for today's call. Joining us is John Konstantopoulos, CEO and Co-Founder in Atlanta, Georgia. With him, we also have Clayton Hatch, CFO of Artrya. I would like to add this call is being recorded today, and all participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a Q&A session following the presentation. If you would like to ask a question at that time, just please type it into the Zoom Q&A section at the bottom of your screen. Note that the raise hand function is not enabled. We will also have a recording of today's call on Artrya's website for future viewing. I would now like to hand over to John Konstantopoulos, CEO of Artrya, to start off today's call.
Thanks, David, and thanks everybody for joining. As David mentioned, I am in Atlanta, here in Georgia, probably for the next seven to eight weeks, really here to move a number of initiatives along that we have been focusing on. More importantly, we just want to focus on this past quarter that we have just finished off. For us, commercial execution in the U.S., as we have always mentioned, has been a major priority, and we have made quite a lot of progress during this quarter. We signed our largest customer to date, and continued the rollout across many of our foundation customers. Pleasingly, we also saw a material increase in plaque utilization following the phase one of the pre-authorization workflow implementation at Tanner, and we are continuing to build a growing pipeline of inbound interest from U.S. healthcare systems here in the U.S.
I will take you through each of these different initiatives as we go forward, before I hand over to Clayton to cover some of the financials. Going through the commercial and execution piece, including Huntsville. As I mentioned, and as many of you heard in the previous call, we started our first SAPPHIRE partner as a commercial customer, the Huntsville Hospital Health System. Post the end of the quarter, part of that agreement was a five-year commercial agreement that makes them our fourth largest commercial customer in the U.S.
What is really important about that is, as part of our go-to-market strategy, we have always been mentioning that SAPPHIRE has been a very important piece to that, so it was very pleasing that we got Huntsville signed up as a commercial customer on a five-year agreement a lot earlier than we expected and what the market was expecting as well. To give you a sense of the scale of Huntsville, they span about 15 hospitals across Alabama and Tennessee. They have 19 heart centers with more than about 1,000 cardiac staff and about 58 cardiologists. They conduct roughly about 60,000 non-invasive cardiology tests annually, and that includes roughly about 10,000 CCTA scans. Where we are going with them at the moment is the next step in the implementation piece is integration of Salix across their network so they can start using it clinically.
That means that we need to formalize the full integration into PACS across the hospital system, as well as their electronic medical record. We will look at working through the workflow processes and onboarding the doctors, as well as implementing the phase one of the reimbursement pathway that I mentioned a little earlier. That is all a major focus for our customer success team. A little bit more about the agreement. As I mentioned, it is a five-year agreement, with a minimum contract value of AUD 500,000 over the five years. That is only for the Salix Coronary Anatomy platform. We also have, in addition to that, as part of this agreement, the usage of the Salix Coronary Plaque module, which will generate additional fee per scan revenue, as will the Salix Coronary Flow module once we have cleared that.
It is important that we have structured this way because it gives us a base for recurring revenue. It makes the platform sticky within the hospital system and allows us then to ramp through the fee per scan process that we have and the business model that we have, as we get traction within the hospital system. Before I move on to some of the other highlights of this quarter, we are also progressing some of the other SAPPHIRE participants, and many of them in varying levels of maturity, and Huntsville was just one of them. It does give us the ability to use them as a reference, and we have seen some substantial interest from other hospital systems since we have signed up the Huntsville Heart Centre. Moving on to our foundation customers and the rollout, as well as the utilization.
Tanner Health is now fully integrated, and all CCTA scan volumes are being processed through Salix Coronary Anatomy. You can see that in one of the graphs that we had as part of the quarterly report. Our CCTA volumes are also growing since they have started using Salix. Our focus has shifted heavily towards plaque utilization within Tanner and as well as in Northeast Georgia as we start to roll out the platform across their remaining hospital systems. When the phase one implementation went live within the September month of this last quarter, we saw quite a significant increase in the plaque utilization at Tanner. That is pleasing because we are starting to see that moving into the October month, and we hope that will keep on moving into the subsequent months and quarters as we go forward.
