Great. Oh, there we go. There we go. All right. Thank you everyone. Welcome to day two of the 25th Annual Needham Growth Conference. I'm Ryan MacDonald. I lead our digital health research efforts here at Needham. With me today, I'm pleased to be joined by Definitive Healthcare CFO, Rick Booth. Thanks for joining me, Rick.
Good to be here.
We've got about 40 minutes. We'll do about 30-minute fireside chat here and then leave the final 5-10 minutes for audience Q&A. If you do have questions for Rick, we'll make sure to leave some time at the end to get those asked and answered. You know, maybe to start, Rick, you know, we've got some likely new faces in the crowd that are, you know, don't know the Definitive story. Why don't we start with a brief overview of the business?
Yeah, certainly. Our reason for existing is that the U.S. healthcare system is massive and it's complex. It's only getting more complex. If you are seeking to commercialize a solution into the healthcare system from a sales and marketing perspective, it's extraordinarily difficult to figure out who are the right people with the economic decision-making and to organize all of your efforts around that. Definitive Healthcare enables commercial intelligence for the U.S. healthcare system for anyone who is selling into or competing within that ecosystem. That's about a $10 billion market with a strong underlying secular long-term growth rate because the healthcare, as we all know, is growing in double digits, and the information generated by the healthcare business is growing significantly faster. You know, I've seen estimates of 20%+ annual growth over the next few years.
A big market space with a clearly defined problem. Then what we do is we've built a unique map of the U.S. healthcare system building up from the care providers, which is a different approach than others have taken. Others start with claims data. They start with claims data because it's easy to get. We actually started with physician data because it's not easy to get. We began building this up in 2011. We are, to our knowledge, the only one that has the Definitive Healthcare ID, which maps all of the interconnections here. That powers our SaaS application, which has a variety of modules that we sell into four key verticals.
As you can imagine, life sciences as of the time of our IPO, which is still pretty indicative, was about half of our annual run rate revenue. Hospital providers, almost 10%. You think about hospital providers, they are not only customers that people seek to sell to, but they're also seeking to attract and retain the right physicians to get referrals, et cetera, et cetera. That's around 10%. Then the remainder is equally split between healthcare IT companies and other diversified. What all of these companies have in common is if healthcare is a meaningful portion of your business, it's very important to identify in the narrow window of time that you have, the right person to talk to and to walk into their office with a clear and compelling value proposition.
If you want to earn time to talk to a chief medical officer about your knee replacement technology, whether it be a device or a therapeutic software, et cetera, et cetera, you better know how many knee replacements they're doing per year, what their readmission rate is, what their Medicare reimbursements are, and therefore how much Medicare money they're leaving on the table with those reimbursements. In an ideal world, you can also prove out the results of hospitals that do use your tech versus those that don't. You can say on average, we reduce that readmission rate by X, and then marry that all with the insights to, and oh, by the way, when we looked into your data, here are the physicians that have the highest readmission rates that we think we would be helping.
You know, and we all know about the decreasing windows of availability to have those sales conversations. When you get that at bat, you can't miss, and that means a lot more prep upfront. You know, the days of glad-handing and walking the halls are totally gone. We make those sales professionals even more efficient. Likewise, earlier upstream, we help size the markets, direct the overall territory development, et cetera, et cetera. In some ways you can think of us as being analogous to ZoomInfo, where for every Salesforce instance, there should be a ZoomInfo instance feeding the right information into that intelligence. Likewise, for every Veeva instance, there should be a Definitive instance feeding the right information in, and for every Salesforce that's focused on healthcare. That's what we're all about.
We're, we are circa little north of $200 million run rate revenue. We have near 90% gross margins. From a free cash flow perspective, we're incredibly cash flow efficient. We translate our roughly 28% adjusted EBITDA margins directly into unlevered free cash flow. We've actually been a little north of that, but I expect that to normalize closer to a 1:1 level. Big market, clear competitive differentiation, profitable and capital efficient model. That's why I hope you'll listen to the rest of the questions.
That's an extremely thorough overview. I like that. That's very helpful. I think a good way to set the stage for us. Now we were gonna have a chance to talk to Robert a little bit. The FDA had other plans this morning.
Mm-hmm.
You know, I'd love to, at least for the audience, maybe just get a quick update on the management change from last year, because Jason Krantz took a sort of a step back into more of a product-focused role. Robert Musslewhite became the CEO. Just curious, you know, what drove those changes and, you know, maybe just your thoughts on what's changed internally, if anything at all, you know, since the transition?
