Hinge Health, Inc. Q1 FY2026 Earnings Call
Hinge Health, Inc. (HNGE)
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Recording of the earnings call — play it with the synced transcript below.
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Guidance
from the 8-K filed May 5, 2026| Metric | Period | Guided | Basis | Actual |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| revenue | Q2 2026 | $194M – $196M | — | — |
| non-GAAP income from operations | Q2 2026 | $47M – $49M | Non-GAAP | — |
| non-GAAP operating margin | Q2 2026 | 25% | Non-GAAP | — |
| revenue | Full Year 2026 | $798M – $804M | — | — |
| non-GAAP income from operations | Full Year 2026 | $205M – $215M | Non-GAAP | — |
| non-GAAP operating margin | Full Year 2026 | 26% | Non-GAAP | — |
Transcript
Auto-generated speakers · tap a word to jump the audioLadies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us and welcome to the Hinge Health First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please raise your hand. If you have dialed in to today's call, please press star nine to raise your hand and star six to unmute. I will now hand the conference over to Bianca Buck, Head of Investor Relations. Bianca,
please go ahead. Good afternoon and welcome to Hinge Health's first quarter 2026 earnings call. I'm Bianca Buck, Head of Investor Relations. With me on the call are Daniel Perez, our co-founder and CEO, and James Budge, our CFO. Our president, Jim Pursley, is spending this week advancing relationships with some of the largest state and local governments in the country, so can't be with us today. I want to thank everyone for joining us. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. All relevant materials are available on the investor relations section of our website. Today's discussion will include forward-looking statements, which are subject to various risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. These statements reflect our current views and expectations regarding future events, including expected performance of our business, future financial results, and growth strategies. While these statements represent our good faith judgment and beliefs, actual results may differ materially from those projected or implied. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. For a detailed discussion of the risks, please refer to our SEC filings including our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2025. We expect to file our latest quarterly report on Form 10-Q in the coming days. All income statement financial measures discussed today are non-GAAP except for revenue which is GAAP. These measures should be viewed in addition to and not as a substitute for our GAAP results. Reconciliations to the most comparable gap measures are included in our earnings release appendix. With that, I'll turn it over to Dan.
Thanks, Bianca. I'm excited to share our first quarter 2026 results. We had a strong start to the year, and let me tell you why. I'll cover three things today. First, our Q1 financial performance, which came in well above expectations. Second, the launch of our migraine care program, our first expansion beyond muscle and joint pain, and a proof point that our platform can automate care delivery across multiple conditions. And third, where we stand commercially as we head into the sales season. Then I'll hand it over to James to go deeper in our financials and updated guidance. After that, we'll take your questions. Let's get into it. We delivered strong results across all key financial metrics this quarter, outperforming our expectations and demonstrating the continued strength of our business. Starting with revenue, we generated $182 million in Q1, representing 47 percent year-over-year growth compared to 124 million in the first quarter of 2025. This performance came in well above our guidance range of 171 to 173 million, showing the continued strong demand we're seeing across our client and member base. Our last 12 months calculated billings reached 770 million, up an impressive 52 percent from 507 million dollars in the prior year period, reflecting the continued expansion of our member base and strong engagement with our platform on profitability we achieved a gross margin of 85 demonstrating continued care team and hardware efficiency as we scale our platform and our operating margin was 25 generating 46 million dollars in operating income exceeding our guidance range of 30 to 32 million for the quarter our free cash flow performance was excellent once again At $42 million, it was 10x higher year-over-year for a free cash flow margin of 23%. These are strong numbers, and they reflect something important. Our business is scaling efficiently. Our AI and automation investments are driving real operating leverage. We're serving more members, delivering improved outcomes, and reducing costs for clients, all while expanding margins. That's the triple aim in action, and it's also what makes this model durable in a world where every company is being asked what AI means for their business. For us, AI is an accelerant, helping us better deliver the triple aim whilst building a uniquely efficient business. We've spent over a decade building the number one rated digital MSK app, leveraging data from the millions of members we served to develop technology that automates over 95% of clinician hours associated with traditional PT. Combine that with our distribution, almost 3,000 clients, 60-plus health plans, PBMs, TPAs, and ecosystem partnerships, and we have a double-walled moat. Advanced platform capabilities on one side, difficult to replicate commercial reach on the other, and frankly, in the age of AI, when things