One of the big benefits that we see within the platform is that it is really making a big difference to the clinicians' workflow. We are seeing some substantial time increase in efficiencies within the hospital system at Tanner, and that is really shifting into a lot of the other phases that they are trying to push for, which means that they want to use plaque more, and when flow gets cleared, they want to use flow more as well.
At Northeast Georgia Health System, the Salix Coronary Anatomy platform was deployed at their main campus in Gainesville at the beginning of the quarter. That site accounts for the majority of their scan volumes across the network. We are now rolling out the remaining Northeast Georgia sites, which the first part started this past week, last Friday, when we had a big session with many of the cardiologists at the remaining sites.
That will continue to roll out across their network, as we finalize the onboarding of those remaining doctors and start getting them using the platform and then using and utilizing the plaque module as well. At Cone Health, we are working very closely with the clinical and IT teams to progress the implementation towards completion. The process was initially slowed down by Cone's transition into Kaiser Permanente. It is probably the largest hospital system in the U.S. But Cone has confirmed and continues to reconfirm that the implementation of Salix remains a key priority for them because of the workflow benefits that it provides them and the opportunity that they see within the hospital system. Across Tanner, Northeast Georgia , Cone, and now Huntsville, our commercial focus is very clear. We want to make sure that we are bringing the remaining hospital systems live.
We want to make sure that we are increasing the number of CCTA studies processed through Salix, and we also want to make sure that we are driving the adoption of Salix Coronary Plaque module as we start finalizing the phase two reimbursement feature that goes live in the next coming months. Those are the major priorities for us, that as we accelerate utilization and customer conversion, we will start seeing our revenue generation really scale in the U.S. as well. On SAPPHIRE, we continued to progress the study during the quarter with many of the participating U.S. healthcare systems gaining early access to Salix and really starting to get used to that. We have onboarded many of the doctors to be able to play around with the software and get used to it as well before the actual study kicks off.
Our customer support team is focused on integrating the platform in many of these hospital systems so they can actually get some of the scans and reviewing their own scans as part of this training that we have got with them. That also continues to progress in close collaboration, both from a clinical perspective but also commercially as well, and we are starting to move many of those across the commercial maturity pathway, as I mentioned a little earlier. I do also want to mention that the SAPPHIRE study still remains a key pipeline generation for us, and we are very engaged with many of these SAPPHIRE partners to move them along commercially while the clinical study moves along and does its own thing. The one thing that I want to really address now is Salix Coronary Flow.
It is a major discussion point, and I really want to make sure that I am clear with some of the comments that we have made previously. In previous ASX releases, we have mentioned that an FDA submission would be imminent, with clearance anticipated by the end of 2026. I do want to explain what has clearly changed since then. Subsequent to the review of the clinical data when we received some of them coming in, and just post the imminent statement, we noticed some inconsistencies in some of the expert reader assessments for one of the clinical substudies, which is a repeatability and reproducibility study.
Taking that into account, together with some of the recent regulatory outcomes that happened in the sector, we decided that we wanted to make sure that we added some further rigor into the study and the clinical package and added a reader study as part of this so that we could really strengthen that and bring further evidence beyond just what the FDA asked of us before we file. The additional reader study wasn't requested by the FDA. However, from our perspective, it's a prudent step as we've chosen to take a very comprehensive and high-quality approach to the submission and address any potential clinical requirements or evidence that the FDA may ask of us upfront so that they're not asking us post-submission.
As a result, the previously submission date that we put forward has been extended, and we'll update the market when Salix Coronary Flow submission is lodged with the FDA and also when it is cleared. It's also important to put Flow in context of the broader business as well. The Coronary Flow module is an additional module within the Salix platform. Our whole commercialization strategy is not dependent on Flow only and the clearance of Flow only. We're getting a lot of interest from Anatomy and Plaque, which are now both FDA cleared and commercialized, and we continue to push forward while we push forward with the FDA submission process.
We're confident that once that is cleared, the Salix Coronary Flow module's cleared, that'll be an additional tool that we can provide to the doctors to use in addition to the Salix Coronary Anatomy module as well as the Plaque module. I'll now hand over to Clayton to talk about some of the financial results.
