Morning everyone, and welcome again to day three of the William Blair Growth Stock Conference. We appreciate everyone being here. For those of you that don't know me, my name is Margaret Kaczor. I am the Research Analyst here at William Blair & Company, who covers ResMed. I am required to inform you that you can obtain a complete list of research disclosures, potential conflicts of interest at williamblair.com. Now we're very pleased to have Rob Douglas, President and COO and Interim Head now of our respiratory care business, as well as David Pendarvis, Chief Administrative Officer and Global General Counsel with us today. You know, again, I offer a couple sentences before throwing it over to Rob.
It's been a pretty eventful few years for the sleep apnea market, frankly, beginning with what seemed like an acceleration going into COVID. Then COVID happened, and then there's a huge demand for ventilator support products. One of your competitors left the market, or at least had a voluntary recall, so you're trying to catch up with them there. You had the chip supply issues. A lot going on right now, one way or the other. Even though the lack of chip supply has been a bit of an issue in terms of being able to serve patients as much as demand. For us, once these issues are resolved, we really think that ResMed will see a durable, competitive advantage for potentially several years.
Whether that's from a brand perspective, whether that's from a pool of patients that frankly aren't getting the care that they need and what they deserve. Those patients will come back into the channel, and sleep apnea has accelerated growth again coming into the marketplace. Then beyond that, just as a big picture, push for ResMed, for us, always been positive is this is probably the only real company that I know in my coverage in MedTech, that has been able to monetize both the digital and SaaS components of the business. Ultimately, for us, that's the future of MedTech. You guys are years ahead of some of their peers.
With that, I'm gonna turn it over to Rob and Dave to provide a little bit more color, and then maybe we'll have time for a question or two after.
Thank you, Margaret. Thanks everyone for joining. It's great to be here talking to you. It has been an event for two years, and I will later in this presentation provide some commentary around how we're seeing those events and where they're going into the future. In the meantime, though, I'll just give you a recap of our strategy and how we see the opportunity in the markets that we're in. We like to lay out our strategy with this. You know, a lot of this is around how you communicate with our teams and with all of our stakeholders. Our number one metric is the number of people whose lives we help.
We're totally purpose-driven, totally mission-driven around this, and it really helps us have a similar type team and have a really steady vision through all of the challenges that Margaret was talking about before. Our real purpose is to focus on helping people live healthier lives and staying out of hospital. There's plenty of companies around with great technology helping people, you know, shorten their stays in hospital and do well in hospital and all of that. Our positioning is we're looking at solutions and therapies and ways of really keeping people out of hospital and keeping them healthier for longer. We're known for sleep apnea. We also focus on COPD, other respiratory conditions. I'll talk more about sleep apnea.
Over the last five, six years, we've invested in SaaS businesses, and these software as a service businesses that are providing really the patient management and the workflow management to providers of out-of-hospital care. It's very much integrated with our vision that the therapies we provide are targeted at a hospital and the software businesses that we run are targeted at managing those environments out of the hospital. Very much a technology orientation. You'll see we've been early adopters of connectivity, early adopters of digital solutions. That's meant we have this tremendous asset in terms of data, and knowledge around what's happening in the market.
We're just getting started on using that data to really optimize outcomes and provide the evidence that we need to show that our treatments are the best way to treat these patients. What's more, that our treatments actually cost health systems less to apply than it does cost the health system to treat the consequences of the diseases that we manage if they're left untreated. I mentioned earlier, we've got a very strong team. It's, you know, the interesting times also in terms of the whole issue of the COVID times and remote work and how all that happens. We have a very strong philosophy around flexible teams and being purposeful about what the teams need to do and how they work together.
We've always been global, so we've been heavy Zoom users probably since Zoom was first launched, actually, more than six or seven years ago. We didn't miss a beat when we moved into that. As far as we can see, our productivity has been strong through all of that. We're very much focused on the medical values of the company. We're actually using our data, and we've been able to greatly accelerate our ability to increase the standard of knowledge or the state of knowledge in the industry. Typically, we'll go to our industry scientific congresses that are, you know, attended by respiratory specialists and sleep specialists. We're generally producing the most high quality research at those seminars.
