Finance News Network Transcription of Discussion at the CEO ASX Sessions with Volpara Health Technologies Limited (ASX:VHT) CEO, Dr Ralph HighnamVolpara Health Technologies Limited
(ASX:VHT) CEO, Dr Ralph Highnam discusses its breast cancer diagnosis products and growth plans.
500,000 women a year die of breast cancer, thousands of those die across Australia and New Zealand. Breast cancer screening saves lives, but we believe there are better ways of doing it. In 2009, four of the world’s top breast imaging scientists came together, which was the genesis for the company, to start working out how to personalise breast cancer screening, based upon risk.
Breast cancer is detected by mammography and mammography is very good at detecting cancer in certain kinds of breast. But certain breasts, what they call dense breasts with lots of glandular tissue, actually can hide breast cancer. Also those women are at greater risk of developing cancer in the first place. Judging density by eye is actually very difficult. So our product actually comes in and does an objective automated measurement of breast density.
VolparaDensity is integrated very easily into the clinics, there’s an international standard called DICOM, which basically makes integration easy. We install the software, the x-ray machine is set up to send images to us, we process and we send out the result in DICOM format - all straight forward. The time scale is from first contact, through to sale and installation can be anything from a few weeks. Such as we had in Perth recently, through to up to a year or more, for the very large academic sites. With VolparaDensity, we’ve become a global brand over the last five years. But we’ve realised that each of our software systems accepts data from 10,000 women or so, each year. There’s an incredible amount of information in that data.
So by moving to the Cloud, we’re able to apply advanced data analytics to really draw out important messages, for the breast-imaging site. Such as for example, one of the x-ray machines might not be functioning properly and the radiation dose might be high. Or the technology might be over-compressing the breast, the women are feeling a lot of pain and therefore, they’re not coming back for breast screening. So moving to the Cloud has allowed us to really open up our product offerings to not only the radiologist, but also the breast centre manager, the chief technologist and the chief physicist, to help a lot more women to have breast cancer detected early.
Currently our product is a hybrid solution, so part of it is in hospital and part of it is in the Cloud. We are set on returning a density score to the woman within two minutes, because it’s such important information. And we don’t feel we can achieve that at the moment with current Internet speeds. But long-term, certainly our aim is to move completely onto the Cloud. That is to start expanding as well to allow benchmarking as well, for example between different sites or different clinics.
VolparaEnterprise is on the Cloud and it is recurring revenue software as a service model. So on that basis, there’s an annual fee for each licenced user. So a chief technologist would have a licence paid annually and on top of that, there’s a paper patient as well. We’re a global brand in terms of breast density and we’re world leaders in that. In 12 month’s time with the new cherry-picked top class sales team, we want to be moving in very significant sales across the US. And we want to be opening up new territories and actually starting to bring forward some new Cloud based products.
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