Hello. Okay, so the format for today is Rick and Ancila will walk us through the results which were released this morning to the ASX. They're also up on the MedAdvisor website. Should take about 15 minutes-20 minutes. And after that, we will follow on with a quick, or say, 10 minutes-15 minute Q&A session, and I'll then pass back to Rick for closing remarks. If you'd like to ask a question, you can do so using the Q&A tab in the ribbon at the bottom of your screen, and we'll get through as many questions as we can in the time that we have. But, for now, I'd like to hand over the floor to Rick, who will get us on the road. Thanks, Rick.
Okay. Thanks, Jane. Good morning, and I want to thank everyone for joining us this morning. My name is Rick Ratliff, and as Jane mentioned, I'm the CEO and Managing Director of MedAdvisor Solutions. This morning we're going to go through our first half update, and just to give you a sense of the flow, if we can go to the agenda slide, slide number 2. First, we're going to spend some time, I'll spend a little bit of time taking you through a high-level view of the accomplishments in the first half of FY 2024. And then, Ancila and I are actually going to step you through our financial and operational update in much more detail. And then, I'll take you through a discussion on our plans for investment in our future growth.
And then finally, we'll wrap up with a view on our outlook for the second half of FY 2024 and beyond. So, let's take a look at the overview of the first half. If we'll go to slide 4. For those of you that are fairly new to our business, just real fast, MedAdvisor Solutions is a global leader of pharmacy-driven patient engagement solutions. We provide individualized experiences for patients, which help with removing barriers to care. That's our primary focus. We'll talk a little bit more about that as we get into the strategy. But, for the highlights for the half, we recorded record revenue of AUD 75.5 million for the half. This number was up 18% in comparison to the same period in the prior year. And, we managed to achieve these revenues with a gross margin of 57.6%.
So, we're really pleased with the results, and we'll talk in more detail on those in just a minute. Also, at a high level, our vaccine program revenue diversified substantially in the half. We now are delivering programs across seven vaccine categories, and vaccine programs are representing about 55% of our U.S. revenue in the first half. In addition, the full impact of the FY 2023 GuildLink acquisition has come through, and an outstanding 95% of Australian pharmacies are now running our software. This and a price increase implemented in FY 2023 drove excellent growth in our software as a service revenue, which was up 15.5% on the prior corresponding period. Also, after extensive review of our U.K. operations and the best way forward, we finalized an initial investment in the U.K.-based Charac.
We'll talk a little bit more about Charac later, but this has allowed us to scale back our own U.K. operations and associated fixed costs associated with those operations. It's also creating an opportunity for MedAdvisor to expand our services at a faster pace and lower cost in the U.K., ANZ, as well as the U.S. Like I said, we'll talk more about that later in the presentation. We were selected as the preferred software provider for the North Queensland Community Pharmacy Scope of Practice Pilot. You've probably heard some about this. We're very excited about the opportunity. This has followed on from the successful UTI and oral contraceptive programs that we've run with pharmacies in Queensland, New South Wales, Western Australia, and Victoria.
It's establishing a platform for us for growth in Australia and New Zealand, as we'll talk about more today, but in FY 2025, FY 2026, and beyond. Finally, we've completed our planning for our five-year growth strategy. There's a section in the presentation later where we'll talk more about our plan to invest, how we're going to drive further stability in our foundation and our cost basis to help us to create a framework for sustained profitable growth. So, if we'll turn to slide 5, we're now going to move into our first half financial and operational progress. I'm going to turn it over to Ancila, who's going to spend some time on the financials, starting with our group financial highlights for the first half of FY 2024. So, Ancila, over to you.
Thank you. Thank you, Rick. We had very clear momentum when you look at our results year-over-year, which led to another record half-year performance. I'd like to summarize the numbers on this page. So group revenue experienced a notable year-on-year uplift of 17.8%, which was on a very strong base of last year, which was AUD 64.1 million. FY 2021 one half revenue was AUD 75.5 million, and this was driven by program expansions in both U.S. and Australia. Gross profit was up 13.3%, finishing at AUD 43.5 million as compared to AUD 38.4 million in one half FY 2023. Our gross margin was down 2.4 percentage points, finishing at 57.6% versus 60% in the prior corresponding period. Now, I'd like a quick note here on margin, and we will discuss this more in detail later in the presentation. This is very much in line with what we see as good performance.
