Hello, everyone, and welcome to this next session of the 25th Annual Needham Virtual Healthcare Conference. I'm Ryan MacDonald, and I lead Needham's health tech research efforts. In this session, I'm pleased to be joined by Tempus AI CFO Jim Rogers. Jim, thanks for joining me today.
Yeah, thanks for having me, Ryan.
Thanks for everybody who is joining us today. For those listening in, we've got about 40 minutes to go through a list of questions on a fireside chat here. If you do have questions for Jim, feel free to put them into the chat box and we'll make sure to get those asked and answered over the last five minutes or so of the fireside chat. With that, let's jump right in. Jim, for those who are less familiar with Tempus, how about a brief overview of the business?
Yeah, of course. At Tempus, we've been spending the last 10 years focused on building a platform that allows us to bring the power of data and AI to healthcare to positively impact patients, starting in oncology. We've focused on three different categories to date. One is in AI-enabled diagnostics for providers. We run a very large sequencing laboratory, or several of them across the United States, where we process samples on behalf of ordering physicians for their oncology patients and contextualize the results even further through some hospital integrations that allow us to access clinical data. We also partner with life sciences companies to improve their drug discovery efforts through the licensing of de-identified data.
We also develop kind of a suite of AI application tools that can do things such as match patients to clinical trials, close care gaps, or some of which even become algorithmic diagnostics of their own, such as our cardiology efforts, which we can get into later on.
Awesome. Yeah. You touched on it a little bit there, but in my view, the tech backbone of Tempus is a real differentiator for the business. Can you talk a bit more about how Tempus's combination of data, AI, and diagnostics is really unmatched in the industry? How difficult would it be for another company to replicate what Tempus has today, and how does AI play into the company's moat?
Yeah. We very much view ourselves as a technology company, and so we've been focused on data from day one. The original idea was, how do we aggregate all of this siloed data to say something insightful to a physician or to a life sciences company? At the same time that we were building out our wet lab capabilities to generate genomic information, we went to the hospitals and had conversations with them about building these EMR integrations that would give us access to clinical information. The molecular information is obviously incredibly powerful, in its own right. However, when you pair it with clinical information, that allows you to do two things. One, as I mentioned before, you can contextualize the result for the physician that is ordering the test, give them additional insight that you can't glean from just the molecular information.
That also, that data as it's de-identified and leveraged in drug discovery, allow you to design more effective trials and really take a different approach than what life sciences companies have historically done because they didn't have access to this multimodal longitudinally updating information. That was core to what we built from the beginning. We're now connected to over 5,500 institutions, and so we have a pretty broad coverage in terms of integrations. That's allowed us to amass a very large dataset that really is the driver of the flywheel that we have. The more data that we generate and the more data that we collect allows us to generate and garner even more insights that we can embed back into the test or with our life sciences partners. The challenge is that a lot of people have access to data.
There's other sequencers that have, obviously, a tremendous amount of molecular data. You have some of the EMR companies that have access to clinical information, but it's really the marrying of those two that sets Tempus apart and why it's important to not only get access to data, but build a suite of tools that allows you to structure, harmonize that data, and also tools that our partners can leverage to interrogate the data itself. We have a research-facing portal called Lens, where our life sciences partners can go in, view the data, build models right within the environment, and that's really incredibly important for them to glean the insights that we provide.
That's really helpful context there. As we think about the two revenue segments of the business, you've got the diagnostics, which is the testing business, and then obviously the data business. Maybe just starting with diagnostics, given how large it is as a percentage of revenue, for those getting up to speed, could you just cover the tests within your genomics or diagnostic segment and maybe how you think about the growth prospects across those tests?
