CARETEQ (ASX:CTQ) Presentation, FNN Investor Event, May 2022

Company Presentations

CARETEQ Limited (ASX:CTQ) Executive Chairman Mark Simari presents on the assistive living market, CARETEQ's proprietary platform, business model, achievements since listing, international expansion, outlook and growth strategy.

Thanks Tim, for having me today. It's a pleasure to present Careteq to your viewership. Careteq is a recently listed ASX med tech company.

It listed back in January of this year, and our focus is assisted living technologies and really tapping into the thematics of the industry. The tailwinds are very strong. Our focus is in some key areas such as falls detection, vital signs monitoring, activity reporting, and medication management and adherence. Our key markets are, we're a B2B SaaS based platform with a proprietary portal that collects information from various hardware devices, interprets that information, and sends out alerts to whoever needs to get those alerts to ensure someone of an elderly nature who's either at home or in a facility or in a hospital for that matter, fallen over, unable to get help, unable to lift themselves up and so forth. And so that's pretty much our mantra, and we're very excited to be part of that ecosystem delivering good outcomes for people in need.

From a board point of view, a lot of experience. I won't repeat the names on the screen as you can see them. Got a lot of experience in the healthcare sector, mainly in other listed companies. We've built successful channel distribution of equipment and consumables, and now that the team has come across here to med tech or health tech initiative through Careteq.

I mentioned earlier, the thematics of the industry are very strong. We have an aging population. The amount of falls patients heading into hospitals is not only clogging up the system, but it shows that a lot of people need help. It's quite an underspend in the sector from a technology point of view. So the findings from the Royal Commission, which is some time now, really emphasise the need of the industry to invest in technology to increase the levels of care that are provided. And so we're dovetailing into that initiative, which we're starting to see the early science coming through, notwithstanding current elections and all the various promises that are made.

As I said, we have an aging population, so the amount of elderly people we're heading about 80 years old, 90 years old, is just growing from month to month to month. And so we're dovetailing to that thematic. And then you have the medication issues associated with both home care and in aged care facilities. And so we're quite passionate about medication management and adherence so that they have comfortable lives at the back end of their lifestyle.

We're in an emerging but very large and growing market. One of the things that pleases us in this sector, or sub-sector that we operate in is there's no behemoth. We're not competing against a very large company who controls all the market. This is a very much an emerging market. Assisted living technology's young, in its infancy stages but when you look at the amount of funding globally, and the people who need assisted living technology, you can see from the numbers on the tables there that it's quite a large opportunity that we're targeting into.

Our focus is elderly care, which is home care or independent living environments. There's aged care, disability care, which through the NDIS we tap into, and then there's accident and rehab and more to do with mental health issues. We work with the TAC on brain injury monitoring and so forth.

As far as what our proprietary platform is, so we have, as I said, a portal that has an AI framework in place where we interpret data from various hardware devices. Some of those devices are ours, and some of them are where we have exclusive distribution agreements with. And I'll elaborate those a bit further on, but our platform is very robust. It's at an enterprise level and it collects all the data from the various data collection points, interprets it, and then sends alerts to various recipients that require those alerts.

So to give you an example, in an aged care facility, we integrate into their systems and middleware programs and where an alert is given it can be done at a facility level. So there might have a 100 bed facility and they have a dashboard on their computer, and an alert will come up for room 105 or Mrs. Jones, or whoever it may be, and then it can be done at a regional level, so it could be at a Victorian or a national level across all sites and then an alert comes up. Each facility and their respective groups will determine their hierarchy of alerts that they require, but the platform has the capacity to be at that enterprise level. And so it's very eclectic in who it integrates with and the devices it can incorporate into its ecosystem.

As it sits today, we have radar sensor technology that clearly focuses on falls detection. And so that's integrated in our system. We work closely with a company out of Sweden called Raytelligence. Their product is called Eazense, and we have exclusive rights over that product for Australia and New Zealand and the US. And it's a fully integrated product that is now in field trials amongst a number of aged care groups here in Australia. And we've got our first one in the US coming up quite soon.

We also do vital science monitoring. This is more an emerging solution. We're working with a number of companies to bring their hardware. We're currently integrating a number of pieces of hardware, which over the coming months we'll be able to come to market with vital signs monitoring solutions and alerts. The vital signs monitoring sort of dovetails into a term called RPM, which is an acronym for remote patient monitoring. Remote patient monitoring is definitely a growth area for us. And I'll elaborate that a bit further, but yeah, vital signs monitoring and integration into our ecosystem SOFIHUB is important.