We expect to see this margin move around slightly as it relates to our mix of digital and traditional revenue. As we onboard new clients, products, and categories, some programs initially launch through the traditional programs. When we look at EBITDA, it was up 20.9% to AUD 10.4 million in comparison with AUD 8.6 million in one half FY 2023. Our NPAT was up 23.4% to AUD 5.8 million in the first half of FY 2024 versus AUD 4.7 million in the first half of FY 2023. We have been focused on building our foundation for sustained profitable growth. MedAdvisor Solutions is on track to deliver profitable growth in the full year FY 2024. If we go to slide 7 now, thank you, George. As mentioned earlier, we have been very pleased with just how much we've managed to improve our EBITDA in the first half of FY 2024.
On this slide, we present our EBITDA adjusted for non-cash share-based payment expenses. Our adjusted EBITDA improved 24% year-over-year from AUD 9.6 million in one half FY 2023 to AUD 11.9 million in one half FY 2024. Operating leverage from the increased vaccine programs, combined with the full-year benefits of the GuildLink acquisition and SaaS platform fee price increases, has resulted in an EBITDA uplift of AUD 5 million. This improved profitability increased our confidence in our ability to invest in a targeted manner for initiatives that will underpin our future growth. On our cash slide here, given the seasonal nature of our business, we finished the first half with a strong cash position of AUD 22.5 million, which has created opportunities for us to fund strategic investment in our growth. Receipts from customers and payments to suppliers saw strong growth both from our U.S. and Australian operations.
This can also be attributed to our very highly disciplined approach to management of capital. We spent an initial GBP 500,000 on our investment in Charac in the U.K. In addition, we have invested GBP 800,000 in developing functionality in our Plus One system to support the full scope of practice work. This platform can be rolled out and leveraged at scale. We will be capitalizing these expenses on completion of the project in Q4 FY 2024. I would also like to note that there are net interest payments shown on this waterfall graph, which relate to our debt facility with PFG of $7.8 million. MedAdvisor currently intends to repay this debt when it falls due in December 2024. I would like to now turn back to Rick, and he will take you through the rest of the presentation.
Okay. Thanks, Ancila. So, now we're going to turn our attention to the United States. We're very pleased to report clear year-over-year momentum in the U.S. business. As you can see here, we increased our revenue for the half up from $54.9 million in the first half of FY 2023 to $64.5 million. It increased to 17.5%. Our gross profit in the U.S. was up 10.8% year -over -year to $33.9 million, and our gross margin declined 3.2 percentage points to 52.6%. Now, this decrease, as I think Ancila highlighted a minute ago, is related to the larger share of traditional programs in the U.S. during the period. For those of you not aware, the digital programs tend to have a higher margin, and the traditional programs that we run in the U.S. with pharmaceutical manufacturers tend to have a lower margin.
So, as we onboard new clients, some of these clients launch initially using traditional programs. They have to go through certain processes to get approvals for the digital programs and communications approaches that we use in the U.S. So as a result, your margin might move a bit over the next little bit of time as we work to get the digital business in a good place for full growth. And, we'll talk a little bit more about that as we go through the presentation. On the right-hand side of the slide, we're highlighting that we executed around 109 programs in the U.S. through the half. This is up 30% over the prior corresponding period. The revenue per pharmaceutical company that we work with in the top 20 was up 25% to $4 million, and our revenue per employee was at around AUD 895,000.
Finally, our THRiV programs, which we're very excited about. These are our omni-channel platform. We'll spend more time talking about later. But, we saw revenue more than double in the period over the prior corresponding period. So, we'll go to the next slide. We'll provide a little bit more detail on what's driving our results in the U.S. A lot of this is related to diversification. We did introduce 11 new brands in the first half. Two of those new brands contributed to the diversification on the vaccine revenue, which I'll touch on in just a minute. We're continuing to deliver pharma-sponsored patient engagement programs across more than 15 therapeutic categories, as you can see on the lower left-hand side of this slide. During the half, heart-related medications made up nearly 41% of these categories, followed by diabetes with about 22.5%.