Yeah. Robert Musslewhite, for those of you that have not had the pleasure of his acquaintance, since his regrets. He's most recently joining us from Optum Insight, which he's been leading. That is a multibillion-dollar part of Optum. He joined when his prior company. Blanking on the name. You probably know it.
From Optum Insight.
No. He grew his prior company from roughly $100 million to roughly $800 million before selling it into Optum Insight. He's deep in healthcare information. He sits on the board of CoStar, which is a real estate information-based vertical application. You know, if you had cast out, okay, who's the right person that understands this space almost as well as Jason, and also has the experience running organizations from $100 million, growing them primarily organically to $800 million, and then running an enterprise at the $2 billion dollar level, that's Robert. From a personal characteristic perspective, he started his career at McKinsey, as Jason did.
I'm also a former management consultant. We all think from a data-driven and analytic perspective with outcome-based orientation, developing hypotheses, driving those far, hard and fast and adjusting as we need to. From a management style perspective, him moving from a board member into the CEO has been very seamless.
Excellent. Now, as you talked about in sort of the overview, obviously there's a really rich data platform that Definitive has built. While there are others on the market, there are a lot of data platforms and data sets out there. You know, we have yet to see one that's really offers the breadth and depth of Definitive. You talked a bit about how that platform was built. As you think about today in a competitive market, the importance of keeping that data fresh and sort of making sure it's up to date, how do you do that and maintain the accuracy? Then how do you work to sort of link those data sets together to create sort of that platform approach?
Yeah. We talk about an innovation flywheel. The easiest way to start to think about it is we built up, you know, leveraging hundreds of thousands of sources and our own proprietary first-person research, this data set on U.S. healthcare physicians. We've also appended to that, 13 different sources or so of claims data. You know, all of this comes in the form of raw data. Anyone who's worked in information-based businesses knows that any information source that you get is going to have missing values and conflicting values. The more complex the information that is being acquired, the more problematic those are. The good news is it makes that information relatively inexpensive because it's a commodity. The bad news is it's hard to work with.
What we've done, we've established those relationships, and we've built our own proprietary processes for, step one, reconciling the information to identify the gaps and the conflicts. Step two, leveraging our predictive intelligence in order to resolve those. As part of doing that, we kick out both a confidence score in the answer that we've provided and a value score in terms of the likelihood of that information to be changing over time. That then kicks into... if you think about that as the AI-driven portion, that kicks into a workflow to our first-person research, which does millions of outreaches per year. Those researchers walk in and the highest value, most dynamic information is routed to them first in terms of prioritization for them to reach out and validate it. The algorithm kicks out.
You know, we infer this is the correct answer, but there were three others in the data. The researcher reaches out and says, "Okay, it was either number one as we expected or two or three," or even, "It was something completely different." That kicks back into the algorithm. That information is now confirmed, which increases its accuracy, but it then it improves the algorithm. I get nervous about anything that's based entirely on technology or entirely on people. If you can combine those two in a mutually supportive fashion, that's really hard to do. That's part of what I think of as sustainable competitive advantage for us going forward.
Because we've done this over time, you can't just go back and do that process as of 2011. You know, can you imagine calling and trying to figure out where a physician was practicing on any given date? You've got this cumulative history that for any sort of predictive analytics is incredibly valuable, and also the trending is incredibly valuable. There's no substitute for elapsed time in doing this because the insights are sequential. That matters because we're competing in this large space against larger, slower incumbents that have more money on their balance sheet. If they could just throw money at this problem and solve it, that wouldn't be a very stable platform for us to drive.
Yeah. I think that's such an important point too, because when you think about the broader business context under this space and being a software analyst, so we see this with ZoomInfo or sometimes with the Dun & Bradstreet numbers, that data is not always, you know, not as always as up-to-date as it needs to be. Then, you know, when you're a buyer in that environment, it just feels like wasted spend then, essentially.
Yeah. That's what you'll hear in your channel checks.
Mm-hmm.
'Cause people really prize a couple of things about this solution. One, it's accurate information. We take more care with that than anyone else is able to do. It tends to be fresh, and it's presented in a very easy-to-use way. We have. I don't have the capability of doing a demo in this room, but you can see demos on our website. It's clean, it's fresh, it's easy to use. You can quickly navigate and experiment in real time with the clean data as opposed to, you know, if you're buying from a legacy provider, someone like an IQVIA or a Clarivate, you submit a request for information.
