T2 Biosystems 4Q 2019
February 24, 2020
Under Tony’s leadership, we will focus 80% of our direct commercial resources on the U.S. market. We will change our hospital targeting to focus on departments with high-risk patients, like oncology, transplant, and intensive care. We will focus more on adoption of our technology and increasing the utilization of our tests, as these are better metrics for our business, and less on the number of instruments we sell or place in a given quarter. We will expand our messaging within the hospital to place greater emphasis on clinicians, as they are essential to integrate T2 testing into the sepsis protocols, which will drive adoption and increase test utilization.
We will continue to expand access to hospital accounts through group purchasing organization agreements in the U.S. market. As previously mentioned, we gained access to nearly 4,000 U.S. hospitals through a Breakthrough Technology contract from Premier during 2019. To further expand access and contracted pricing to U.S. hospitals, we are in discussion with other group purchasing organizations and anticipate adding new contracts in 2020.
Previous commercial plans, and sales incentive plans, were focused on instrument placements, resulting in an installed base of T2Dx Instruments with low test utilization. At the end of 2019, our worldwide “active” installed base of T2Dx Instruments was 91, of which 40 were in the U.S. market. The test utilization among the active T2Dx Instrument installed base in the U.S. market was approximately $50,000 annually, which we aim to increase to approximately $100,000 by the end of 2020. Our top customers have achieved annual test utilization exceeding $200,000 per instrument, which is our long-term target. To support this test utilization target, we have aligned our U.S. sales strategy and sales incentive plans to emphasize adoption and test utilization.
Outside the U.S., we will maintain a small team to support a network of commercial distribution partners. We believe there are opportunities to strengthen our international business by partnering with one or more strategic commercial distributors. We are in discussion with several potential partners and anticipate entering into the first such agreement during the first half of 2020.
Given my commercial experience, I will be personally involved in our sales and marketing effort and expect to support our team in targeting and closing key partnerships.
Moving to our second priority, improving our operations:
To achieve short and long-term success, our cost structure must not only reflect our aspirations, but must also be grounded in today’s reality. We must make smart investments in the areas that best support our strategy, while applying greater discipline to reduce spending and how we manage expenses in all other areas.