Thanks, John, and thanks to everyone for joining the call today. It's great to be presenting to you for the first time as CFO of Artrya. I'll now run through the key financial activities for the quarter, as reported in our Appendix 4C lodged with the ASX this morning. The numbers I'm referring to are all in Australian dollars, and in accordance with ASX listing rules, these are not audited. But before I do, I'd like to add a couple of comments on where we are on our early commercial journey and how I feel the team is progressing. Firstly, I'm greatly encouraged by the early commercial success, especially in the U.S. health industry, which is notoriously slow-moving and takes a fair amount of time to gain market acceptance.
So far, we have moved quicker and are more established in the first 12- 18 months of commercialization than I've seen in my previous roles in U.S. healthcare. Secondly, following my recent visit of hospitals in the U.S., I'm buoyed by our best-in-class technology platform, as doctors deal with the ever-increasing workload and require efficiency gains from technology platforms. The Artrya platform was the major attraction for me joining the company, and I'm pleased to inform shareholders that this view was solidified on my recent U.S. trip. Finally, CCTA volumes are increasing at such a rapid rate, the total addressable market is ever increasing, and this presents a huge opportunity for Artrya, which I'm really excited about. Moving on to the financials, and a quick reminder that this quarterly report is based on cash receipts and not revenue recognition for the September quarter.
In terms of our operating cash flows, customer receipts of AUD 84,000 are almost entirely receipts of subscription revenue from our Salix Coronary Anatomy platform for Tanner Health and Northeast Georgia, with a small number of receipts from plaque revenues at Tanner Health. As John mentioned, once the pre-authorization upgrade went live in mid-September, we've already seen a marked uptick in plaque volumes, so those receipts will track increased plaque billings in the future quarters. We also had cash inflows of AUD 500,000 from interest on our AUD 30 million bank term deposit, which we expect to bring in around AUD 2 million interest for the year. On operating costs, excluding the interest income received, these were AUD 7.3 million, up from AUD 6.4 million last quarter, which reflects our growing investment in the U.S. commercialization activities.
The main driver was increased staff costs, which were AUD 3.6 million, in line with headcount growth in both Australia and the U.S., as well as our annual pay increases, which began at the start of the financial year. Advertising and marketing costs also increased by AUD 200,000 to AUD 400,000 as our commercial and customer engagement activity continued to ramp up. Offsetting this, R&D expenditure reduced by AUD 300,000 to AUD 800,000 for the quarter. When we take all of this into effect, our total net cash outflows for the quarter were AUD 6.9 million. On the 30th of September 2026, we held a total of AUD 67.2 million in cash and term deposits. In addition, we will be lodging our claim for the FY 2026 R&D tax rebate later this month, and we estimate receiving a further AUD 4.8 million in cash in early 2027.
We remain well-funded for the U.S. rollout and execution and for all of our group activities. I'll now hand back to John to discuss our outlook and priorities.
Thanks, Clayton. Before I get to what our focus is going forward, as part of the quarter, we are also very pleased to be included into the S&P/ASX 300 Index, which is a really major step for us forward as a company, as we grow and as we scale as a business. We also welcomed Helen Kurincic to the board as a non-executive director. She brings more than 30 years of leadership experience across radiology, healthcare, specialist medicine, as well as financial markets. As part of that, we have also started strengthening the governance of our board with the forming of the Audit and Risk Committee, as well as a Remuneration and Nomination Committee. From an investor engagement perspective, we presented at the Bioshares Conference in August and also had a non-deal roadshow following our FY 2026 results.
Since the end of the quarter, we presented at the Canaccord Drug & Device Conference, and we are also pleased that Ord Minnett has also now initiated research coverage on Artrya. Looking ahead, as part of our priorities, we are firmly focused on U.S. commercialization and execution. The three major priorities for me and the business are, we want to bring more health systems live and do that a lot faster. We want to start increasing the utilization across this install base, and that means completing the implementation at Cone Health and expanding Salix across the broader Northeast Georgia network, and continue to grow the CCTA volume and plaque utilization at Tanner, as well as Cone and Northeast Georgia when they go live. Secondly, we want to integrate into Huntsville and across their network, and planning is now underway.
