Patients need access to these treatments. They need reimbursed access. We’re creating a big new category in interventional dry eye.
Operator: One moment for our last question, please. And it comes from the line of Joanne Weunsch with Citi.
Unidentified Analyst: This is Anthony [ph] on for Joanne. Just going back to guidance, I just want to clarify the guidance you put out in Surgical Glaucoma that assumes that reimbursement is essentially unchanged for the year. So there’s no LCDs. And then in Dry Eye, could you maybe just talk about what your expectations are going into 2025? Do you expect to start the year with a large amount of covered lives? Or do you expect these payer wins to be more on a rolling basis?
Ali Bauerlein: Yes. So inherent in guidance is under the assumption that we are in the current operating environment of LCD coverage where OMNI continues to have broad access and coverage in the market which we think is fair and reasonable expectations for 2024. I’m sorry, what was the…
Paul Badawi: From a TearCare perspective, the work I described earlier, our payer team is engaged. There’s a lot of engagement with our providers and payers across the country. Right now, that’s more on the claims level. So working with providers and payers to ensure TearCare claims get reimbursed appropriately. Over time, in parallel with that effort, our market access team will be working on coverage policies. Now these policies have annual cycles but we will be doing that work this year, engaging with payers on policy-type coverage discussions and we’d expect to hopefully generate coverage policy wins in 2025. At that point, we have great expectations for the business.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] We have a question from Margaret Andrew with William Blair.
Margaret Kaczor: I wanted to maybe talk a little bit about some of the dynamics around getting formal coverage for canaloplasty and trabeculotomy. What steps have you taken at this point to kind of try to push that further? And any kind of other updates that you can share on the LCDs in the last several months? Any expectations for when we might hear any updates would be helpful.
Paul Badawi: Margaret, so just to quickly recap what happened in the second half of 2023 was an opportunity for us to engage with the 5 MACs, help better educate them on Sight Sciences, on the OMNI Surgical system, on the comprehensive outflow procedure furnished by the OMNI Surgical system and the most importantly, compelling long-term clinical evidence that we’ve generated for OMNI over the years. At the end of the year, it culminated with 2 important developments. One, the publication of our even longer-term 3-year prospective GEMINI study; as well as a meeting with the MACs following the society’s meeting with the MACs which was another opportunity for us and our clinical stakeholders in a number of our glaucoma surge in KOLs to help further educate the MACs on Sight Sciences OMNI and our clinical data.
We’ve been able to follow up. We intend to stay engaged with the payers throughout this year. We have followed up with the 5 MACs. In due course, we’ll continue to engage with other payers such as the other 2 MACs. And we believe, in addition to the clinical data that we had provided throughout 2023 which was substantial, we’re continuing to generate really meaningful clinical data this year. We should expect to see a number of compelling publications I had mentioned earlier, such as OMNI’s results in ethnic minorities, a meta-analysis of OMNI which reaches the level of hopefully Level 1 clinical evidence, long-term stand-alone OMNI outcomes. So with further clinical evidence, continued engagement with the payers this year, we feel that we’re very well prepared if and when LCDs are proposed again.
Margaret Kaczor: Okay. And then just to hit on the competitive standpoint one more time and relative to what’s assumed in guidance both for this year as well as for next year, what conversations are you guys having with clinicians and accounts in the field around using OMNI for stand-alone cases? You’re assuming utilization grows. So clearly, you’re hopefully hearing that within the field from your accounts. Does competition come up at all? Do you guys feel a need to change any commercial strategy? Or what kind of assurances can you kind of give us of what you’re hearing to support that utilization growth?
Matt Link: Yes, this is Matt. I appreciate the question. Maybe taking the second part of that question first in terms of commercial strategy. We talked a bit about the restructuring of the organization in the second half of last year and it really is intended to optimize our approach to the market as we continue to further segment the market based on the opportunities and given what we believe are unique opportunities for us or Sight Sciences uniquely positioned for given the comprehensive nature of OMNI and the associated efficacy. So from a competition standpoint, from a sales perspective, I believe we’re well positioned in strongly engaging the market and consistently receive the type of feedback we want to hear, given the confidence nature of OMNI and its ability to treat glaucoma in both combination MIGS as well as on a stand-alone basis.
So as it relates to stand-alone, we’re obviously in an evolving marketplace. And so we see sort of a rapid expansion of the opportunity for internal procedures, MIGS, in particular, in the treatment of glaucoma and ultimately stand-alone as a part of that. And so given the comprehensive nature of OMNI, the broad label and our ability to pursue those opportunities, we see — we continue to see significant opportunity there. We see strong engagement from physicians broadly and physician advocates. But ultimately, that’s something that we will continue to develop in the marketplace and the market is receptive to that again with the evolution of this interventional mindset. So from a competitive standpoint, I’d say the market conditions seem consistent with prior periods, in which case, Sight Sciences as an organization and particularly OMNI the procedure, I think is well positioned to continue to compete effectively and take share.