It takes them time to send you the file, and then often as part of that, they're looking for a pro services arrangement to do some analysis, which gives you information, but it's stale as opposed to dynamic. It's not being updated in real time as ours is.
Makes sense. Let's shift to the macro environment. I think that's on everybody's minds. You know, like others, you've seen, you know, an elongation of sales cycles that, you know, started first in new logos last year, spilled over a bit into renewals and upsells. You know, just wondering if you could kinda comment on what you've been seeing in the market over the last, you know, 6, 12 months and, you know, sort of how that's impacting, you know, your outlook for sort of the trajectory of the business, growth trajectory of the business.
Absolutely. My comments that follow do not. I won't be providing any new information in between earnings calls. Nobody wants us to do that, even though it's being webcast for us. You know, what we saw, we were among the first in Q2 to call out some elongation of sales cycles and therefore, seeing some softness in new logos. In Q3, we saw that spread and also begin to update upsells. At the time that we did that, we were pretty early in the cycle. I think you've seen virtually all enterprise software companies now make similar commentary. I know ZoomInfo was not seeing the same thing in their commentary in their earnings call, but two weeks later, that was significantly revised.
Mm-hmm.
They lowered their estimates. I think that's reflective of the way in which Definitive communicates with the Street. I've been doing this a long time, lots of gray hair up here, unlike the handsome man to my left. We are a just the facts, very analytical, call things as we see them. We can get as deep as anyone would like into sales pipeline, sales pipeline slowdown. Nothing that we're seeing indicates that that's a secular long-term trend, but I'm open to questions on it.
That's the nicest compliment I've got, I think so far this week. Go with that. Yeah.
Considering the end market should be a lot less affected by the economy, why is it that you pursue that trend?
Mm-hmm.
That's a fantastic question. I think if we, if we break it down across the 4 major customer streams that we have as of IPO, I'll use those sizings, but they're still broadly indicative. About 50% of our ARR comes from life sciences. Break that half into medical devices and half into bio and pharma. Within bio and pharma, half of that comes from companies of 500 employees or fewer and half from the larger. I think we've all seen the kind of funding and the dynamics that are impacting life sciences overall. We're seeing the greatest impact in those companies of up to 500 employees. They seem to be having the greatest impact. We're still seeing some impact in larger companies, and we're certainly seeing some impact in medical devices as well.
I'm speaking here of Q2 into Q3. There you've got about 50% of our business, which is impacted by the combination of changes in biotech funding, r ising interest rates, that sort of thing. They are then selling into healthcare providers to a large extent. Healthcare providers, which are directly about 10% of our revenue stream as of IPO. They're going through their own round of challenges. You know, lower non-operating income, real cost pressures. They continue to struggle with productivity, et cetera, et cetera. Those two kind of go together. Now you're talking about 60% of the revenue run rate. The remaining 40% split equally between healthcare IT and other diversified. They're just dealing with normal macroeconomic challenges. Healthcare IT is, of course, subject to all the same vagaries of enterprise software. You're hearing all the big guys talk about slowdown pipeline and decision-making.
In this care, the healthcare case, the healthcare IT is generally trying to sell into the other 60% of our business that we see. Then the diversified, everything from flooring manufacturers, waste disposal, cafe operators, they're selling into primarily the healthcare systems as well. Those are the places where although at first glance, you think about it and you say, "Healthcare, that should be recession-resistant.
You say, "Okay, well, let me get into the really, the fastest-growing, most dynamic parts of healthcare, where, you know, they're not just already embedded." That's where we see, you know, the biggest impact has been in new logos, in the third quarter, we began to see some pressure on upsell as well. Those two factors combined create the growth pressure, which is creating this wonderful entry opportunity in terms of share price.
If I could just follow up just real quickly. As you may know, at least one company, Veeva, has talked about the net sales reps, I guess, being reduced or not growing as quickly. How much of it is a factor then for your company?
Not a factor for us at all. Veeva had, they're moving away from a really seat-based economic model, whereas ours is more platform-based in terms of access to the platform. The number of seats is a factor, but it's a tertiary factor in our pricing. Our pricing is primarily driven by company size and vertical. You know, we'll charge more for access to our platform if you're a pharma company than a flooring company because you'll derive a lot more value from it. Industry segment, size of company, then the number of modules that you're subscribing to. Our kinda core modules are called our View Suite, so HospitalView, PhysicianView, nursing view, et cetera. The more of those you use, the higher the price.