Given the scale of the system and getting the clinical and IT workflow and reimbursement process going, we really need to do that quickly, and that is a priority for us because of the volumes that they present for us and the opportunity that they present for us as well. Thirdly and finally, we want to start converting more high-volume health systems into commercial agreements. Huntsville has demonstrated that the potential for SAPPHIRE relationships and converting them into commercial customers is great, and we continue to progress the commercial engagement with the other SAPPHIRE participants, as well as a growing pipeline of inbound U.S. opportunities. On the technology side, we focused on completing the additional clinical work to support a comprehensive and high-quality Salix Coronary Flow submission, and that is an ongoing focus for us. As I mentioned, Flow will expand opportunity with Salix.
For now, our commercial execution is a high priority for us, and driving anatomy adoption as well as plaque utilization is a key focus for us as a business. To summarize, commercial execution in the U.S. is a key priority. During the quarter and immediately after it, we signed our largest customer to date and achieved the first SAPPHIRE commercial conversion. We have started increasing our CCTA utilization across the install base and also installed the pre-authorization workflow at Tanner, which showed that material increase in plaque. From here on, the focus is straightforward, and it is really just bring more of those customers live, process more CCTA studies, increase the adoption of plaque and those reimbursement modules that we have, and convert that activity into recurring revenue. I want to thank everybody for joining us today, and we are happy to start taking some questions. Thanks, David.
Happy to carry on from there.
Thank you, everybody. We've got a number of questions that have come through. Just a reminder, if you would like to please ask a question, use the Q&A window in your Zoom function. As we do have quite a number of questions, if they are on the same topic, we will combine them for the sake of efficiency. Our first question today comes from Martyn Jacobs at Bell Potter and relating to Huntsville. Could you give us an idea of the timeline for integrating Huntsville? Secondly, has the Huntsville subscription fee already been received?
We cannot give that yet. We are kicking off our first IT session with the Huntsville team in the next few weeks, and we will know more from there. For now, our focus is to make sure that we accelerate that, and we will continue doing that. No, they have not yet started bringing in the subscription fee. That will happen post go live.
Just following on from there, how many other non-SAPPHIRE groups are you negotiating with? You talked about the growing pipeline. Could you give some color on that, please?
Yeah. It is a decent pipeline. We are getting varying levels of sizes, some very small, some decent sized, and some really large size hospital systems. We are focusing on the ones that we have key relationships with, and we will update the market as we start bringing those into commercial agreements as well.
Next question from Melissa Benson at Barrenjoey. Regarding the plaque adoption at Tanner, you noted a material increase during September post the pre-authorization model being deployed. With this flowing through to October, how should we think about this as materiality? When do you expect to deploy the pre-authorization module live at Northeast Georgia's main hospital site?
Yeah. Okay. I do not know if you want to grab the first part of that.
Yeah, absolutely. It was mid-September. We saw a couple of weeks' worth of increased volumes of plaque. That has carried through into October. Our material, we will update that once it comes through. We are seeing a step-up in plaque numbers coming through, which is pleasing.
Yeah.
Moving back to Huntsville, follow on from Melissa. Is there any implementation efficiency with onboarding at Huntsville's main site, given it was already a SAPPHIRE site? Or is the implementation aligned with your prior foundation customers on a case-by-case basis?
Look, it is case by case. We know enough of Huntsville now to know where the, I suppose, where the bottlenecks could be. However, we will know more once they start implementing and what their IT teams are like once they start that process. We have got our own blueprint, which we follow quite rigorously. Usually it is not us that is the bottleneck, usually it is the hospital's IT systems that is the bottleneck. Once we have their teams committed, we can go really fast. It is making sure that they get the teams committed, which is what we are working on.
A question now from Tom Godfrey at Ord Minnett. Can you talk to the step-up in SCA volumes across Tanner and Northeast Georgia? How much is efficiency driven versus a broadening of the cardiologist numbers?
Yeah. Look, the volumes for Northeast Georgia and Tanner are in those numbers, an increase in those numbers. There has also been an increase in utilization from. Sorry, not utilization. Increase in CCTA has been processed by Tanner as well since they have started using Salix. So that has also increased part of that. But it also is, Tom, as you mentioned, the combination of Tanner, Northeast Georgia coming on board, but then a smaller subset of that being the increase of CCTA volume that Tanner is seeing as well.
Another follow-on in relation to Huntsville. We've got a few questions on this. Can you provide some context around the 60,000 annual tests being conducted by Huntsville Health? Will this number end up being what is put through Salix platform in time?
