Accolade, Inc. (NASDAQ:ACCD) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Rajeev Singh: Thanks for the question, Jeff. Let me start with the back end of your question. Last year, when you look at the deals we closed last year, and we had a strong bookings year last year, 30% growth off the year before, that year we saw the majority of new customer acquisition came in with more than one product. And so whether that was advocacy plus primary care, advocacy plus DMO, advocacy plus a trusted partner, we saw the majority of our deals come in with multiple products as part of the first sale. We think that’s reflective of customers understanding the strategy, believing that a personalized health care suite is aligned with their needs, and also wanting to see a platform to weave all of those capabilities together.

And so that trend continues into this year. And so, I think, I would guess over time that that just becomes the norm and that what we’re looking at are customers who are looking for a suite of solutions to solve the litany of challenges that they’re facing when they’re trying to reduce health care costs and improve patient experience or member experience. First part of your question, Jeff, we would say that the way we’ve been thinking about our service from the beginning is that primary care on a platform of advocacy is fundamentally differentiated, particularly when you’re talking about an advocacy platform that today is between 2.5 million and 3 million members. We have an extraordinary experience of delivering advocacy. We’re now layering primary care on top of it.

And what that really means is, every primary care physician that works at Accolade has a 360-degree view of the history of the patients that we’re serving, has an understanding of the medications that are on and the conditions that they’re facing, and also has an understanding of the benefits ecosystem that the employer has aligned for that patient. That gives our primary care physicians a superpower that other primary care physicians don’t have. And so, a year ago, we really just got started in bringing primary care to market, the Accolade Care offering, and I think we were learning about how customers wanted to understand and embrace the solution. What we saw was a strong embrace of the solution last year. We deployed those customers on January 1.

We’re seeing great uptick in terms of their utilization. And I think it’s fair to say, Jeff, that it’s a more significant and pronounced part of our value proposition as we go to market today because we saw such traction in it last year.

Operator: And thank you. And one moment for our next question. And our next question comes from Jessica Tassan from Piper Sandler. Your line is now open.

Jessica Tassan: Hi, guys. Thank you so much for taking the question, and congrats on the quarter. We were just hoping you could remind us what the performance revenue in F1 Q ’23 was, whether there was any in this quarter, and then just is that kind of what accounts for the year-over-year change in adjusted growth margin? Thanks.

Steve Barnes: Hi, Jessica. It’s Steve. Thanks for the question. Yes, there are certainly some performance guarantee impacts in Q1. Let me just walk you through. So, the guidance range for the quarter was $89 million to $91 million. So we beat the midpoint of the range by a little more than $3 million, and the top end of the range a little more than $2 million. There was about $1 million of performance guarantee pull forward recognized in Q1, that we expected to be recognized later in the year. So, we call that out. So the true beat was, call it $2 million — $2.2 million at the midpoint, $1 million at the top of the range. If you look back to last year, you’d see that in this quarter last year, we had a fairly significant performance guarantee revenue item recognized in Q1 for a little more than $3 million.