Augmedix, Inc. (NASDAQ:AUGX) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Manny Krakaris: Sure. So we went into the ER a while ago at a West Coast facility just to kind of cut our teeth on that, because the workflows as you can imagine are very different from the ambulatory or clinical care setting. And that helped us, kind of, figure out how to deal with those challenging workflows, because the workflow is not linear as it is in the ambulatory setting. And we figured that out and decided to market it more aggressively and that effort is beginning to pay off, and it’s not just with a regional hospital on the West Coast, this is with the major healthcare enterprises. So we’re really excited about that opportunity. And it’s not very well represented as you probably know in the virtual documentation space, because it’s so hard to do. But we feel we’ve cracked that nut and looking forward to greater expansions within that segment.

Neil Chatterji: Great. That’s it for me. I’ll jump back in the queue.

Operator: Thank you. The next question is from the line of Allen Klee with Maxim Group. Please proceed with your questions.

Allen Klee: Good morning. Two questions, one just the run rate on operating expenses is what we’ve been seeing year-over-year for the third and fourth quarters. Is that kind of what you’re, kind of, targeting going forward? And then second on the Go offering, the feedback you get from doctors of — basically, what would make them switch to what you have versus Dictaphone? If you could dig into that a little more? Thank you.

Paul Ginocchio: Hey Alan, it’s Paul, I’ll take that first question. I think as you look at year-on-year OpEx growth as we get into 2023, it will not be at the same levels of growth year-on-year that we saw in the third or fourth quarter of 2022. We expect a more moderate growth rate. I hope that’s — we’re not going to give any more specific currently, but you should expect a deceleration in year-on-year growth. And just before we move on to Manny’s question around the relative benefits of our products first, dictation. I just want to call out that the 1,300 clinicians in service we commented on at the year-end, that was a point estimate of the number of clinicians in service at the end of the year. The 1,246 is the average for the fourth quarter. There are two different metrics, I just want to make sure everybody’s aware of that, we don’t typically give point estimates of clinicians and service, but we did at year-end. Thank you.

Manny Krakaris: Yes, Alan, to answer your second question, the objective criteria that we use to evaluate the value proposition for Go are, one, the ease of use or sorry, the amount of savings in time for physicians it’s really important that the product is capable of saving more time in preparing a medical note than a dictation solution. And second, it has to be a lot easier to use with dictation, there’s a lot of work that has to be done beyond just dictating the commentary that you need or want to see in the medical note, there’s a lot of navigational steps that have to be taken by the physician to place specific content and specific fields within the EHR and that is obviated by our product. There’s a couple of intangible criteria as well that we think are really important; one is transparency, which I talked about in our comments.

We will expose to physicians how the medical note is built, that’s baked into the user interface. And we think that’s important, it’s important to show the sausage making to the physicians, so they have an appreciation for what the steps are. And then they can see where there’s areas where they might want to do something differently than what the models are doing. And that leads to the second intangible point, which is empowerment. They have the ability to control the look and feel and specific content that they want to see in that medical note without a lot of effort, and that’s the elegance of that particular product. And I think it’s our view that many physicians value that control and transparency. They go beyond the more objective metrics that we look at.