Then we have medication management solutions. So we are exploring a number of pill box technologies that we can integrate into our systems. We're looking at technology in how medication reviews are undertaken. We've also created programs where, through medication management deliverable, we're creating efficiencies for aged care facilities, that they can either have significant savings from a labour point of view, or have their current labour work in a more efficient manner, and we're seeing some really great early signs on that.

We have home care assistive technology which I should say all these pieces of hardware do integrate together. But the home assistive technology is effectively a box that sits in your home with some sensors and it monitors your activity as two-way voice, helps with medication reminders, temperature, and the like. And so it's mainly for the home care. We don't really see that product working in aged care or in hospitals, but for the home care market it's an appealing product.

And then we have what we call TEQ-secure, which is a wearable beacon or key ring, you can use it as a key ring holder. And it's a portable tracking device that has geotracking capabilities. It can be used for falls detection when they're outside of the home and not in radar proximity. It has a SIM card in it so it's a telecommunications product. And so people can call and through the system, if something ... if they go out of their geofencing region there's an alert sent to a carer or a child that mum or dad, or Mr. Jones, whoever it may be, has left an area and you might want to check on them.

And so there's a set of alert protocols associated with that tracking. And that's the ecosystem as it's today but it continually evolves. We're looking at a number of products to add to this ecosystem, to provide an even deeper solution to the marketplace to meet the needs we're seeing out there.

I've highlighted a number of these products, but you have those key areas again, falls detection, the vital signs hospital and the home is a very key area for us. There's a host of solutions in that space. And they dovetail a lot with hospital outpatient programs. So we're having discussions with a number of hospitals on their requirements, what they'd like to see, what's nirvana for them. And then look to see how our solutions can support those initiatives that they're looking to provide and take advantage of the hospital and the home programs.

Medication management, personal security, so the TEQ-Secure down the bottom left hand corner is a key component of that. And then our pro solutions is effectively our enterprise offering to the marketplace that we work with on a B2B level. And some B2B partners would like us to integrate into their systems, and so we call that our pro solutions offering so that we can be bespoken and acclimatise our offering to their offering so that they can be effective and deliver it to their clients. A couple of clients that we work with are Threat Protect and ADT in the home security market. And then there's a number of others it's emerging now with, in the age care space where we all have similar type environments.

Our business model is threefold. So we effectively have hardware sales of either our own manufactured products or exclusive distribution agreements. We're not a hardware company per se, but the pieces of hardware are an important part of the ecosystem to collect the data. It's an unavoidable part of our business, and so we embrace it and we look for best in class solutions to fulfil the needs in the marketplace.

And that no piece of hardware is brought into the system, or is an offering if it doesn't attract the SaaS subscription. And so that's the core side of our business is the SaaS portal and getting users on that portal. And so the hardware units are drivers of that SaaS subscription for the solutions it provides. And then we also have contractual revenues in our business unit ward, medication management, where we have some 30-odd thousand aged care beds under the license for across 2, 250 aged care providers ... well, not providers, sites, doing their medication management reviews on behalf of the facility themselves in conjunction with the government initiative on keeping pharmaceutical costs down within aged care. And so that's an exciting area for us, given our passion for medication management.

Our achievements to date, so post our listing in January, we've signed an exclusive with Raytelligence on the Eazense radar, and that takes us out to the US, and we're seeing a number of early stage pipeline opportunities emerging in the US so we're quite excited by that. We've got some leading distributors that we're working with over there. We're in the process of marrying our first reference sites at the trial stage. And so, yeah, it's pretty exciting early stage, but pretty exciting what's happening in the US.

We also have quite a large pipeline of trials happening here in Australia. We've got some five to six larger groups trialling our solutions, and they'll be running out over the next two to three months and we look forward to fulfilling on those, and hopefully that translates to them coming on board with us in a more structured nature and us integrating into their systems and offerings. We'll continue to make further investments into new technologies, either through OEM partnerships or operating them ourselves. We're in partnership now with RMIT on assisted living technology initiatives. And so we're really excited about some new products that we can create with them and their skill set.

Baptist Care's a recent signing, and it's across 75 locations across Australia and we look forward to working with them. And we're really starting to get some penetration into the NDIS and its providers as well. So the foundations have been laid for what we believe will be a very successful next year, 12 to 24 months.