Yeah. Within diagnostics, we have two offerings or two call points. We sell to oncologists through our therapy selection and MRD offering, and then we sell to genetic counselors through our hereditary offering, the hereditary offering, largely the legacy Ambry business that we acquired back in 2025. Within oncology, we have a very robust portfolio where we do DNA, RNA, liquid, solid, germline. We have a tumor-informed offering, an MRD through our partnership with Personalis, and then a tumor-naive test that we've developed internally. We can really serve as a one-stop shop for oncologists to meet all of their genetic testing needs. In the hereditary space, the majority of that business is in oncology today, although there is a small rare undiagnosed disorder business that is growing. It's different call points. The growth trajectories for the businesses are different.
Obviously, in oncology and therapy selection, the industry continues to grow. All of our peers are experiencing strong growth as well. Our oncology growth rates in Q4 were 29%, so very strong kind of volume growth in oncology. On the hereditary side in 2025, we benefited from some competitor disruption, and so we had outsized growth for 2025 that began to moderate in Q4 and will continue to moderate in Q1, as we've highlighted for folks. The hereditary space is more mature in oncology. Rare is still relatively untapped and so that represents an opportunity for that growth rate to kind of tick up. That's kind of a quick overview of the breakdown of our assays and anticipated growth for each.
Very helpful. Before we drive into the growth drivers within diagnostics specifically, I wanted to ask you about some recent news. Late last week, the diagnostics group of stocks, and Tempus included, were pressured by some updates around the CRUSH RFI and announced efforts just more broadly from CMS to sort of eliminate wasteful spend. Can you provide a bit of color on the CRUSH RFI and what potential impacts it could have on the diagnostics business over time?
Yeah. The CRUSH RFI, as you just described, was an effort aimed at kind of minimizing wasteful spending within CMS. For us, the reimbursement landscape has constantly evolved since we've started sequencing patients, and we've always taken approach of having kind of multiple mitigating strategies that hedge against any reimbursement risk. We have multiple labs and different kind of MAC jurisdictions. We've been bringing assays to the FDA to kind of seek coverage under the National Coverage Determinations, and those efforts will continue. We believe we're well positioned to kind of adapt to any potential changes that could come in the future. That's always been our strategy from day one.
Got it. All right. As we think about sort of the diagnostics business, obviously it's P x Q, you know, so volume. We'll talk about volume and pricing from a growth perspective. If we start with volumes, can you talk about the drivers of volume growth for Tempus across oncology and hereditary? How much of the success in oncology is sort of market share gains versus sort of a simpler, broader market growth and sort of more patients actually just getting their cancer sequenced?
Yeah. Certainly there's, as I mentioned, we're all benefiting from the fact that the market as a whole continues to grow. We used to say that we thought about 1/3 of cancer patients were receiving this type of sequencing. We believe that number is probably about 55% today. There's still room for growth of the overall market, but everyone is benefiting from the fact that this type of testing is being ordered more frequently. For us, the advantage has always been one of the insights that we can provide. We certainly have experienced over the last several years market share gains as a result of kind of our differentiated offering. As I mentioned, we grew 29% in Q4. That had accelerated over the course of 2025, largely due to some Sales force realignments we did the previous year that had caused some disruption.
By the time we got to Q2 of last year, we had started to kind of see efficiency kind of tick up from the Salesf orce, and that continued over the balance of the year. On the hereditary side, as I mentioned, the hereditary cancer market, more mature, however, we still don't sequence, if you look at the number of people that should receive hereditary cancer screening, it's still a relatively untapped market. You have to be able to kind of see that pull-through to kind of drive higher growth rates there. Rare is a little bit different just because that's relatively new. Reimbursement only kicked in over the last couple of years, so our competitors in that space are also growing quite nicely. We would anticipate that growing faster than the oncology hereditary market.
Makes sense. As you think about sort of the oncology segment, you mentioned 55% probably of the market is, or patients are getting sequenced today. Within the existing portfolio, how much of that sort of existing addressable market can you serve? How does that expand as you get more tests approved across sort of solid tumor, liquid, and MRD, the categories you talked about?
Yeah, I think expanding the 55% largely comes from changes in guidelines, right?