What's interesting in the half, we were successful in testing our first, what we characterize as a direct-to-consumer unbranded program targeted at atrial fibrillation or AFib, so basically a heart condition. This was an initial test to determine if a brand can actually allocate part of funds that are typically targeted at TV in the U.S. and run this type of targeted program on the pharmacy network. We've seen some success with getting the program launched. Then, as we typically do, we'll follow that up with the performance of the program over time. If you move to the middle part of the slide, vaccine program revenue did increase 30% over FY 2023, driven by a couple of key factors. One of those, as I've already mentioned, was the diversification of vaccine programs across seven categories.
The second issue or the item that was driving the increase was the introduction of the two new brands. These were primarily in the RSV space, which is a new vaccine category that was launched via two different manufacturers in FY 2024, the first half of FY 2024. So, importantly, you know I think you can see from here that vaccine programs did represent 50% of the revenue, as I said, versus 45% in the prior year. And then, if we move to the far right part of this slide, digital programs represented 32% of revenue versus 55% in the prior corresponding period. And, again, this is due to the nature of the programs that came into the network. But, a little more specifically, there was a decline of our COVID digital program that ran at a large scale in FY 2023.
That was offset by new brands that came into the business that were traditional versus digital. So, we're expecting to see this is really a temporary issue. And, we'll start to see some stabilization. And, as I'll talk about the FY 2024 second half pipeline, we're starting to continue to see strong growth for our digital programs. So if we'll go to slide 11, we'll turn our attention for a few minutes to ANZ. While many consider Australia and New Zealand businesses as a mature business, we're developing a foundation for continued growth. We saw an increase in the first half revenue, which was up from AUD 9.2 million to, in the prior corresponding period, to AUD 11.1 million. And, this was a 20.7% increase year-over-year. And our gross profit was up 23.1% year-over-year to, I'm sorry, AUD 9.6 million.
Our gross margin was up 2 percentage points, finishing at 86.5%. On the right-hand side of this slide, highlighting some key accomplishments in the half, we did execute 54 health programs in the first half. This was 43% higher than the number of programs in the same period in FY 2023. I think what's important to notice, and as we talk through our growth strategy here, is that these types of health programs are very similar to the types of pharma-sponsored programs that we run in the U.S. business. In addition, we had 2,300 pharmacies using our Plus One extensions to support clinical programs such as screening for UTI and over 1,800, I'm sorry, 18,000 patients served across four states. We're very proud of this number. It continues to grow. We'll look for continued growth in this half.
And it really underscores the importance of being able to treat patients with these types of conditions and others that will be running through our pilot as we start in the fourth quarter within the pharmacy channel. With regard to the SaaS revenue in Australia, we did see an increase of around 16% year-over-year thanks to the full impact of price increases, which were implemented in the prior financial year together with the additional 1,400 GuildLink pharmacies that we brought on in FY 2023. And finally, I would just like to say, as I mentioned and reemphasize, that we were not only awarded the North Queensland Community Pharmacy Scope of Practice Pilot, but in late 2023, it was announced that this is going to expand to the full state.
So, we're looking forward to getting this up and running and working with the Queensland Guild as well as Queensland Health and the other stakeholders to make this a successful pilot and roll it out beyond Queensland going into the latter part of FY 2025. Now, if we'll go to the next slide, moving to the U.K. for a minute, our U.K. strategy is taking shape as planned. We've made the initial investment of GBP 500,000 in Charac, as Ancila mentioned earlier. The transition of our U.K. business is proceeding faster than expected, actually. With regards to closing down our own U.K. business, 100% of the MedAdvisor contracted pharmacy owners have been contacted, and all of the settlement activities have been completed on time. This has been a significant team effort.
We do want to thank everyone involved, both on our team and all the pharmacies that have worked with us over time in the U.K. The majority of our pharmacies have actually either been migrated or in the process of migrating to Charac. That's progressing extremely well. Outside of the U.K., MedAdvisor Solutions and Charac have been planning other activities. As we've mentioned previously, we're planning on the delivery of pharmacy commerce solution in ANZ in the first quarter of FY 2025. In addition, we've been analyzing an ability to accelerate home delivery management solution and other solutions in Australia in FY 2025. Taking things back to the other way, we're also looking at bringing digital adherence solutions or health programs from MedAdvisor Solutions in the U.S. back into the U.K.