Finally, there are analytics that layer on those modules to make them even faster and easier to use. Those factors all go into our pricing.
Thank you.
I'm curious, maybe upon just kind of continuing along that point of spend and sort of spend initiatives. When we talk to agency partners, it seems like in the markets where marketing budgets for healthcare companies are tighter, the transition from more traditional forms of spend in sales and marketing to some of more of the digital native and data assets tend to slower that pace of transition slow.
We saw a really strong move in 2020, 2021 'cause of the pandemic. In these tight budgets, if there's not maybe a comfort level with new level investment, it tends to be on the data side. That seems to be cut first. I mean, have you seen or gotten any pushback on sort of, this is a new investment, we're just not, you know, we need more time to sort of evaluate, we're not comfortable with it yet or anything along those lines?
Let's see. I think it's really interesting. I think I agree with the outcomes that you're seeing. Isn't it ironic that in a tougher sales environment, people cut back on data?
Yeah.
You know, in the long term, you know, you know where that battle is gonna play out.
Mm-hmm.
What we see is people get reluctant to make incremental new investments. They continue to renew as long as they're financially able to, they continue to renew their existing high ROI assets. That's where we saw the pressure first in new logos and then in incremental spending within existing customers for new modules. Saying, "Hey, we love what we've got, but, you know, let us continue to enjoy that ROI for another six months.
Mm-hmm.
The navigate ball question that I don't have a better answer than you do is: how long does that trend continue, and when do we get back on the larger, longer-term trend?
Makes sense. I'm curious, you talk about sort of demonstrating ROI and how important that is to the product and the sales motion for Definitive. Can you just kind of walk through when a salesperson is kinda going into a prospective customer or even in a renewal, what are they looking to really demonstrate to sort of prove out that ROI? What's sort of the standard or the approach that your sales are taking there?
Yeah. This, I have the pleasure to sit in on sales calls occasionally, and the most powerful thing to me is we start with what's keeping you up at night.
Mm-hmm.
In real time, the sales engineer starts modeling out the approach that we could take to solving that problem. I was on one recently where someone was looking to increase their referrals from the Tampa region.
Hmm.
You know, to my knowledge, there was no pre-coordination between this prospect and the sales engineer in order to make them, to create a nice opportunity for the CFO. In real time, we started pulling up the existing referrals from the Tampa region that are going into this healthcare provider. Saying, okay, so here's where you're getting business today, let's flip that. Let's look at where you're underrepresented relative to the region. You can look at it by the physician level, you can look at it by the practice level, you can look at it by the hospital level and start to discern like, hey, if you were to look to make incremental upstream marketing investments, here are the places where there's a high volume that you're underrepresented.
You've got a toehold, but you're not getting a lot. That's where you wanna focus your attention. That's the wonderful thing, and the frustrating thing about the ROI story is it's a little different for each customer.
Mm.
Like back in the day when I was selling medical transcription, software, I had a little calculator that I built in Excel. It was like, you tell me how many lines of, transcription you're generating, I can calculate out the ROI.
Mm.
This is different. On our Investor website, you'll see we've got about 40 different case studies illustrating the ways in which our solution provides value. Some of those that stand out for me are ones where identifying just one or two more patients for an orphan drug will more than pay for the subscription.
Mm.
You know, orphan drug, cohort development, clearly a massive ROI activity. The example that I used around knee replacement and the importance of being well-prepped, you know, targeting the right people and being well-prepped for those discussions, that's another one. Professional service firms are well-represented there.
Mm.
The ways in which they use it both to identify customers and also to execute on projects. There's a fascinating variety.
Interesting. You're helping to demonstrate that ROI in the sales process. Is it, is the solution then easy from a self-service perspective for customers? Once they adopt you, they don't require a lot of professional service or easy ramp time to it?
Yes. In fact, that's one thing to call out in our business model is we have traditionally had 99% subscription revenue, 1% professional services revenue. With the acquisition of Analytical Wizards, I expect that the portion of professional services will go up slightly.
Mm-hmm.
Remain in the mid to low single digits. That's important because the way we use our pro service teams is to work with our largest customers on cutting-edge problems. Once they've seen that problem more than 4 or 5 times, they effectively have the algorithm in mind that we can then feed into development to build it into the platform itself. We have no aspiration to build a big professional services organization 'cause that's easy to do, but hard to reverse. Then you get into this continual short-term, long-term conflict between PS revenue and product development, which we don't wanna get into.