Doctors' adoption of this type of testing, you've seen some of that over the last couple of months where there's been expansions in things like pancreatic cancer to cover earlier stages and things. As you look at that 55%, I'd say less so tied to new assays coming to market, more so that, again, these doctors are now leveraging these types of tests in different circumstances where they may have previously not done so.
All right. As we shift to sort of ASPs within the oncology segment there, you've talked about there's a potential here to expand ASPs by about over $500 over the next several years here. If we look at sort of the categories of that, you talk about an incremental $200 of ASP growth that could come from just the xT to xT CDx transition. Can you remind investors sort of what percent of tests have been migrated to CDx thus far? Sort of what's inhibited the transition, if at all, and then when you think this migration's going to be complete?
Yeah. There's kind of three initiatives that we have on the ASP front, the first being that we got xT, was FDA approved, got ADLT status, and we began migrating volume in 2025. We ended the year between 30% and 40% of kind of volume that had been migrated. We're confident that we'll end the year in 2026 with the vast majority of the remaining volume kind of migrated over to the ADLT version of the assay. There's a variety of factors that lead to the timing of that. Again, we're confident that we'll be able to exit the year with the majority of that being on the ADLT version.
The second initiative relates to our liquid biopsy portfolio, xF, which we submitted to the FDA earlier this year, won't have a 2026 impact on rates, but as we get to 2027 and get approval, that will also lead to additional upside in reimbursement for xF.
The last initiative relates to commercial payers. We're largely still an out-of-network lab and payment for our assays varies greatly amongst commercial payers. We do think that over time, we will continue to make incremental gains with those payers. Obviously, as I just mentioned, changes in guidelines that recommend the testing obviously lead to coverage in certain instances. When we get FDA approval of assays, that also helps with some of those conversations with commercial payers. We'll continue to crack at the number of times that we receive very little or no payment from commercial payers, and we think that adds $100+ over the next couple of years.
Yeah. How much, as you get assays approved across solid, liquid, and then also at MRD, how big of a factor is having tests in each of those categories into, let's call it, the broader commercial reimbursement where you could start to see that final $150, I think you talk about that factors into ASP growth?
Yeah, exactly. I think it certainly, again, it's payer by payer. They all have their own policies and what they cover or don't. Some may only cover solid tumor, some may only cover FDA-approved assays. It's very fragmented is how you chip away at it. We're doing all of the things that all of our peers are in terms of trying to drive up that ASP with commercial payers, which has lagged where Medicare and Medicare Advantage have been at.
That makes sense. Okay. As we shift to the hereditary segment, you mentioned obviously nice market share gains due to some disruptions at a competitor last year, starting to see that market sort of moderate in terms of the growth rate there. How should we think about the blend of volume growth versus ASP expansion within that segment and as we think about 2026?
Yeah. ASP is obviously more mature in the hereditary screening space than they are in therapy selection. The only kind of anticipated expansion we would see was as the rare business grows and becomes a larger piece of the pie, obviously the reimbursement for that testing is higher than what we would have for hereditary oncology. That would lead to some increase over time. We're not anticipating significant changes in reimbursement for the hereditary space until that occurs.
Yeah. While not directly comparable, do you see any knock-on effects from the news out of Grail with some of the concerns around their tests, or does it change or shift consumer perception of how hereditary screening or precancer screening is viewed by consumers in the marketplace in your view?
We don't believe so. That is obviously an early detection test versus the testing that we're doing, which is identifying whether you may be a carrier of a mutation that a loved one has, the same mutation they developed cancer. It's a different type of test.
One that plays an important role in people's care. We don't think that there'll be much impact there.
Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. If we shift over to the data business, we saw Total Contract Value climb to north of $1.1 billion from $940 million. What are some of the key drivers that drives future strength in the data segment?
Yeah. We have always said that, over time, TCV growth and NRR should largely align with your revenue growth.