Recently, one of the opinion leaders in the sleep space. I did a year in review, and I think half the papers he cited were actually funded by ResMed or actually authored by ResMed. Really using that data now to drive the science and the environment that you're in. In terms of that strategy, our sort of key execution pillars, we're looking at growing the market. The thing with, particularly with, sleep apnea or sleep-disordered breathing we call it's a really common condition, and I don't talk to anyone now that doesn't know about it, doesn't have a relative with it or a friend or have it themselves. We actually think it probably affects about a quarter of the adult population to some degree.
Now, not all of that quarter needs treatment, but absolutely a lot more than the current treatment levels need treatment. We're in a just incredibly under-penetrated market with nearly one billion patients. There wouldn't be probably more than 40 million patients around the world that have been tried to being treated. It's still just a massive opportunity in our core business, and that's before we even start to think about COPD in those markets, where there are challenging treatment conditions and difficult to get out-of-hospital standards of care. There are over 380 million COPD patients that we could help improve their lives as well. I mentioned earlier, digital innovation is step two to where we're going.
It's always our first sticking point, and we've got so much data that we're able to drive results with just connecting the device to boost an uplift in adherence. That is how much people, once they start using our treatments, stay on it. You know, it's not quite 90% now, but it's close to. That was an uplift from around 60%. That's actually better than nearly any other optional treatment or optional long-term therapy that you'll find. These respiratory therapies are used by patients, and they're a key part of their life. Mentioned already, we're focusing on transforming out-of-hospital care. This process of providing long-term care to people is a difficult environment.
The number one problem for all these businesses is actually at the moment staffing, and getting people aren't paid high wages to really provide good care for patients. Actually, technology can really be a big help to that if we make life better for those staff. We make the documentation loads easier. We make sort of management and planning easier. There's huge opportunity in these out-of-hospital settings to make these changes. I just want to talk a little bit more about what we mean by this integrated healthcare. This example is really in our sleep environment. When we think about everything we do, we think about sort of the patient pathway or how the patient goes through from being a consumer onto long-term treatment that's changing their lives. It's not a simple process.
It's a long, long pathway. The first thing is awareness. How do you become aware that you're potentially a sleep apnea sufferer? One way would be to talk to me, and I'll give you some advice. Actually, the most common thing is it's a bed partner complaining about your snoring or your gasping or waking up. It's often a threat. It's like, "If you don't sort this out, this isn't a good future for the relationship." That type of awareness will generally come through to primary care, and we'd hope that primary care are aware enough around the signs and symptoms of sleep apnea to know that it's a condition that they should be referring on to sleep specialists. Sleep specialists will then refer you to a test.
Now, that may be an in-lab test or a home test, depending on preferences and capacity. There is a lot of testing capacity in the market, and that's grown consistently over the years. From there, you will get referred to a home medical equipment provider, or different versions of this around the world. The home medical equipment provider will set you up on therapy, get you stable on therapy with the right equipment and the right mask, and then sort out billing for you, and then move you on to long-term care and keep you on therapy treatment over time. That long-term adherence is really important.
We actually see that, you know, take a long-term view of it's a real disease management process that currently there are a lot of parts of the healthcare system. Our digital strategy is really to enable sort of integrations between all of those sort of steps in the pathway. Actually, there's bottlenecks or potential bottlenecks in every step of those. In a sense, this is a summary of our commercial and marketing programs and our technology programs, because we're looking for technology solutions that aid the handover and management within each of those steps. We're looking at commercial programs to make sure that businesses can traverse and support across all of those. It's really right for a technology drive on that, and we've seen really good success in that.