Makes sense. You've I think you've done a great job sort of outlining what's going on in the end markets, I'm sure as you as well as most companies, they look inwardly in these times as well to see how can we drive better productivity from our sales force. I'm curious, you know, is there Have you been able to parse out sort of what's macro versus what's productivity driven? Have you made any changes in terms of how you think about the go-to-market motion?
I think we look at the sales productivity very, very closely. If you think about LTV to CAC, at the time of IPO, we were 10+. That has come down a bit with sales productivity. It's still very attractive. What we're doing right now is taking a look at the sectors in which the motion is working and doubling down in those sectors in terms of our marketing efforts to continue to develop leads, while also maintaining focus on the size of the end market, knowing that we will power out this to make sure that we have. I'll pick on providers, for example. Providers, roughly 10% of our revenue stream, 20% of our potential TAM estimated at IPO.
Cutting down a little bit on the short-term sales and marketing investment while maintaining the longer-term product spend that drives our future outcome. Making some of the smart tactical decisions of that type.
Mm.
'Cause we, you know, part of our culture is we measure everything. You know, we're constantly, you know, you set a hypothesis, you fund it and then as quickly as you see it's working or not working then you either double down or cut back.
Makes sense. I, you know I ask you this question all the time, but you do plenty in demos, but like, you don't ever really offer pilots of the program. I know you can demonstrate the ROI sort of w ith your reps. Have you ever considered sort of, shifting towards a pilot, and if not, you know, is there something preventing where maybe a pilot wouldn't be as effective of a sales motion there?
Yeah. It may be, it may be a terminology thing, but, so you can sign up for free access for 10 days on our website.
Mm.
If you think about what you'd normally do in a pilot, normally you would build the API integrations, load the data, begin to configure the reports. Well, that's about a 6-minute process with our platform. You know, the data is already loaded into the platform. It's readily configurable. You know, as a test, I gave myself access and was able to research a variety of interesting observations on, you know. It's the first thing everybody does, right? You do it on your own doctor.
Mm-hmm.
Your mom's doctor, et cetera, et cetera. Trust me, if I can figure it out, anybody can.
For sure.
Yeah, it's so readily available, and you think about it, you know, we start on a phone call with that guy trying to expand referrals from Tampa and walk him through it on the same platform that he can have access to by creating a username and a password on the website. We haven't found the need to do more formal pilots because the technology is so enabled.
Mm-hmm. Makes sense. Okay. Maybe back to the sort of end market question. You obviously had identified a few end markets where there was greater weakness than others. How flexible is the sales org and go-to-market motion, and can you pivot the same sort of all the reps to specific end market verticals where you might be seeing less impact from the macro? How flexible?
I would say moderately flexible.
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
3 years ago, everybody sold everything.
Yep.
3 years ago, the platform wasn't as robust as it is today.
Mm-hmm.
Clearly, you know, there's some ability to sell that way. As we continue to advance, you know, three years ago, we didn't have a single million-dollar customer.
Yeah.
Now we have mid-teens million-dollar customers.
Mm-hmm.
In an ideal world, we have salespeople that are facing off with industry experts in areas like life science and biopharma that are familiar with the terminology. You know, medical devices is different from pharma, is different from life sciences. There, we really try to keep people in their lanes.
Mm-hmm.
You know, we're patient enough that, you know, we have account development plans, and we're not gonna yank and shift somebody, you know, based on a quarter.
Mm-hmm.
We'll look at that over time. As you start to add further to the right in this little mental picture that only I can see, as you get further to the right, people get more generalizable. Within the kind of all other category, you can pivot people pretty quickly.
Mm-hmm.
Because the depth of usage is not quite as high.
Mm-hmm.
You know, we can make appropriate changes, and we can shift marketing dollars.
Mm-hmm.
We couldn't do a massive pivot.
Then, you know, if we remove the macro completely, you know, as you look at your end markets, kind of how would you rank sort of what you're most excited about in terms of where you see the greatest near-term opportunity and, you know, and maybe where are you focusing your product investments during this sort of time so that you can kind of continue to bolster that functionality for when the market kind of reopens again?
Yeah. Yeah. Can I talk out of both sides of my mouth for a minute?
Sure. Why not?
I love all our customers. You know, if I look across those four segments, they're all doing darn well. There's a lot of room to grow.
Mm-hmm.
