HealthStream, Inc. (NASDAQ:HSTM) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

So overall, we think we are well positioned as demonstrated by adding a 32-plus customers across that suite during the quarter. And also, we’re — it’s nice to see the subscription revenue starting to compound a little bit. And I think the number was 56%. Let me look back at my note. Maybe Scotty, what was the revenue growth rate year-over-year on CredentialStream?

Scott Roberts: I think you got it right, Bobby.

Robert Frist: Yes. I think it’s 56% and ShiftWizard was 30-something percent. So Yes. I think overall, I hope that answers the question. We feel it’s very competitive, a finalist in every deal we look at, and we believe we win more than we lose. So really excited about how well positioned that application suite is. We acquired several companies over a decade and rebuilt the core application set, and we have over 700 agreements on that core new application set and expanding, obviously, rapidly. So we’re excited.

Jared Haase: Okay. Great. And then just as a follow-up, I wanted to talk about staffing. It sounded like you mentioned labor costs were down a bit year-over-year. Can you just remind us where you’re at kind of relative to your broader hiring needs? I think last quarter, you talked about having a handful of open positions that you’re expecting to fill during the second half of the year. So maybe just a quick update of where we’re at and how we should sort of think about kind of a run rate for operating expenses going into 2024?

Robert Frist: Yes. I think we have about 50 open positions. I think we’re recruiting for about 20 of them. We have some new hiring models which are exciting where we hire kind of cohorts together and bring them in as a team on. For example, we just hired a development cohort for one of our applications, the ShiftWizard application, which allowed us to move the development of that from an offshore team to a HealthStream team. So we do have open positions and with the natural turn. We’re also using departure as an opportunity to reshape the business. And so we’ve got all of our managers thinking about that if people do elect to leave, we’re using that opportunity to think about our structure and where our emphasis is. We’re trying to put more emphasis on the customer and connectivity and on development.

And so those are 2 areas of relative investment. Overall, I’d say our employment numbers are fairly stable with the kind of puts and calls of natural turn performance-based terming and also the hiring that’s going on. So I think overall, around this 1,100 number is a good way to think about the scale of our workforce in the coming quarters.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Richard Close of Canaccord.

Richard Close: Great. Can you hear me okay?

Robert Frist: Yes, Richard.

Richard Close: Okay. Excellent. Well, first of all, congratulations on the success here. A great quarter. I was just curious on — you just mentioned the CredentialStream and revenues grew 56% in the quarter. ShiftWizard, I believe you said 33% over the prior quarter. And then just looking at those growth numbers your revenue growth overall was like 5%. So just curious there, is some of the growth in CredentialStream and ShiftWizard that you referenced, is that some cannibalization of the legacy products? I just thought with those numbers, total would be greater.

Robert Frist: Yes, yes. So there’s definitely some of that. As we know, we acquired a lot of applications and some of those we classify as legacy applications. And our goal is to move those customers. So that is true. Some of that comes from migration as we talked about. And some of it comes from new wins out in the market. And it’s probably around for credential anyway around 50-50, I believe, maybe I’m a little off on that. But just historically, I think in any given quarter, is a little bit of I guess you would call it cannibalization, but we call them successful migrations to a SaaS subscription application suite. So — but some of that growth number is the migration from the legacy applications over. And again, we celebrate those migrations.

And there are definitely new business on the newer applications. And we think on CredentialStream, it’s probably about half. And I’ll see if anybody texts me one of my officers anything different than that. But I’m going to say ballpark the last few quarters is probably around half.

Richard Close: Okay. So the lower growth rate overall for total revenue doesn’t it imply like customer churn, the learning platform or anything significant like that?

Robert Frist: Well, there’s always a little of that. We’ve got a lot of market share. And so there’s always a little come and going. I think what we’re trying to highlight most recently, though, is where — once we get a customer in for 3 or 4 of our products, they seem more likely to go from 3 or 4 to 8 to 10 than they do to leave. Now when we have just 1 product, we got a toe in the door a few years ago and maybe they change — they make the difference in business decision on that product, that’s where we lose them on that product, and we also lose them on the hStream platform. And so I think a couple of quarters ago, that happened on a few accounts. We don’t consider them like real ecosystem partners. And so we’re really excited this quarter to see the change in a couple of our key big renewals.

This quarter went the other way. And so we’re really excited to watch them go from 5 products to 11 products and doubling their subscriber revenue per person per year. And obviously, that’s more typical because overall, we have growth, and we have growth in our newer product categories.

Richard Close: I know you’re probably not going to want to answer this question, but is there any way to sort of size as a percentage of overall revenues like the Learning versus Credential and ShiftWizard in terms of…

Robert Frist: Well, I think you are right because we’re really — what we’re trying to get, Richard, and we’re just not there. We have this — I’ll call it a very immature metric, this hStream subscription. In fact, we’re still — a lot of work to do to clarify differences in subscriber and a subscription to — we’ve broken down this platform hStream into hStream for learning. Almost think of it as a membership in our learning network, hStream for credentialing and hStream for scheduling. So we’ve created these value bundles that are kind of infrastructure that are bundled with the sale of each core application. And what we’re trying to get, obviously, is to sort out how many unique individual professionals are in our entire network.