We're far and away number one product leader, so physical products, we've got the best. Up until middle of last year, the AirSense 10 was the best device on the market. Now it's the second best because we've launched the AirSense 11, and it's going really well. We have the number one and number two products in the market. Traditionally in this market, we would obsolete an older platform as soon as we could after launching a new platform. I'll come in a minute to talk about some of the market dynamics and why we're not doing that now. We've got both these products in the market and going really well. We're particularly excited about the AirSense 11.
We launched it in the US last year, and we're just launching it in Europe as we speak. It's been a significant part of our volume in the US over the past year. One important thing that we're seeing is that with the improved patient engagement and ease of use and integration with our other digital solutions, we're seeing that patients who use the AirSense 11 are much more likely to pick up myAir, which is the patient engagement app that helps patients acclimatize to treatment and learn how to use the treatment. In fact, in using the app and the videos and the intelligent support from that, they become much less likely to come back to their provider. It's better for the provider because it eases their workload.
In fact, they're much more likely to hit their compliance targets in the shortest time possible. It improves billing times and improves the number of people that are billing. It's really good for the providers. On the AirSense 10, we were impressed that we had 25% of the patients taking up myAir. On the AirSense 11, we have over 60% taking up myAir, which is a phenomenal change. Our mask portfolio, we've got the best mask portfolio in the business. We continue to innovate and we've still got great ideas of how to upgrade these particular points in the portfolio and also add new elements in terms of how we view the segmentation. Really for that, in terms of all those solutions, we've got great stuff for patients, for providers and for payers.
We actually have that today. We've got really good data showing that we've got a great ROI for treating patients. I'll come to that. We're easing the life of payers and most importantly, for people whose life has been affected by sleep apnea, we're actually changing their life and helping them live much better lives. Again, talk to your cab driver or your Uber driver or anyone like that who won't take you on if you tell them someone who's using sleep apnea, and they will tell you that it's changed their life. They will also tell you ways in which it can be better, which is another really interesting thing about our business is that even at this stage and with the changes that we're driving, we're not done on the technology front.
We've actually still got good innovation that we can introduce and invent in order to improve really the life of the patients. Going forward, we have really strong plans for each of these entities in the whole health system. Quickly off our apps business. Really you could think of our apps business as the electronic health record and workflow tools to providers of medical equipment in various different settings. We started originally with Brightree, which is a provider of those systems for the home medical equipment industry. Obviously, we have to have firewalls and all that type of thing from the traditional ResMed business. Actually by integrating Brightree well with the AirView workflow systems and those types of things, we can really make a good experience for providers setting up sleep patients with ResMed equipment.
We also make the rest of their business much better as well in terms of how they manage their workload, how they schedule their staff, how they get their, you know, even logistics operating, how they manage their warehouses. We're really helping across the board operating for the industry. Brightree very much has a major market share in those industries. MatrixCare is doing the same in out-of-hospital care settings. Our share positions are different. We have higher shares in skilled nursing, which actually has been one segment that's been challenged most by COVID. I don't need to go into it, but there were many political issues around what was happening in skilled nursing homes during COVID. There our census-based business is affected by the people's reluctance to go into nursing homes at the moment.
We are seeing that recover, and it will naturally recover. Pretty well all of these other settings are really growing strongly and really good positions, and we're well positioned to take share in those markets. I ended up with a few more slides than I expected here. The net of all of that is we've got the best data of anyone in the industry. As I said, we've got nearly 20 million patients in our AirView system. We've got so many cloud-connected devices out there, and all of these devices are connecting every night and bringing data in, and we're well over 11 billion nights of data. We're actually able to use that data, we can tokenize it and anonymize it and match it with other sources of data.
We're now actually able to match utilization data of how people are handling their sleep condition with all-cause health costs and all-cause health outcomes in particular health systems and countries. In France, for example, with N's of well over 100,000, we were able to compare people who've been diagnosed with sleep apnea, people who use their CPAP versus people who did not use their CPAP. We showed a significant improvement in survival rates for patients who use their CPAP with a 40% difference roughly. Now these are all published studies, and they're like in this presentation on our website, so I won't dive into them. We've just recently published another one showing actually a dose-response measurement.