You know, when I look at the productivity metrics, et cetera, et cetera, I keep looking for weak spots, and it's just a degree. It's a question of degrees of strength if we're ignoring the present macro environment. I just go back to basics, and I say, "60% of our TAM is coming from life sciences." You know, as we've defined it, I see no reason for that not to continue to grow as a portion of the economy, the information related to that. That feels very core, and we've got a lot of activity there. Closely adjacent is providers, because once you're making one set of claims and other investments, and you're building these analytics, they spill over very directly.
Mm-hmm.
Then you've kinda got the data exhaust that allows you to make similar insights available to healthcare and IT, healthcare and IT and others, in terms of at much, much lower rates, because you've got those high economics. I think of left to right on this little spectrum, focusing the investment on life sciences and to a lesser extent on providers, and then being disciplined about providing access, but not driving new research on the others.
Interesting. We've got about five minutes left. I wanted to save time for questions, so.
Yes. I know that there are some competing data services, but from your customer standpoint, because you're taking your proprietary data and you're adding some that you're buying, is it all proprietary from their standpoint, or can they , well, I can get this here and I can get this there?
By the time we're done, we view it as proprietary, and most of our customers are using multiple sources of data, certainly all of our life science customers. What we'll generally find is folks are using IQVIA for things like, 'cause they're the most commonly mentioned other company as a source. They'll use that for things like pharmaceutical sales rep compensation, which it's just kind of a steady, you know exactly what you need. You know, every period you need this report on this date, boom, boom, that sort of thing. Then they'll, they will use us on incremental use cases, the areas that are more dynamic. You know, within our platform, for example, you can in real time model different patient cohorts. More the strategic stuff coming to us, the tactical stuff remaining there.
Many customers, you know, may have six or seven different data sources that they're pulling together and combining, especially the large pharma.
Good. Can you describe your M&A philosophy [audio distortion]?
Yes. We have a, you know, very clear strategic focus. We look for data and technologies that will immediately make the rest of our data more valuable when we add them to our data and vice versa. They generally tend to be up to $25 million of revenue. They need to have a high gross margin and the ability to get to a long-term economic model similar to our own, where we target high 30% to low 40% adjusted EBITDA at scale. That tends to mean that you'll have a small, fast-growing, high gross margin, slightly loss-making target. The kind of prototypical most recent two examples are Analytical Wizards completed in February of this year and Monocl completed in the fourth quarter of 2019.
We would aspire to do one to two of those deals per year. We're exhaustive on our diligence, and we're disciplined in our usage of capital, and therefore we kiss a lot of frogs before we take one to the ball. I'd love to deploy more capital. Our balance sheet is built for it, but I won't pull the trigger on a deal that I'm not convinced will improve shareholder value. You know, we're waiting for private prices to normalize a little more.
Any additional. Oh, go ahead.
What about head count? You talked about, you know, the macro environment being a little more difficult. What are you doing on the sales side specifically, and where does that target go in terms of the numbers of sales specialists?
We continue to evaluate the places where adding additional sales professionals can be accomplished without degrading their ARR per salesperson. One of the things that makes that really difficult right now is we're seeing a decline in the ARR per salesperson over the last few quarters. We're really digging into it. There's no, there's no simple answer. You know, I think you guys all do the same math that I do of, you know, you look at the dollars of ARR added relative to the sales and marketing, and you say, "I don't like that trend." You know, you can imagine I can be a real pain in the ass internally. We're spending a lot of time breaking it down in detail figuring out where it's working, where it's not.
You know, these are all incremental adjustments to the dials of what is still a highly effective sales and marketing engine but we're continually tweaking.
Maybe just one last one from me on margin trajectory. I think gross margin's been a big topic of discussion.
Mm-hmm.
As Analytical Wizards are integrated, and then you bring more prescription drug data online. Y ou've outperformed so far. How should we think about this as more Analytical Wizards maybe also having an impact from those elongations or maybe some push out of those investments?
The primary driver is, we're making two major claims data set investments that are going live in January of 2023. They're live now. The way these claims data investments work is they're a fixed cost per year that turns on when you go live.
Mm-hmm.
That's worth about 200 basis points of gross margin pressure in the first quarter. If we exited in the fourth quarter at a little over 88% gross margins, you'd see that potentially dipping in the first part of the year to circa 86%. We've taken that all into account in our commentary vis-à-vis 2023 economics that we provided on the September 30th call.
Excellent. We're right out of time. We'll leave it there. Rick, thanks so much for joining me today.
Thank you, Ryan.
Thanks, everyone.