Yeah. So 60,000 is all non-invasive cardiology reads, which could include echo, it could be stress tests, it could a number of non-invasive tests that they run. As I've mentioned and we've mentioned in the past, they do roughly around about 10,000 CCTAs, so that CCTA volume is a subset of that. As the platform expands and grows over time and we look at other modalities, yes, we could potentially take the full 60,000, but for now we're focused on CCTA.
Okay. We have another question here from Andrew Wilkinson at Venn Brown. On the current trajectory, how long will it take Tanner to use Salix for all of their scans and plaque expected scans of around 70% of SCA scans?
They're already using all of their scans for SCA, so all CCTAs are being processed by Tanner, as well as Northeast Georgia. It's the onboarding for Northeast Georgia that we're looking at the other hospital system of the other cardiologists. As soon as they go live, all CCTA scans are processed through the platform. With regards to plaque volumes, as we've said before, the plaque reimbursement only became a Category I earlier this year, in January this year, so there is a bit of time that it takes to get there. Our penetration rate with Tanner, I know it's a sample size of one, is increasing quite nicely. We hope to push that further as we go forward as well.
But hitting the 70%, that will take a bit of time as we build towards that and as people get more used to using plaque as well as being reimbursed for it.
Thank you. Picking up on the pre-authorization that you installed, this is from Andrew Wilkinson, how long do you expect it will be before you complete the second phase of that pre-authorization upgrade?
Yeah, the focus is to get that done as soon as possible. We're focusing it on in the next few months. But it's not an absolute wait for that. We're already starting to see that plaque utilization up because of phase one. But to fully automate that process, having that phase two is the next step for us.
A question now from Tanu Jain at Petra. "Hi, John and Clayton. Thanks for taking the question. As part of the outlook, you mentioned you'll be focused on getting commercial contracts and customers live faster. Could you talk about what factors would enable you to accelerate this versus the early rollout?
Yeah, I'll have a stab at that. Clayton, do you want to have a crack as well? From our side, we're a lot more certain in our process to rolling out within the hospital systems and our onboarding process as well. We do have the customer success team on the ground as well now here in the U.S., so that gives us a little more certainty to make sure that we have the team to support our customers once we've signed agreements. It also gives us a little more certainty that we can bring more customers on board as we go forward, knowing that we've got a strong support structure going forward.
Yeah, just to add to that, obviously, any new customers will have their own timelines, and that's pretty normal for healthcare and their IT departments. A little bit unfortunate, obviously, with Northeast Georgia and Cone being delayed the way they were in terms of going through a different process. The next ones could be quicker, but they all have their own timelines pretty much.
Great. Thank you. We've got a question now in relation to financials. Previous guidance has been for FY 2027 exit run rate of around 15,000 scans, which is around breakeven is the question. Has this changed, and when might you expect to forecast for breakeven?
Breakeven, obviously, to have them on board the whole time and also have plaque utilization at the rates that we're expecting, which will take time, so I'll leave that to the side. I think the 15,000 was the foundation customers. Clearly, bringing forward Huntsville, and if we can get it implemented, which we will obviously get it implemented before the end of this financial year, that'll increase that 15,000 CCTA scans as our exit run rate. More like around 22,000, 23,000 scans into the new financial year.
Next question follows on from one of the earlier ones. When will the September and October plaque invoices actually be paid? Is there a delay from invoicing to cash in the door is the question.
There's always a time delay, obviously, between invoicing, sending them out. Obviously, for October plaque, if that's what we're talking about, obviously, the increase in the plaque volumes, they're billed at the end of the month, same as obviously November, December. So cash receipts for those will be in future quarters. There could be some obviously received within this quarter, in the December quarter.
Thank you. Question now in relation to the SAPPHIRE study from Melissa Benson. When do you anticipate the first data readout might be available from the SAPPHIRE study?