And finally, we are planning to do some research on artificial intelligence in order to identify opportunities that could further reduce operational costs and time for pharmacists. And that is a key part of our AI strategy, as we'll discuss here in a minute. We've spoken a bit about Charac today and in the past. So, let me just remind everyone about who Charac is and why this investment into their business makes sense for MedAdvisor Solutions. Charac is the leading patient relationship management software as a services platform in the U.K., with 20% of the U.K. community pharmacies signed onto the platform. Embedded into their SaaS platform are things like video call module to deliver telehealth, appointment booking, repeat prescriptions, and a number of other services, somewhat similar to what we have deployed in the Australia market.
Charac does come to the table with a number of strategic relationships in the U.K., in particular with Royal Mail related to home delivery opportunities, the National Pharmacy Association, who represents 86%+ of community pharmacy owners in the U.K., and one of the large pharmacy software providers in the market, Positive Solutions. So, a lot of similarities and alignment to our business in Australia and our overall MedAdvisor Solutions strategy to empower the pharmacy of the future and simplify patients' medication journey. So, we're very excited about where we are in the U.K. and the direction. And with that, we'll now kind of take it to the next topic. So, I mentioned earlier that we've decided to invest in our growth.
So, I'm going to spend a few minutes going over these plans and give you some idea for the direction we're heading with the investment and the timing and where that investment is going to go. So, if we'll turn to the next slide, just as a reminder, again, I want to emphasize that our purpose is to enable pharmacy-led personalized medication management. We've already had a strong impact in growing our solutions with now being able to deliver capability and engage over 200 million people across 37,000 pharmacy locations around the world, including nine of the top 10 chains in the U.S. and all of the top five pharmacy groups in Australia. We're also helping our pharma customers to improve patient access to needed medications. And that is a significant part of our business and approach in the U.S. and growing in Australia and New Zealand.
If we go to the next slide, please. The key is that our personalized solutions are powered by our evolving global medication management platform. This platform is being built utilizing the best capabilities from ANZ in the U.S. businesses. The foundation is our machine learning omni-channel platform called THRiV, which was developed in the U.S., as we've discussed. And it is not only powering patient communications in the U.S., but it will power patient communications in health programs in ANZ as we continue to evolve the global platform. This enables our communications awareness and adherence programs. As we've discussed in the past, the personalized medication management platform also will power our Plus One platform, which serves as the foundation to allow pharmacists to engage patients around their medications, scheduling vaccinations, payment for services, and provision of a growing suite of clinical services.
We'll also be expanding this, as I mentioned a moment ago, including other expanding capabilities around over-the-counter type products and home delivery in the future. So, with that as a basis, if we'll go to the next slide. As I mentioned, we are making a very focused investment into the business in order to be able to deliver on the full capabilities of the personalized medication management platform, as I just discussed, with a key focus on establishing a foundation to deliver sustained profitable growth. So, this investment that we're going to talk about over the next few minutes is going to be funded with internal cash flow. It's going to be split across FY 2025 and FY 2026. We'll start to see some of the benefits in lowering capital - I'm sorry, in lowering operating expenditures in FY 2025. And I'll touch on that in just a minute.
There's four key areas of focus that are going to create operating leverage for us that I'll talk to more in a moment. They're going to drive the future growth of the business as well. So, as part of our, if you look at the left-hand side of the slide and operational excellence, as part of our Pathway to Profitability initiative, we've already launched a process to implement a shared services structure and multiple operations improvements, improvement efforts, rather, that are really targeted to decrease our operating expenses with an intent to decrease over time the operating expenses 20%-30% from where we're at currently.
From a global platform perspective, I already talked a little bit about the global platform, but more specifically, our intent is to ensure that the platform is 100% cloud-native and optimized, that we've standardized on services and key types of integration across the platform, as well as modernizing all of the services. Although it's called, it is a global platform, the intent is that we can actually deploy it on a local basis. This will allow us, in combination with our shared services structure and the standardization on the technology and the cloud enabling, again, to bring down the cost significantly, but also to accelerate our ability to drive innovation.
