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Q4 2024 American Well Corp Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Sue Dooley; Head of Investor Relations; American Well Corp

Ido Schoenberg; Chairman of the Board, Co-Chief Executive Officer; American Well Corp

Mark Hirschhorn; Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer; American Well Corp

Craig Hettenbach; Analyst; Morgan Stanley

Stan Berenshteyn; Analyst; Wells Fargo Securities

Jailendra Singh; Analyst; Truist Securities

Eric Percher; Analyst; Nephron Research

Charles Rhyee; Analyst; TD Cowen

Matthew Shea; Analyst; Needham & Co

Kevin Caliendo; Analyst; UBS Securites

David Larsen; Analyst; BTIG

Jessica Tassan; Analyst; Piper Sandler Companies

Presentation

Operator

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to Amwell's fourth-quarter 2024 earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions)
I would now like to hand the call over to Sue Dooley, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Sue Dooley

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Amwell's conference call to discuss our fourth fiscal quarter of 2024. This is Sue Dooley of Amwell Investor Relations. Joining me today are: Amwell's Chairman and CEO, Dr. Ido Schoenberg; and Mark Hirschhorn, our CFO and Chief Operating Officer.
Earlier today, we distributed a press release detailing our announcement. Our earnings report is posted on our website at investors.amwell.com and is also available through normal news sources. This conference call is being webcast live on the IR page of our website, where a replay will be archived.
Before we begin our prepared remarks, I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that during the call, we will make forward-looking statements regarding projected operating results and anticipated market opportunities. This forward-looking information is subject to the risks and uncertainties described in our filings with the SEC, and actual results or events may differ materially.
Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update or revise these forward-looking statements. On the call, we'll refer to both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures is provided in our posted earnings release. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Ido.

Ido Schoenberg

Thank you, Sue, and good evening, everyone. Q4 marked the close of a transformative year for Amwell. In 2024, we refreshed and refined our strategy. We increased our focus on our core mission and matured our company to deliver efficiently. We also prepared to realize the potential of our unified technology-enabled care platform.
I want to start by sharing some of our key accomplishments of the year:
First, together with our latest partners, we are completing the stage launch of our full solution across the Military Health System, our most significant growth initiative in the company's history. Second, we made significant progress in our path to achieving cash flow positive results next year, while further strengthening our robust cash position.
We drove efficiency with focused cost reduction measures. We also improved our quality of revenue and margins. These initiatives are showing up in a steady, better-than-expected quarterly improvements in our adjusted EBITDA.
Third, we established a leaner and more nimble leadership structure, which we believe will sharpen the focus and efficiency of our company as we advance our efforts to propel profitable growth. The highlight of these changes is the expansion of Mark Hirschhorn's role beyond CFO to include Chief Operating Officer.
This year, we're establishing the groundwork for positive cash flow in 2026. The drivers underscoring these initiatives are increasing subscription software revenues and aligning our costs. We are targeting a meaningful margin expansion; and this year, we aim to improve our adjusted EBITDA by over 60%.
I would now like to take a moment to briefly review a few other accomplishments from our Q4. As we continue to evaluate our portfolio of assets, we divested Amwell Psychiatric Care, our legacy psychiatric staffing business. We determined that APC did not meet our threshold of being an integral part of the Amwell core offering and was not advancing our profitable growth.
This transaction helped us focus our resources on our core platform and bolsters our balance sheet significantly by adding up to $30 million in cash. Also during Q4, we signed an agreement to add Vida Health to our growing portfolio of clinical programs, expanding patient access to obesity and diabetes care, including GLP-1s.
With this partnership, our clients can offer patients a broader set of valuable services through their Amwell platform. Our platform provides individuals with a delightful single entry point to a comprehensive array of clinical and behavioral programs, including obesity care and related illnesses.
In Q4, we delivered considerable value for our clients, led by our DHA deployment. Since our last update, we can share that many of our programs are now fully deployed across the Military Health Systems and feedback is very positive. The remainder of our programs will be live across the AMHS enterprise in the first half of the year with the final expansion of on-demand visits and complete international deployment expected in early Q3.
And we completed renewals across several Blue Cross Blue Shield plans as well as with a large national health plan in Nevada, The Clinic, and Intermountain Healthcare. Importantly, the HSC in Ireland continues expanding its use of our Digital Behavioral Health programs. Our Q4 performance demonstrates our existing client base is a fertile ground for future growth.
In addition to the strong software growth we are guiding for this year, our sales insights are resulting in improved visibility as we look to expand further across the commercial and government space. We are expanding our deal pipeline.
RFP traction with payers and health systems is significantly larger and of higher quality today than it was at this point last year. And based on our effective execution in the government space, we have in our sights expanding our market opportunity there. On the heels of this progress, we enter 2025 with momentum and unprecedented focus with market dynamics working in our favor.
Outside Amwell, we observed two trends that could help accelerate our growth, growing consumer readiness to start their health care journey online and expansion in innovators offering new and improved technology-enabled clinical programs.
With our success in strategic deployments like the Military Health System, we believe we have cemented our role as the technology-enabled care partners that health care organizations are turning to as they seek to modernize and achieve operational and clinical goals.
Here's how we are seeing this play out: As more patients go online to get care, our platform offers a single delightful patient experience to help orchestrate access to a large and growing number of clinical programs. Payers and health systems value being able to offer one comprehensive technology-enabled care solution fully embedded in their own digital assets.
They see the benefit of having a common patient care access pathway, making patient acquisition and retention more effective. Payers and health systems also like the flexibility of dynamically choosing their preferred set of clinical programs and offering different ones to varied patient cohorts. They desire the convenience and efficiency of having Amwell integrate relationships with multiple clinical program vendors.
Finally, our investments in a common longitudinal patient-centric data structure is resonating with them. Payers and health systems see it as a powerful instrument to improve navigation and patient experience with the promise of unified analytics and reporting.
In addition, as more innovators leverage technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to offer more effective clinical programs, they too reach out to us. Integrating with the Amwell platform allows them to reduce customer acquisition costs, demonstrate better engagement and drive results. We are encouraged by the clarity of our value proposition and the way it is resonating across the market.
With our healthy balance sheet and improved financial visibility, we have high conviction in our path to profitability, supported by the following top priorities. First is growth. We will work to deliver excellence, showcase our value and accelerate growth by working with our strategic partners and by expanding our presence within existing clients.
Our key growth initiatives for 2025 include: full execution on our deliverable with the Military Health System; actively opening new government channels; pursuing new payer and health system contracts in competitive RFPs; and adding several more third-party clinical solutions to our platform, bolstering our high-margin revenue contribution over time. Second is realizing a higher mix of highly predictable recurring revenue.
By aligning our existing and new product initiatives with our revenue quality goals, we will continue to improve our revenue mix of subscription-based software. Finally, and critically important is efficiency. We will continue reducing our overall costs while focusing on our core Amwell portfolio of services, centering the energies of our company behind monetizing our platform.
In summary, during 2025, we will pursue these key initiatives as we continue to enable the digital aspirations of health care organizations with long-term profitable growth well within our sights.
With that, I would like to turn the call over to Mark to review our financials, our strategic priorities for the coming year and our guidance. Mark?