Yeah. Our focus has been on SCF, so we've moved SAPPHIRE along, the study side, to make sure that the ethics work has been done, the protocol's finalized, the doctors are moving, and looking at the actual protocol and finalizing that review, as well as looking at contracting as well and budgets to get that all sorted. That's happening over, I suppose, the next few months. But because of SCF and our major focus on SCF, we've heavily focused our team to deliver on that, and then moved and held the primary investigator from Mass General, giving them the ability to move that along with some of the other SAPPHIRE partners. So from that perspective, for us, SAPPHIRE is a clinical study that allows us to show future proof. But our focus has been SCF, and we're going to keep on moving that through as we go forward.
Thank you. We have got some questions around cash outflows and cost base. Next question is AUD 7.3 million a quarter where you see the new floor or peak of your cash outflows? What is the planned headcount that you are thinking for this financial year?
Yes, that is a new cost base because we are obviously growing the team in the U.S. As execution comes through, when we take on new work, there will be additional headcount as we grow it. There is no set number of how many we need over this period, but we will be increasing headcount in line with increasing customer acquisition and future revenues.
Okay. Related to that, this question is in relation to your progress to appoint a Chief Technical Officer.
Technology Officer. Yes, we are progressing that. We have been interviewing a number of candidates. It is one that I have been very focused on because of the capability of our technical team and how strong they are, and finding the right person that can lead that technical team and drive them forward. So we are still progressing that, and we have not yet found the right person. We have identified a few that we are in discussions with, but it is a key focus for me. I am also very picky on the person we want to bring on because of the strength they already have. We have got to have the right person coming in with the right cultural fit as well.
A question about the team. Is the current team able to handle more customer signings, or do you foresee there is a requirement for more staff in the midterm?
Yeah. Current team, we should be able to handle more customers being signed on with the existing team. But obviously, as we bring more customers on and we start scaling, they will scale that team to adapt to those new signings and appropriately bring them on as well. We are not going to bring new people on early just for the sake of that. We will know generally once when contracts are starting to come forward, what that timeline looks like, and we will start hiring accordingly from there.
Related to that, there is a question. Are you expecting to bring on additional U.S.-based senior management or directors as part of your expansion?
Yep. Senior management, yes. Board of directors, no. We are an Australian-based company, and we will continue to be so, and we already have a structured board as we have now, and a very, very strong board. So the board is as it is.
Okay. We've got a number of questions on Flow. One of them is, can you give some more detail on the inconsistencies in the SAPPHIRE study? Have you been required to tweak the algorithm to improve accuracy, or is it a variability in the quality of the scans?
It's a really simple one. We had multiple doctors doing repeatability studies, and they had to do the same read within 24 hours and then put the results in a spreadsheet. We got some of the results in separate cells, and we weren't able to align those cells to the previous day. That brought a lot of uncomfort to us as a group to either figure that out ourselves or just ask them to redo the repeatability study. That's effectively what it was.
Thank you. Okay, now we've got a number of questions around the timing of that submission.
Yep
If you want to comment. I know you've already commented on that during your address, if you.
Yeah. I do want to just also address something, David. There's nothing wrong with the model. The model is performing. We're now being very prudent and appropriately being prudent in putting additional reader study into our Flow submission. Based on all that's happened in the past, as many of you know, and where we want to go as a company, taking that extra time and putting that extra effort in to make sure that we're getting a highly compliant and quality submission in, and shortening it in the back end, is something that we're more focused on. The reader study is one of those. We did something similar with SCP when we ran that. That submission took quite a lot longer before we submitted. We also ran a reader study, and we're doing the same thing now with SCF.
Thank you. A question from Andrew Wilkinson. Is the Flow being used at all, even in a research capacity at the moment? Is it available in your customers?
No, it's not. However, we have, in detail, demonstrated that to some of our key partners in the SAPPHIRE group, who've given us some great input on future releases as we go forward, what those releases could look like. But they've been very, very impressed with what they've seen and really like what they've seen. As we get closer to submission, we'll give them access to some of the early ones. We'll give them access to that model.
Got a couple of questions on a related topic about the doctors in your customers. Have the doctors got any autonomy about whether they use Salix, or are they all required to use Salix and not allowed to do a manual read? Secondly, if they are using a platform, are they able to choose which product they use for plaque or for flow in their hospital?