By getting the platform optimized, we're going to be able to more quickly and cost-effectively deliver enhancements to existing products like THRiV, Plus One, or mobile app while enabling acceleration of our AI solutions, expanded scope of practice services that we've discussed, and even new pharmacy solutions that we need to bring into the market to continue to add value to community pharmacy in the healthcare market in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. One key aspect of our strategy is around data. We aggregate a significant amount of data across both Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S.
We've already started the processes to bring standardization to our data infrastructure and services and bring all the data into the cloud such that we have an ability to bring in new data sources to enhance our existing and new products, as well as improve the level of data science, advanced analytics, business reporting, et cetera, that are necessary to help support our targeted growth initiatives. Then finally, as we look at the implementation of these changes, we do know it's going to come with significant impact on our teams across Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. So, we're very focused on building our, continuing to build our one-team culture and support our team with new tools and new capabilities, as well as new resources and skills, and continue to enforce our newly established corporate values, which we've discussed in the past.
So, finally, given the magnitude of the changes that we're contemplating, it's important that we implement a number of new processes, controls, and measures to monitor our progress in order to meet the timelines and budgets that set the foundation for sustained success. So, if we'll go to the next slide, I want to spend just a few minutes talking about AI and bring a little bit of focus to AI specifically, which is a part of the investment that I just described. But, I think what's important is we are rapidly working to integrate AI into our platform in order to revolutionize and really take patient engagement to the next level and simplify the medication journey for patients. With this, we were pleased to announce earlier this week a partnership with Brand Engagement Network, also known as BEN, which is an emerging provider of personalized customer engagement AI.
Together with BEN, we're working on a new platform we call the Medication Advisor, through which we'll be able to offer a range of AI-powered features that include 24/7 patient support, tailored communications, which are set up in a way that meet individual patients' needs and preferences, will enable the ability to provide better support as people feel more confident talking one-on-one if they're in an environment where it's more supportive and feels like it's more protected relative to confidentiality. And then finally, the platform is definitely designed to help reduce the burden on pharmacists. In addition to the Medication Advisor, we also expect, anyway, to implement AI into parts of our ongoing operations, as well as products such as THRiV and Plus One. So, now if we'll go to the next slide, I mentioned operating leverage previously.
The question is, why are we investing in the business, in our core business, as is? Really, the focus is to make sure that we've created a platform to be able to deliver operating leverage over time. We're going to touch on a few of those key points here. We've been and continue to purposely drive down our fixed cost. We've already taken cost out of the business, but are implementing additional initiatives to bring cost down further, including shifting to the shared services model, as I mentioned earlier. We expect to complete a lot of this in the first quarter of FY 2026. These actions relative to the operational changes, global platform, data, etc., will help to steadily create downward pressure on our operating expenses as a percentage of revenue.
So, as fixed costs reach an equilibrium point, we expect in the fourth quarter of FY 2025, that's where we do expect variable costs to increase, but they will increase where we're undertaking planned activities such as the launch of a new product. So, we expect that the efficiencies that we gain through this exercise and these investments are going to enable us to drive sustained profitable growth across our global operations. So, let's turn to slide 19. So, in addition to operating leverage, our investment strategy will enable future profitable growth. But, if we go to the next slide, before we look at the growth drivers beyond FY 2024, I want to touch on a few key points regarding the second half of FY 2024 and our expected FY 2024 finish.
At this point, we have 75% of our projected revenue for the second half, and this is in the U.S., is contracted. We have a very solid pipeline in the U.S. that covers about three times what is needed to close the other 25% in the second half. We have significant confidence in the quality of this pipeline and our ability to meet our projected internal revenue from a budget perspective. In the second half, the U.S. pipeline continues to show good diversification of programs across 50+ brands, strong demand for digital solutions, as you can see in the donut chart at the bottom. Our THRiV platform does represent 15% of our pipeline revenue. We expect to see significant year-over-year growth overall for THRiV in FY 2024.