For every extra hour that you use your CPAP up to seven hours, you have something between 5% and 10% reduction in utilization of healthcare expenses. Again, these studies are done with N's of six figures or more, huge numbers of patients. They're real world evidence. They're not randomized controlled evidence, but we actually think this real world evidence, particularly at the health economics scale, is really providing really good data for us. All of that nets into a very strong track record of performance. We've had really consistent revenue growth, and even better earnings growth, over the past five years. We, in terms of our markets and where we're going, we're still barely just getting started. This strong track record we're very proud of. We've got a strong vision.
We've got all the product assets that we need, that we're able to really take a consistent view of our hospital healthcare experience. You don't see other players that position you like this. Our tools all really improve the patient experience. We're keeping patients on treatment for longer. We're actually making it lower cost to find and set up a patient. And then we're providing much better health outcomes, and we're keeping all of this as data right through to measurable health outcomes. This is our challenge, you know, obviously we have to get the health systems to listen to this and understand it and explain it. When you've got the types of power of data that we have, you really can't argue with it.
I just want to talk a little bit about recent events, and Margaret gave a nice recap of that. It has been interesting times. When the COVID pandemic hit, pretty well all the sleep labs in most hospitals were turned into respiratory wards. There was a big headwind on new patient diagnosis. We did move to home sleep testing a bit, but that has sort of normalized. In most countries, not in all countries, it is relatively normal around that. Early in the COVID kind of pandemic, the only treatment available was in ICUs with patients on ventilators. Now, we make home care ventilators for COPD, chronic COPD patients and others.
We don't target selling our products into hospitals, and they don't look like hospital ventilators, but actually they're very good at keeping people that need ventilation, urgent ventilation alive. Because we make home care ventilators, we make more than nearly anyone. We saw huge demand for ventilators through that period. We had to really adopt guiding principles around how we were gonna meet the demand in terms of how we would allocate products and how we'd look after patients. We set up those guiding principles, and our team executed towards that. Things started to normalize.
We saw that the electronics industry went through one of its typical, cyclical, boom and bust cycles in terms of available volume, generally caused by a mismatch of investments and unexpected uplifts in consumer demand, not to mention electric vehicles and telephones and all of that. Typically our systems would manage that. It's actually something that happens all the time, although not to the extent that it's currently happening. That's why we have inventories and all those types of things. We wouldn't have seen an industry shortage, and perhaps wouldn't have had people asking us about supply chain issues had we not had a competitor recall come up where, in April there was an inkling of an issue on the competitor's financial announcement.
In June, there was a recall that basically went to all of the patients of this competitor and they were the number two in the market, saying, "Please stop using the device and talk to your physician." The physicians didn't really have much advice what to do, and many people did keep using their device. The competitor said, "We're not gonna supply any new patients until we've completed the recall, which should take about four months." Actually, subsequent announcements have extended that out, and they're still talking that the recall will finish around the end of calendar 2022. What that has led us is huge uplift in demand, where we've tried to meet the demand for number one and number two in the market.
In the face of those supply chain constraints, actually, we can't. We will, but we can up to some, and we've tried to give some indication of where we thought that would be. Although it is challenging because what's happening is this term called decommit, which has always been a feature in supply chains. Again, we haven't had to explain what they meant before, but basically it means someone's promised you a delivery of product, either it could be next week or it could be over the next 12 months, and they decommit from that and say, "We're only gonna give you half of it or none of it." They can come out of the blue.
Actually we've been managing a higher than normal rate of decommit coupled with a competitor recall that sucked all of the inventory out of our systems and out of all of our customers' systems as well. There is a huge shortage of devices. At the moment, we joke with our head of our supply chain is our Chief Revenue Officer because what that person builds, we sell in terms of devices as soon as we can. Of course, we have to navigate the freight challenge that COVID introduced as well. Pretty well, we feel we've got a good handle on managing this. It is still uncertain times, and things like China lockdowns and what that means for the supply chain are challenging for us.
