Danielle Antalffy, U.S. MedTech Analyst, UBS: Thank you, Danielle.

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

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