If you look at ANZ, on the comments on the right, we do see continued strong support for our software as a service business across the pharmacy network in ANZ. In the fourth quarter, we are going to launch new transaction fees for vaccinations, flu shots, etc., and something called Project STOP, which will positively affect our revenue in the range of 5%-7% in FY 2024. So, we also have a strong pipeline, actually, for our health programs in the second half. And we expect to drive good, solid year-over-year performance in our health programs in the second half. So, we'll take a look. If we'll move to slide 21, and we'll move to the end here. So, anyone that's familiar with our business and has been following MedAdvisor for a while does understand, hopefully, that this is a seasonal business.
We expect to show year-over-year revenue growth and EBITDA profitability for the full year, but it will be in line with the seasonality of the U.S. business. We expect our sustained profitability to come from growth and improvement in a number of different areas. And you can see on the left and the right-hand side of this slide, so just to touch on a few of these, we are going to continue our focus on increasing the number of accessible patients via our digital channels in both the U.S. and Australia and New Zealand, as this serves as a foundation to help drive growth in a number of different areas, not just pharmaceutical-sponsored programs. So we're expanding our relationships with pharmaceutical manufacturers. We're doing some of that through expansion of our sales team in the United States.
We'll increase our penetration in many of these organizations and be looking for synergies between the U.S. and Australia and New Zealand, actually, to help drive continued growth in pharmaceutical-sponsored programs, as we've seen in the past. We do expect to see continued growth in our vaccine programs. We do expect that diversification will continue. And we will be implementing transaction fees, as I mentioned earlier, that will carry on into FY 2025 and beyond. And then we're launching expanded solutions such as our e-commerce, I mentioned earlier, through our relationship with Charac. We're looking at telehealth and other solutions that will be deployed initially in Australia and New Zealand. And we'll look at the applicability to deploy elsewhere. Finally, delivering expanded scope of practice pharmacy services is a primary focus because it lays a foundation not only for limited growth in FY 2025, but significant growth in late FY 2025 and beyond.
We've also focused a lot of our efforts, as I've described in the investment component of the presentation, on areas to help us to bring down cost, but also in areas to help us to improve margins. So, as we've talked about in the past, moving more of our product mix to digital and particularly to THRiV and new business models in relation to THRiV, we'll start to see a change in our gross margin. As we implement everything we've been discussing in relation to our investment strategy, we'll start to see more efficiency and lower cost. And shared services will continue to deliver on bringing down the operating expense. And then finally, artificial intelligence will be utilized for improvement of internal operations over time, particularly as we affect the investments in the modernization that I described.
So, I do want to thank our team for a huge effort across the first half of FY 2025. These results that Ancila and I have discussed this morning, they're hard to deliver. We've got an amazing team. They're fully focused on delivery. It does make for some late nights and early mornings across multiple time zones. So ,I want to thank the team significantly. I want to thank you for your attention. So, now I think I'd like to turn it back to Jane, who maybe we have a little bit of time for Q&A, and you can help us through that. Thank you.
Terrific. Thanks, Rick, and thanks, Ancila. As Rick suggested, we'll now open up the floor to Q&A. Appreciate everybody who's already dropped a question in using that button at the bottom of the screen.
But if you have a question in mind, please do so now. We will kick off with this first question. Rick, I think you did make a brief point on this, but could you please comment on any seasonality across quarters in both revenue and cash receipts?
Yeah. So, relative to revenue, similar to FY 2023 in the past, the first half of the year tends to, in the United States in particular, tends to drive a significant percentage of our full-year revenue. And it's typically in the 60+% range. Could be 60%-70%, depends on the timing of programs. But because of the flu season and particularly the focus on vaccines, that's what drives a significant amount of the variability, as well as just some of the nuances related to the U.S. healthcare system itself.
But we'll see that continued significant uptick, and then it'll come down, level off in the second half, pick back up in the first half of the following year. That's relative to revenue. Relative to cash, the cash flows as we implement the programs. And Ancila might want to talk a little bit more to the details of the timing because we do, as we start to have individual conversations, we do want to kind of walk through this in more detail. It's a little bit of a complicated conversation, but maybe you want to hit the highlights, Ancila?
Yeah. Yes, sure. Thanks, Rick. So just as a general rule, in the United States, our pharmaceutical manufacturers pay us within 90 days of programs. So what happens is cash will always be one quarter behind our revenue.