Once they use Salix Coronary Anatomy, that is it. They do not have any other platform to report on. That is their reporting platform. That effectively becomes their record of truth for CCTA reads. For plaque, we have replaced every other plaque module that is around. We have replaced that with our Salix Coronary Plaque module. They are using, and they will continue to use plaque going forward. While Flow is going through the process that we have mentioned before, they are still using Heartflow, but plan to move on from Heartflow once we get cleared.
Thank you. A follow-up here from Tom Godfrey, Ord Minnett. What has been some of the early feedback from your SAPPHIRE partners when they have been deploying Salix relative to the other point solutions they might already be using?
Clayton, you heard some of the comments on your trip, so I would not mind you answering that one.
Yes, absolutely. Healthcare systems in all areas are moving away from point solutions. They just do not want another point-care solution that pops up, have multiple of them, multiple point solutions. They have talked about other solutions or point solutions where they gain 5% or 10% efficiencies, and IT departments are not even looking at it. For an efficiency gain, it needs to be above that before they will even look at it because there are so many things coming at them from a healthcare point of view. I think the main driver, and again, what I was talking about previously, was having the platforms solidifies your position within the healthcare system, and then additional modules can sit on top of that. The point solutions are, I think it is something that they will really struggle with going forward.
Yeah. It's exactly what we heard when we were there on the last trip as well. Many of them are battling with point solutions and really battling to keep control of those point solutions. We've seen that with some of the SAPPHIRE partners, and all of them have the frustration with the point solutions as well as trying to accelerate their reads with the volumes that are increasing, and the pressures that they're under. We do see that as probably a shift going forward in the future where IT teams are going to try to consolidate those into single platforms such as ourselves.
Scott, one quick clarification question here. Is the additional reader study you mentioned the final piece of the puzzle for your Flow product submission?
Yes. That's correct. Yeah.
Great. Thank you. Another one in relation to commercial rollout. Are you expecting to have Northeast Georgia and Cone fully integrated in this quarter that we're in now?
We are busy working through that at the moment. We will go live with them once we have completed the IT work with both of those respective hospital systems.
Thank you. Question here in relation to reimbursement for Heartflow versus Artrya from the hospital perspective. This question says, "I remember AYA having a more favorable reimbursement level than Heartflow." Just wanted to double check that was the correct understanding.
I think we have got a more favorable price point than Heartflow. The reimbursement is the same. From a Medicare perspective, it is $950 for plaque and $877 for flow. The private payers are usually two to three times that for both of those respective rates. Our price point is lower than what Heartflow's is for both plaque and for flow.
All right. Thank you. I have got a couple of wrap-up questions around flow. How many scans are you expecting to need in the additional reader study? I do not think you will comment on this, but can you tell us how long that might take?
Yeah. It's the same amount of scans that we've always had for this. We've powered this study for a certain amount of scans, and the reader study is just going through those same amount of scans. Sorry, the last question was, Dave, what was the last question on that one there?
Oh, just the timing that it might take.
Yeah. We're busy working through that at the moment, and then we'll get through that. As I mentioned before, we'll update the market once we've submitted.
Great. One final question coming back to Tanner and plaque. You mentioned you'd had some strong uplift in their plaque scans. Can you just talk a little bit about why that occurred and how you see that moving forward?
Sure. Clayton, you want to go? Yeah.
Yeah, sure. I think the pre-authorization obviously helped, and that will help obviously with Northeast Georgia and other customers going forward. So that once they are deployed, they will be able to use that pre-authorization process and be able to be sure that the reimbursement is coming in from the insurers. So we have seen that. It is still only early days. It is a few weeks old, that pre-authorization. Again, the second phase of that, as John mentioned, will be coming. But we are seeing those numbers increase. So that is it. That is pleasing.
Great. Thank you. Look, that is all the questions we have today that has come through. John, I will hand back to you for any closing remarks.
No, I appreciate that, David, and I appreciate the time for everybody and listening to this call. I will just reiterate, our focus is clearly SCF and getting that submitted. Second is utilization of plaque and continuing getting that pleasing adoption as we have just mentioned, keeping that ramp rate going up. The final one is making sure we are onboarding Cone and Huntsville as quickly as possible because of the volumes that they provide us, as well as the inbounds that we are starting to get and starting to progress those to commercialization. Thank you everybody today for the call, and appreciate the time. Thank you.
Thank you. That concludes our call for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.