There's obviously for us, when we sign some large chunkier deals, that has a larger impact on TCV in the short term. What we did say at year-end was of the greater than $1.1 billion of TCV, $350 million of that relates to 2026. By way of context, we did about $317 million of data and Apps revenue in 2025, and so that backlog provides us a level of visibility as we enter 2026 that is really strong. We do think that the way that these relationships are established are that they are set up to grow over time, meaning that they typically start small where someone is licensing one cohort of data. They see value from that, and so they expand it to multiple indications or assets that they're working on internally.
Ultimately, they rise to some of these strategic collaborations of which we've disclosed a handful of those over the years. We work with 19 of the top 20 big pharma companies, a couple hundred biotechs, so very good or strong customer footprint today. The good news is that many of them are still in that small or mid-tier in terms of the number of cohorts that they're licensing. There's a tremendous opportunity for us to march all of them up to those strategic collaborations or the majority of them up to those strategic collaborations that will fuel the growth over the next couple years.
Yeah. You've had a strong start to the year, frankly, within the data business, and it's proven through the announced deal with Merck, which I think is a new strategic collaboration partner. You've just announced an expansion with Gilead. Can you just talk about the environment for the data business right now, what got Merck over the hump and some context around what's involved in that deal?
Yeah. As we mentioned at kind of year-end and on the earnings call was that we've had really strong engagement from our biopharma partners. Obviously, that's continued into the quarter with the announcement of several other deals, Merck being kind of the headline deal. The thing is, as I just mentioned, is these relationships kind of evolve over a multi-year period. These are folks that we had been working with previously on a smaller scale. They've obviously seen the value that our data can bring to their drug discovery efforts and have decided to expand those relationships more broadly across multiple indications. This is not a type of business where things can just kind of come up out of nowhere. They're relationships that we're cultivating over multiple years, making sure that they see value in the data that they're licensing before they expand.
It's really exciting to see Merck join that group. Great to see the Gilead expansion as well, but one that we're not surprised by given obviously the engagement that we've seen from biopharma over the last six-nine months.
Yeah. Maybe just as a clarifying point, because I think it's something that's interesting that, as we've done meetings together that I think is really underappreciated within the investment community, is sort of the opportunity for expansion even within these large strategic collaborations with customers. Can you just talk about, sort of in a typical deal, like one of these collaborations, what percent of the dataset they're actually using and how there's opportunities to expand into additional cohorts over time? Because these aren't sort of just deals for the entire data platform from my understanding, is it?
Yeah. I think that the reason why people end up committing to these multi-year strategic deals is really one of scale and discount, right? You could license one file from us or 10 files from us, or you're just paying a higher rate than if you're committing to spend. What typically happens is that once organizations determine that they want to embed the data across their entire portfolio, they commit to those higher levels of spend to secure a higher discount. That said, it doesn't mean that you can download all of the records for these strategic collaborations. There's obviously limits in terms of what people can access, and it's a relatively small percentage of the overall database that they can download. A lot of times it's let's get in the door, let's expand this across the entire portfolio.
That's not a cap on what someone could spend in a given year. They may still come back and have three other projects that they need to work on, but it gives them the ability to kind of leverage the amount of spend that they have to secure a larger discount.
Yeah. Makes sense. Okay. One of the most notable deals you signed last year was sort of the foundation model deal with AstraZeneca. Can you just provide an update on sort of where we are in the development process of that deal and how is that factoring into the pipeline of incremental opportunities for similar type foundation model deals?
Yeah. We announced the kind of AZ Pathos foundation model deal last spring. As we talked about on the earnings call, the development and training of that model has gone well. We've delivered the first version of that to AstraZeneca, and so we feel like that is going as well as we've expected. I think that in terms of pipeline, that's obviously a very large deal, and so it's difficult to predict when another one of those. We've certainly seen an uptick from other folks that want to build smaller models, maybe indication-specific. There's always ongoing discussions related to those types of deals. I don't think long term, because we get to retain a copy of the model and leverage it to make our data products and our diagnostics more intelligent, that's not going to kick in at the first version of the model.