So a large revenue quarter of Q2 that we've observed right now in our business will see most of that cash coming in to Q3, which is now, between the period of January to March. And that's the flow of revenue and cash in our business.
Right. Okay. Thank you both. All right. So will the tech investment back into the business be expensed or capitalized, Ancila?
Yes, sure. So I can help with that. So, at this stage, the way we've done our modeling, we do not expect these investments to be capitalized. But, we will review this as we go forward with the projects.
Thank you. Okay. So, is the second half expected to be EBITDA positive?
Do you want me to?
You want to comment on that, Ancila?
So, again, this goes back, yes, sure, Rick. This goes back to Rick's summary, which he's just given. Due to the seasonal nature of our business, our second half is not expected to be EBITDA positive. But MedAdvisor Solutions is on track to deliver profitable growth for the full year.
We do expect the full year to be EBITDA positive.
Exactly.
Okay. Thank you. All right. So, a question here on FTE. So how many FTEs can be part with the platform improvements? What's your view on longer-term EBITDA margin at scale?
I would just comment, and then I'll ask Ancila to comment on this one as well. As we've done our planning at this point, given the implementation of the shared services and the technology, our expectation is to get operating expense down 20%-30%. But I'd probably leave it at that for right now.
As you do the planning and you get into the details on the execution, there'll be a little bit of up and down, and that's why there's a range. Then relative to EBITDA, we haven't typically provided EBITDA guidance. So I don't know that we're in a good position to comment on that at this point.
Yeah. Appreciate that. Okay. Thank you. I've got a few pointy questions here from Sarah. So there's a list. I'll work my way through them. Can you provide more specifics around where the AUD 10 million-AUD 15 million investment in the technology transformation is going? What is the timing of the AUD 10 million-AUD 15 million spend over the next 18 months-24 months? Perhaps if we start there, and then I'll move into the next lot.
You want to touch on that, Ancila, or?
Sure. I can start with that, Rick.
So, Sarah, in terms of timing of the AUD 10 million-AUD 15 million investment, we expect most of that to come into the FY 2025 and the start of the FY 2026 period. What we are looking at doing in terms of our planning, we are looking at staging this so we can improve our revenue, gain efficiencies, and our cost base through the shared services implementation, and then manage that because the other thing that we're doing in parallel is managing this through our own cash. So, we want to make sure we've got profitability, we've got operating leverage coming in, the expenses coming, and then the turnaround with the revenue as well. So, we do expect the improvement in revenue. With the 20%-30% fixed cost decline in our operating expenses, we also look at revenue improvements of about AUD 50 million-AUD 60 million over time. So, we are working through that in the next 18-24 months.
Great. Okay. There's a follow-on question here, and possibly you've already answered a bit of it in just your reply there. So, longer term, how do you think about continued investment in technology and new products? Will it be a percentage of revenue once this tech transformation program is complete?
I would say that it's highly dependent on the type of product that we're releasing. The intent is that, particularly for the infrastructure that will be put in place, there are a number of services that can be implemented. And as I think, as I mentioned, it will be able to flex up and flex down where we need to be able to deliver the product and pull back to when we're operating business as usual.
So, it'll give us a better ability to do the flex up and flex down and actually measure that. The question in some cases is, are we building it completely, or are we partnering? So as we're looking with Charac as an example, we are not planning to build a commerce platform ourselves. But we're leveraging their capability and integrating that into our services to build that. Whereas with full scope of practice and our direction to support clinical services, we are building that. And so we're flexing up to be able to build out the capability. But when we get to steady state, we should be able to bring back down the cost, if that makes sense. A lot more flexibility.
Great. Okay. Thank you. Okay. So you spent AUD 0.8 million in the first half of 2024 on the scope of practice pilot. How much incremental spend is there left to go?
The entire project, we expect it to be between AUD 1.6 million -AUD 1.8 million, AUD 1.9 million. Because this project goes live within the next two months, so we're not expecting to reach that number. As soon as we reach about AUD 1.5 million, AUD 1.6 million and the project goes live, that's when we will capitalize this in Q4.
Thanks, Ancila. Okay. You successfully did a pilot direct-to-consumer funded unbranded program targeted at atrial fibrillation. Can you explain how you executed this program and what it involved, and what metrics do you use to define success?
