Silk Road Medical, Inc (NASDAQ:SILK) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Suraj Khalia: Fair enough. Hey, Lucas, one follow-up question for you and I will hop back in queue. In your prepared remarks you mentioned about, and I am paraphrasing here, mining physician behavior to see how to better engage the physician. Again, I am paraphrasing. What I am curious about, Lucas is, given the newness of the NCD, do we have enough data points to mine any changes in physician behavior, hence make any corrective actions? Gentlemen, thank you for taking my questions.

Lucas Buchanan: Thanks for the question, Suraj. I think it has less to do with reimbursement in this disease state. As we have always said, the brain is the end organ here, which is incredibly unforgiving and what could go wrong in a prophylactic procedure intended to prevent a future stroke is major stroke, death, heart attack, permanent cranial nerve injury. So the stakes are really high and physician behavior is derivative of what’s at stake and confidence has a lot to do with it. And when we say the inertia of CEA, that’s another way of saying their confidence in a procedure that they performed for a long time. And so that’s the same type of confidence and the same type of barriers to entry we will ultimately build around TCAR.

And the good news is we know we could do it because we have done right, we have got a lot of TCAR first physicians that have crossed that chasm and have really gone from not confident to highly confident and that’s reflected in their adoption patterns. And so when we talk about behavior, it’s really confident in other key variables that allow us to look at adoption trends and what’s working really well, what’s not working so well and how do we continue to change and evolve to drive the business in this disease state with this end organ.

Suraj Khalia: Thank you.

Operator: Standby for our next question. This question comes from Michael Polark of Wolfe Research. Michael, please go ahead with your question.

Michael Polark: Hey. Thank you. Two for me. One, the balloon, Lucas, would you be willing to frame up numerically how much balloon contribution year-to-date?

Lucas Buchanan: Thanks for the question, Mike. So I’d say we are slightly ahead on our ASP expectations and slightly behind on our utilization expectations. And obviously, those two things are related and so that is — there’s still a lot of room to run in terms of driving the balloon utilization and more accounts and more procedures. So we are making good progress. But, no, we don’t break out product level detail, Mike.

Michael Polark: The follow-up maybe for Chas and maybe again five days in a question that’s unfair. So if that’s the answer, that’s the answer. But I look at Silk and I know there’s nuances here, but your customers are principally the vascular surgeon community and this NCD kind of levels the playing field with interventionalists. And I guess, as you look at this at a really high level with multiyear lens, doing the diligence ahead of saying yes to the job, do you think there’s a path here where Silk in addition to continuing to serve the surgical community engages with interventionalists in a bigger way?

Chas McKhann: I appreciate the question and we are going to look at over time broadly a whole range of strategic options where we want to be over time if you take a lens of multiyear and we are going to have those discussions. So allow me to spend time with the team really understanding experience to-date, as well as other plans. I like the fact that right now we are a pretty focused company and we got to focus on that and keep it going. But then I also like to go back, that creates new opportunities for growth down the line and that could be international opportunities or it could be adjacent opportunities. But at this point, what that looks like, I am not prepared to sort of put a stake in the ground. We will — and this, by the way, there’s already been a fair amount of work done internally. So I am going to learn from that, understand where we are thinking about where to go and then come back to you guys with a more robust comprehensive plan.

Michael Polark: Thank you.

Operator: One moment for our next question. Our question comes from Neil Chatterji of B. Riley. Neil, please go ahead with your question. Seeing there are no further questions, I’d like to turn it back over to Chas McKhann for closing remarks.

Chas McKhann: Yeah. Thank you for joining us today. I just want to leave you with some final thoughts, especially as we pull back just from reporting on the quarter. TCAR truly is an outstanding procedure. There are proven — the proven benefits for patients, physicians and the healthcare system, as well as the support of the really robust clinical evidence is really unmatched in this space. And at Silk Road, because of all of that, we aspire and this hasn’t changed at all to establish TCAR as the standard-of-care in the treatment of carotid artery disease and we believe that patients deserve the benefits of this therapy. The company has made a lot of progress towards achieving that objective over time and we have a strong team in place.

Going forward, as I mentioned a few times, we are going to really dig into the business and work to deliver on that promise of this therapy. To all of our investors, we very much appreciate your support and look forward to sharing more in the coming months. Thank you all for joining us today.

Operator: Thank you for your participation in today’s conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.

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