You start to identify some of these insights that we can either turn into enhancements or insights in our diagnostics or leveraging the model to improve the effectiveness of our data products. That work is ongoing. We're super excited about, obviously, the work that we've done over the last 12 months to kind of get a first version of the model. It will be ongoing to continue to kind of tweak and further train the model. Certainly we'll start talking more and more about the insights and things that we're seeing.
As we've done sort of checks in the marketplace around sort of the competitive differentiation of Tempus' data relative to peers in the group, it really sort of seems to boil down to sort of uniqueness of the proprietary datasets that you own, and then sort of data visualization or ease of use in surfacing insights. When you think about sort of where things stand today and the investments you're making on the data side of the business, what are the prioritization in terms of remaining competitive and differentiated there? Is it filling sort of gaps within the dataset that you're looking at, or is it working to sort of make surfacing insights a lot easier, making the platform easier to use for your life sciences customers?
Yeah, I think we're always evaluating new datasets and how they can play a role in kind of the data offering. That said, what we have today allows us to kind of fuel the needs of our customers today, and so there's not kind of big gaps in the data. The interesting thing about the dataset is it's constantly updating, right? Every time there's a new therapy or a new guideline, you start to see that kind of flow through the data, and our customers need access to the latest data. It's kind of maintaining that continuous flow of data is obviously important. We certainly have made tremendous investments in the tool that I mentioned earlier called Lens, which is what researchers are kind of leveraging to access a lot of the data to build their models.
We've embedded things like Tempus One there, where before you'd have to go in and kind of manually identify kind of to build your own cohort. You had to understand the data model. Now you can just talk to it and say, "Build me a cohort with these things," and it can do it automatically. That ease of use is incredibly powerful, especially when you're dealing with the amount of data that we're leveraging with our life sciences partners, that they're not spending all this time trying to just understand how to get to what they want, have that be readily available for them so then they can spend their time modeling versus trying to build some of these cohorts.
Makes sense. When you acquired Ambry, I know it was noted that they didn't really have much of a data business at all, but there was an opportunity as you integrated to sort of build products with and leverage that data sort of into the future. What's the product roadmap look like in this regard, and how near-term could you start to leverage some of the data from Ambry in that data business overall?
Yeah. We've owned Ambry for about a year now, and they've operated largely independently. What we think is Tempus' role in the ecosystem is how do you positively impact patients. That comes in the form of intelligent diagnostics to providers and also leveraging de-identified data sets for purposes of drug discovery. We're in the process of evaluating the nature of that data and how it gets incorporated into the data offering. Based on that will dictate how quickly or how long it takes us to incorporate it into our life sciences partnership. That is ongoing. That will continue to be ongoing in 2026 and into 2027, certainly an area that we think the platform can be very applicable to, given what we've built in oncology.
Yeah, makes sense. With the current sort of forecast, as you think about the growth in the data business, it's not really dependent on integration of Ambry at all, I would imagine, into the dataset or any sort of starting of monetization there, is there?
Yeah. The vast majority of our data revenues today are within late-stage oncology, and so that is not something that we're, again, having an impact in 2026 or 2027.
I want to shift and touch at least on the AI applications business as well, because I think this is where there's some really interesting long-term future opportunity for Tempus. You continue to validate and gain reimbursement for a number of applications. Obviously, you have the ECG-AF go out there that's gotten some reimbursement on there. How do you view the framework developing for additional approvals in this portfolio, and what do we need to see to hit an inflection point where the AI application business can be a driver of growth and profitability over time?
Yeah. When you talk about that flywheel that I mentioned earlier, one of the exciting things is as you start amassing all this data, you can start identifying very interesting insights that get turned into algorithms of their own or algorithmic diagnostics. We have a suite of those in cardiology that you mentioned, two of which have FDA approval, have limited reimbursements. We have some FDA-approved offerings in radiology. We have digital pathology through the Paige acquisition. We have a number of these efforts that are ongoing that have been deployed and are reaching some scale. To your point, there isn't a strong reimbursement framework. Unfortunately, there's not a great answer on timing of when that changes.