So, the program was targeted at individuals that had a certain indication of a potential cardiac condition, which could mean they're on other blood thinners, certain types of medications.
The intent was to educate that patient on AFib and how you appropriately treat AFib and the alternatives available for treatment if certain treatments are not effective, without mentioning a brand. So, there is no brand mentioned in the communication. It's pointed to actually online resources that educate around AFib, but there's still not a brand even in the online resources. So, that's what makes it interesting, is that it's purely an educational focus with the intent over time that the particular brand that is sponsoring does see some level of uplift in prescriptions for their medication. So, we'll have to measure that over time. That does take time. We just implemented the programs in the first half.
So you have to be able to look at this at least over a six-month, if not longer timeframe, and start to utilize even maybe some of the measurement structures that are used even in TV because of the way these programs get implemented.
Okay. That's helpful. Thanks, Rick. Okay. So, we are very close to time. In fact, we might be over time. So, I'm going to take two final questions, and then we'll wrap it up because I know it's a busy day for everyone. So, how big an issue is the reduction in U.S.A. pharmacies given the U.S.A. pharmacy chains, given the issues the U.S.A. pharmacy chains are having?
Good question. The U.S. pharmacy chains are definitely facing some headwinds relative to their business. They're quickly restructuring. And we've seen that with Walgreens. They brought in an interim CEO.
They've renamed the CEO, or they've named the permanent CEO, rather. He's brought in his full management team. We're continuing to do programs with Walgreens as we have in the past. At points in time, things might slow down. There might be a little bit of a distraction. But, reduction in pharmacies hasn't really affected anything because people still need to get their medications, and they're going to get it from the pharmacies that are open. So, it hasn't really decreased the number of medications. It's just some of the challenges in making sure, from a day-to-day perspective, that you can get people engaged to get programs launched and monitor programs, react to issues, etc. So, it's really more day-to-day kinds of issues versus being concerned about losing any volume.
Very good. Okay. Okay. So, final question, Rick. Could you just elaborate? We've spoken quite a bit about AI today, but the opportunities that you foresee in AI as you look forward from here?
Yeah. So, there's a number of processes that we use to help determine the appropriate level of targeting on communications, the development of content, launch of content. So, there are a lot of internal operational opportunities to streamline our processes and maybe even bring programs live faster and make them more effective. And then, there is what I described relative to the Medication Advisor, which can be expanded significantly to actually be more than just advising on a specific medication, which is a two-way interaction with the patient, but also advising on something like AFib, like we were talking about a minute ago. So, it's a different way to engage the patient. The other opportunities are around areas like clinical trials.
So, you want to engage people in a clinical trial and then make sure they're understanding any side effects, they're reporting side effects, et cetera. So, there are some potential use cases in the clinical trial space. Finally, we are having conversations. I think there's been some questions on Cotiviti in the past. We are looking at what might be opportunities to help align engagement of what we call members in the U.S., which are health plan customers. And so, the AI could be a member engagement type initiative. So, we're starting to take a look at that as well. So, that's just a couple of the use cases. There's many when it comes to both operational improvements and improved or next-generation patient engagement.
Excellent. Well, everyone's talking about it. So, I'm sure that we'll have a lot more to update people on as we make progress there. So, with that, it's been a really full session. I'll hand back to you now, Rick, for any closing comments.
Sure. Sure. So, I would just say that as we look from this point into the future, we're very excited about the opportunities for MedAdvisor. We're building the platform for growth. We've got a great strategy to expand beyond the financial results and deliver on financial results in line with what we reported today. So, we're really looking forward to keeping everyone up to date as we deliver on our plans and what we've outlined today. And we appreciate everybody's support as well. So many of you have worked very closely and have been looking to see the direction MedAdvisor Solutions is heading. And so thank you very much for that continued support. So, Jane, I'll turn it back to you to finish things or wrap things up.
Thank everyone for today.
Right. Thanks, Rick, and thanks, Ancila. I'll add my thanks to everyone who's joining us today and what's a very, very busy point in the reporting calendar. That wraps up our proceedings. I'll invite you all now to disconnect and have a great day. Thank you.