Our team, we've got a really strong team, and we're able to jump on these issues. When we see a problem or if we think it might be a problem, we'll revalidate component alternatives. We'll do design changes. One major design change that we did, and we only launched a few weeks ago, was about one of our main components that was challenging was the comms module. This is shared technology with what's in cars and telephones and things like that. We have different protocols around the world, and we had some significant decommits on that. We introduced a device, an AirSense 10, which is a very high-end APAP device with Card-to-Cloud. We're going back to how it used to work before the AirSense 10 was launched.
We're using a SD card to collect the data and use that for proof of using the device. We're targeting that at specific customers. Actually, there are new entrants in the industry that have been supplying similar products like that at price premiums, significant price premiums to us in the shortage situation. We think it's much better for our quality product in doing that. That's, as I say, only launched a few weeks ago, but getting good reception and should actually help ease some of the challenges that we've got. Looking forward, we do expect that these supply chain challenges will continue, but our teams should be able to sort of steadily but slowly and with some potential volatility on a result to result basis, continue to improve that through.
We think that the competitor calls their recall end around, you know, early 2023. In fact, it's gonna be ±6 months, probably wanting minus. After that, there will be a patient backlog because as we think about it, if you know someone who's waiting for sleep apnea, their HME will have told them that somewhere between two-six months. Actually, we think the backlog's probably somewhere between two and 10 months and growing. Once that recall situation ends, there can be a lot of work to get all of those patients in the backlog through the system. We expect the sort of mismatches, supply and demand, to possibly extend a year or even 18 months beyond that recall. It's. We're in this situation for a long time.
We're managing it with guiding principles, and our key guiding principles are focus on patient and patient acuity. The patients who need our treatments the most. We've prioritizing ventilators, bi-level machines, adaptive servo ventilators and then APAP. We're focusing on providers who can get good sort of good outcomes for patients. It is the ones using our digital solutions. We have a business relationship with, and we've had to have an allocation policy to allocate to those providers. As the industry leader, we're actually being very disciplined in talks around every way we're conducting ourselves in the industry. We're being thoughtful and disciplined around pricing, although costs are a factor, and we have had to increase our charge, and other changes.
We're actually taking a view with an eye to the long term. Our view is once these sort of short-term considerations are over, the actual return to long-term steady growth enabled by breaking the bottlenecks in the patient pathways, we could resume our pathway to continued market leadership and continued access to millions and millions of more patients as we go through. You know, our mission to 250 million lives, we think is actually the right message to be communicating and we're doing well on that going through. That tends to continue to be a focus for Mick. We're very proud of what we're doing. Thank you, Margaret.
Yeah. Thank you. Any questions from the audience? Otherwise, we're coming up on time. Maybe just one second since I've got you and given the announcement in moving on to Verily. Any changes or any updates around what that could mean from a strategy for ResMed and how do you look at FDA because this is your interim right now?
You know, Jim's done a great job for ResMed. You know, he joined ResMed as our Head of Strategy, as our first head of strategy. Strategy is probably his strongest link. I think we have a really strong strategy. Naturally, we're in the process anyway of refining the strategy and for two reasons. One is 2025 is not that far away, and we would be giving our teams and everyone a view of how we're thinking sort of out refining that. The current dynamics of market changes are very significant. We do have teams looking at refining strategy, but there's nothing broken in there. We had a very strong team that know how to run.
In fact, the thing is we just didn't have a lot of notice. If we'd had more notice, we probably could have found an internal appointment through the correct process without needing to announce me as interim. I've been really impressed with how the team's going and what they're doing.
Fabulous. Well, we are 30 seconds away, so I'm gonna call it right now. Really appreciate everyone being here in the audience. Thank you to Dave and Rob. We're gonna head to breakout room for more Q&A. That breakout room is your room. Thank you, guys.
Yeah. Thanks, everyone.