Sidney Follow Up To Video Question Late Last Night
Got it Cache! Sidney is a good guy. Very different from any other CEO I have converged with. News Pre Market Monday. He also emailed back last night night after I responded about the videos with additional questions.
Thank you for your kind words.
I do not know how the market will react to this announcement. It takes time to absorb and then digest the information to understand what we are trying to do. You can understand why it was a challenge to put the information together to release and explain to the public.
The whole System was developed with a lot of thought. It may look simple but it took a bit of time to make it as uncomplicated as possible to make it easy for Healthcare Providers to use and patients to understand. We have now percolated it down to one number, a number used by healthcare providers. Frankly, from my many interviews with doctors in an attempt to market our system without the enhancements that I realised that the doctors pay lip service to blood glucose data but never look at them. They only look at A1C and generally very much delayed. Therefore, it allows diabetes to progress to unmanageable stages. Here, with a simple number of A1C, patients will also know how they are doing.
We do not have patents for insulin dose adjustment but to get a similar feature developed, it will take time. Also, if the feature is not FDA cleared, it will not have marketability. In addition, whoever wants to create a competing Insulin Dose Adjustment, that party will have to get the blood glucose management platform cleared by the FDA. This is no trivial task. I can tell you that from experience.
Predictive A1C and how we deploy it is getting patented. We filed the patents July/August If someone wants to duplicate, they can. The key is that no one will have the real life blood glucose data that we collected since September, 2014 to demonstrate how well their version of Predictive A1C will work. Of course, we will also prosecute as soon as we find out as well. We filed with a worldwide patent, not a U.S. centric patent.
With respect to the health insurance companies, as soon as one major insurer deploys the System, all will jump in. They are the ultimate herd mentality. That is the U.S. centric. The key is the Government health plans. They are insurers of last resort, I dare say the Governments are the insurer of last resort for all countries including the U.S. because of Medicare and Medicaid. They have the greatest motivation to insist on the deployment – slow the progression of disease. It will contain cost increases and get the patients who are not of retirement age to continue to be productive.
Yes, the market is very large – all 440 million+ diabetes patients are potential customers. What is more profitable will be the data collected. It will be a treasure for both pharmaceutical companies and health insurers. We have designed unique reports designed specifically with their interests in mind. This is unique information, not available anywhere else. On the other hand, all my competitors are looking at the insulin dependent patients and the high end competitors are focused on Type 1 diabetes patients. Our market is all diabetes patients.
You will see what I have planned for the pharmaceutical companies within the course of the next 6-9 months.
First, we need to get a commercial launch off the ground ASAP and we are targeting Alberta, Canada to be starting point. Simply, the reimbursement is in place to pay for test supplies and our platform.
That would mean proof of concept and from there, the real fun will begin.
We would welcome big pharmaceuticals to co-market with us. It will not be good for them to market under their own brand. They can certainly pay for the service for the insurance plans to collect the data for patient care. We can in turn sell them (both insurers and pharmas) analytic reports derived from the data for assessment of their competitive positions as well.
Someone has sent me comments from the investor boards essentially saying that we are pump and dump operation. Well, too bad for those folks. At some point, it will be too late to get on the moving train.
I look forward to that day.
Best
Sidney