Our viewpoint is that it would be very odd for us that the healthcare system wouldn't want to pay for things that can have a positive ROI on overall spend. If you can identify a patient that's at a higher risk for something early on and prevent a catastrophic event, the math probably works in your favor to reimburse those. Our approach has been to deploy these things, so to develop them, deploy them, start having them run in the clinic, and start building, obviously, the evidence of their impact, while simultaneously having discussions with folks in the government about why these types of things should be reimbursed.
For us, this is not something that we're building in. We've said it's going to be a multi-year effort, so it's not in our 2026 guide or we don't anticipate a significant impact in 2027. The really exciting thing is that they can scale incredibly quickly because we're leveraging a lot of the integrations that we've already built with hospitals. We can deploy these things. They're relatively inexpensive for us to run today, but when reimbursement ultimately does come, which we hope and believe that it will, then they can scale very quickly. Because we sit on top of this very unique dataset, that affords us the ability to identify these insights, turn them into algorithmic diagnostics and deploy them while simultaneously trying to move the football down the field in terms of reimbursement has been our approach to date.
Yeah, obviously a lot of work to do on the reimbursement side and getting FDA approvals as you continue to build the portfolio of algorithms. Where is private payer thinking on this right now? Is it on their radar? How much education are you having to spend and do right now with the private payers?
Yeah. I think the private payers are similar to some of the government conversations of there is a recognition that these things can have or add enormous value to the healthcare system, but it's how do we prove that out before we're willing to reimburse? I think those are the conversations you're having of, okay, show me how exactly this plays out in reality such that we see the value that we think we're going to see.
Short of AI applications obviously being a material revenue driver or margin driver in the business, obviously there's a lot of provider education right now, and is the opportunity to attach the AI applications onto existing tests? Where does that stand today in terms of what do attach rates look like, and how does that maybe even just create a retention or differentiator relative to the other diagnostics tests in the market?
Yeah. We have a handful of algorithms within oncology today that are basically add-ons to some of the wet lab procedures that someone may order. Today, it's about 40% of our orders come in with one of the algorithms selected, which gets back to my earlier point of where we win within oncology therapy selection is one of ease of use and additional insight that we can provide. I think demonstrated by the fact that we've got a large percentage of our orders coming in with these algorithms just highlights that doctors obviously see tremendous value in them.
Yeah. Makes sense. One of the questions we got in from the audience is around sort of where you see the value in incremental investment within the diagnostics business in terms of investing in new assays or refinement of assays versus spending more of your investment on the data side. How do you think about the differentiation relative to the more traditional diagnostics vendors here?
Yeah, if you look at the investments that we've made historically, we've taken a slightly different approach than some of the other diagnostic players that are kind of always bringing the first assay to market and kind of first mover, where we've taken a slightly different approach, where we've been focused on being a very comprehensive sequencer, but then having these additional kind of insights. That's not to say that we don't invest, obviously, in new assays. We're obviously building out our tumor-naive MRD portfolio. We continue to iterate on versions of our core assays as well to add additional features. We just don't make all of our investments in that space. We also make investments on the data and platform side and on these integrations that allow us to provide that additional insight.
But it just gets back to kind of at our core, we view ourselves as kind of a data technology company and less so kind of a traditional diagnostic company that always worried about being the first mover because there's only one transcation which is what you get paid for the test and what it get cost, right? We've got multiple shots on goal through various offerings that we have.
That makes sense. Okay. Another question we got from the audience is around some of these regulatory proposals around potential for nationalizing MolDx and what sort of the implications or change could be moving from a regional system to more national. I guess, how concerning is that, or what sort of process would that sort of result for Tempus to do? What kind of disruption could it create?
Yeah. This is similar to the CRUSH RFI discussion earlier. Our view has always been the reimbursement landscape continues to evolve. It's evolved over the last 10 years that we've been operating a lab, and we always have mitigating strategies to minimize any impact. That's why we've been bringing things to the FDA to get approval and get under the NCD in the event that there's a change in any of the MAC kind of dynamics. Again, I think we're well positioned to minimize any impact that may come.