As far as from a financial highlights, it's still early stage for us. But in total, our first half, we've seen some okay growth, especially at a SaaS subscription level. The run rate currently is sitting higher than that. We're probably circa around 20,000 a month of recurring revenue, and from month to month that's slowly growing, as is our R2, but yeah, all and all we're pretty pleased how things are traveling from the financials point of view. We're well cashed-up to take advantage of the opportunities available to us. And we look forward to delivering on our strategy over the next 24 months, 12 to 24 months.

Just talking bit more depth about the Australian partnerships, so on the screen you'll see some of the partners that we have. We value these partnerships and we're continually growing them, expanding into different verticals and valuating to our business through their business. And if we work closely together, we can all achieve success in penetrating the assisted living technology, the merging of that, so thank you to all those partners.

From the international side, so RehabMart and Senior Safety Technologies is two of our key partners over there. One of them has helped us with our reference side and there's a number of other pipeline opportunities that as they come to fruition and have some gravitas we'll communicate to the market, but suffice to say at this early stage of our US initiative, and we are doing that at the B2B level, so we're not looking to put on a large labour force in the US, the early signs are very pleasing, and we're quite excited about the road ahead.

A different project, but still targeting what a passion of ours is, we have the SiTa Foundation collaboration where we are the software partner to a domestic violence device. It's slowly progressing to where we'll be able to commence field trials quite soon. And so we look forward to continue to support the SiTa Foundation and tackling domestic violence and providing a world-class device that really assists in helping victims of domestic violence at a much earlier stage than they do today. The device is quite ... in simple terms is a small device that sits in ... can be clipped into a bra strap or a belt or wherever someone would like to conceal it. And on being potentially attacked or being attacked, there has sensitivity activators on the device. And once they activate it, it connects up to the 911 service in the States. And there's an immediate response team that comes to help that victim or potential victim. So it's quite an exciting project to be involved with. The statistics are quite scary on domestic violence, but not just in the States, but across the world, and so if we can play a small part in making a difference in that space, we're very proud to be associated with it.

I mentioned earlier about hospital in the home. We really see that as another vertical that we can really tackle. A lot of our offering dovetails into what's required for hospital in the home market solutions. So we're in discussions with a number of hospital groups to provide those solutions. And it sort of does dovetail with remote patient monitoring solutions, so a lot of you'll see duplication in the offerings and so forth, but yeah, they sort of target different types of verticals. RPM, as we call it, is more from a telehealth and continued monitoring solution. And hospital home has a shorter timeframe where hospitals try and keep people out of hospitals and keep them at home longer post-operation and so forth. But it is a large growing market, and we look forward to tapping into that opportunity over the coming months.

Our strategy going forward is obviously heavily, heavily weighted towards sales and marketing. We IPOd and got our investors to invest in the company for really to commercialise what we have today. And so a lot of effort and resources have been put into fulfilling that and taking advantage of the opportunities available to us. But having said that, product development is also important. As I was saying in the industry, if you stop you die, and product development is very much of that notion. If we remain in our roles and what we have today, and don't continually evolve the product range in the offering, then yeah, the market will move ahead of us and the opportunity will pass by so we're still heavily focused on product development.

International expansion is important. We are focused on the US at the moment and putting a lot of energy into supporting our VP of global sales over there and our B2B partners, and so we look forward to that delivering over time. And then lastly, which is more of a medium to longer term strategy is M&A. We do come across a lot of M&A opportunities in this space. And if and when we feel it's appropriate to explore those and bring them in, then we'll certainly be looking to undertake that as well.

For the year ahead, so obviously we're looking to scale our operations. We're still quite early stage. We have a lot of verticals and tentacles within those verticals. And so we're hell-bent on capitalising on those relationships and channels that we've created and have. We feel we have a great foundation for growth.

The product is at a good position. We have a good pipeline of new products coming on board to fulfil a solution to the marketplace that it needs. And so we, yeah, we believe that foundation will turn into momentums for future years going forward. The one thing about our model, we don't need a huge amount of ... although we want a huge amount, we don't have a huge amount of subscriber requirement to at least get to a cash flow broker even in the current cost structure. And so 15,000 subscribers approximately would deliver a break-even on a cash basis for us. And so we're sitting at just under 4,000 at the moment. And so the path to 15,000 is not unsurmountable. We feel we could do that in a relatively short to medium-term timeframe.

We're committed to delivering on the growth, and we want to take advantage of the tailwinds that the industry's got with the aging population and increased assisted living technology focus to increase the levels of care so we feel we're well positioned at the moment.

So I just want to thank you for having me today. Tim, thank you for hosting me. And I hope all the viewers take a bit of a deeper look onto Careteq and where we're heading and what we're doing and join us on the journey. Thank you.
 

Ends

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