Awesome. Yeah. Good questions coming in. For those who have incremental ones, please let me know. We can get those asked and answered. Jim, I want to shift to, obviously, we'll give you a few CFO questions. Why not? It's obviously a very large growth opportunity ahead of Tempus both in the diagnostics business, also in the data business and the AI applications. Plenty of ways to allocate capital. Can you just provide some color on the framework of how you're thinking about growth versus profitability and how you're thinking about reinvestment of gross profit dollars over the next couple of years and then beyond that?
Yeah. We've told people that if you assume a 25% growth over the next couple of years, our plan is to reinvest 2/3 of the incremental gross profit dollars back into the business, let 1/3 drop down to Adjusted EBITDA. We think it's important to demonstrate that we've demonstrated leverage, but that there's continued leverage in the business. Obviously, we're operating at a scale now where that's a fair amount of discretionary spend that we're choosing where to invest. As we look across the various offerings, you have diagnostics, which is growing at a healthy rate. We have MRDs still to come, so that's exciting. That's an area that's definitely worth doubling down on.
On the data side, as we've mentioned, we've been able to establish a business that operates at scale, but it's still relatively early days with most of our customers there. We want to continue to invest so they continue to see that value that leads to that expansion of those relationships. The last category is this AI applications, which obviously isn't a near-term revenue driver, but we do think is a worthwhile investment because that will afford us the ability to continue growth long term. After about three years, we think we can reverse that trend of reinvesting 2/3, and that can drop down to 1/3 , because at that point, you're generating a lot of gross profit dollars such that your investments, you think that you can sufficiently invest while letting more drop down to the bottom line.
While we're mindful of profitability and kind of continued leverage in the business, we do think it's important given where we're at in our life cycle to continue to invest in these initiatives.
Makes sense. You've talked about the 25% growth. We're trying to sort of work towards multiple years of growing at that consistent rate. How do you think about where to invest to meter that growth in times when, say, last year you had hereditary that was growing much faster than what you initially expected? This year, data's off to a really hot start. How do you think about balancing and shifting those investments as you're seeing the changes at the end market activity on a year-over-year basis?
Yeah, I think there's always going to be periods of time where you're going to have a reimbursement uplift, right? That's going to heavily drive growth. Our view is, okay, let's see what is working and where can we double down on those investments.
We're very thoughtful in that when we enter a new disease area, for example, we do so very small to begin with. We don't get ahead of our skis. We want to prove it out before we double down. When you're running ahead of plan in a certain area, then you want to identify those areas that are going well and double down on those efforts. It's something that we look at on a quarterly basis to identify what are those areas that we should be looking at, and then making sure, obviously, that they end up seeing that ROI down the line.
Makes sense. How are you thinking about M&A as a capital allocation strategy moving forward? Obviously, historically, you've been acquisitive over recent years. It makes sense with Ambry to build out the portfolio. Paige was a nice, interesting asset to add to give more context when maybe sequencing isn't effective. How are you thinking about incremental M&A to supplement organic initiatives?
Yeah. We think that on the diagnostic side, we have a pretty well-rounded portfolio at this point. Obviously, Ambry was an outsized acquisition relative to the ones that we typically do. Many of the companies that we look at are smaller, tucked-in acquisitions, where somebody has built something very interesting from a technology or integration standpoint, or in Paige's example, a digital pathology offering that we think could be complementary to the current business, but also has some future growth potential as well. We evaluate all of these the same way of how does it fit into the offering? Is it something that ultimately will improve patient care? If it checks and doesn't divert us from our continued leverage in the business, then we look at tucking some of those folks in.
Awesome. Well, I'm not seeing any other questions from the audience, so we are going to leave it there. Jim, thank you so much for taking the time today, and thanks for everyone who joined us and for all the interactive questions from the audience. Have a good day, everyone.
Yeah. Thanks, Ryan. I really appreciate it.