are easier to build than ever, proprietary data and preferential access to clients is a recipe for outsized returns. James will unpack the financials in more detail shortly, including our raised guidance for the year. Now let me shift to product and an expansion I've been waiting a long time to talk to you about. Our vision is to use technology to automate care, transforming outcomes, improving experiences, and reducing costs. We've proven this in MSK. Over 2 million people served, 21 peer-reviewed papers with demonstrable outcomes, and the top-rated digital musculoskeletal lab. But here's the thing, we've spent years building a unified platform for our core technical and clinical capabilities, from enrollment to treatment, outcomes collection, member engagement, nerve stimulation, and more, combined with a leading go-to-market motion, we're well-positioned to extend into adjacent conditions. This quarter, I'm excited to share that we're launching our migraine care program. Migraine is a form of chronic pain that shares neurological roots with the neck and spine conditions we already treat. The nerves in the neck and head converge in a shared pain processing center, so not surprisingly, roughly 75% of people with migraine also have MSK pain, and our existing NEC program members have already reported fewer migraine days and lower medication usage simply from engaging with our existing product. The scale of the problem is massive. One in six American adults has migraine, and the prevalence rate is twice as high for women. On average, migraine Migraine sufferers drive more than $16,000 in annual healthcare spend, over double that of people without migraine. And nationally, migraine costs U.S. businesses an estimated $78 billion each year and drives absenteeism and reduced productivity. Our migraine care program delivers three things. First, rapid drug-free pain relief using our groundbreaking neuromodulation device, What's more, we just received 510 clearance from the FDA to extend Enzo into migraine care. This means for many people, we could deliver drug-free migraine relief in minutes. Second, AI-powered tracking that helps members identify personal triggers across environmental, lifestyle, and dietary factors. And third, proactive prevention through exercise therapy and clinically proven lifestyle guidance from our care teams, designed to reduce both the frequency and severity of attacks. Our Migraine Care Program will roll out later this month. The client response has been overwhelming. In just a few weeks, we've had over 125 clients adopt the program, representing more than 2 million eligible lives. Time and again, our clients mention that they themselves, or a family member, or someone they know is afflicted with migraine. We expect revenue contribution to be minimal this year, with a more meaningful impact beginning in 2027. But the real significance is what this demonstrates. We didn't come this far with digital physical therapy to stop at digital physical therapy. Migraine is a compelling data point in the broader applicability of our platform. The clinical overlap is strong, our capabilities translate directly, and the speed of client adoption, over 2 million lives approved within weeks, underlines the credibility we've built with our clients and partners. This is exactly the kind of innovation that gets us excited about the decades of work ahead. We're building infrastructure to automate healthcare delivery across multiple conditions. Migrant is our next step, but it won't be the last. With that, let me now speak to our commercial progress. As many of you know, our sales cycle follows a predictable seasonal pattern. The first half of the year is primarily focused on building our pipeline and nurturing prospects, and we typically close the majority of new clients during the second half of the year as employers finalize or benefits decision for the following year. This quarter, we created substantially more pipeline compared to Q1 2025, which gives us confidence as we look ahead to the back half of the year. The interest level from prospects continues to be strong, and we're seeing good momentum across our client verticals and markets. Our investments in the SMB space are also paying off, where we're seeing substantially more pipeline generated in that category than in years past. We also continue to win at record rates, and the competitive takeaway trends we saw last year have also persisted, which speaks to the strength of our platform and the value proposition we're delivering to clients. Our Hinge Select offering is also seeing positive momentum. We ended 2-1 with 4,100 provider locations, and we're also thrilled to share that we recently expanded Hinge Select access through one of our national PBM partners and three of the five largest national health plans by self-insured lives. We expect this to help accelerate client adoption during our sales season in the second half of the year. While I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, the fundamentals we're seeing gives us good reason to be optimistic. We expect a combination of strong pipeline development, solid win rates, and the added value we can now offer through our migrant care and hinge-like programs to position us well for the foreseeable future.
With that, let me turn it over to James. Thank you, Dan. Let me start by reminding everyone how our billings model works our calculated billings are driven by three key components the number of average eligible lives multiplied by our yield which is the percentage of those lives that actually engage with our programs multiplied by our average selling price per engaged member for q1 our ltm calculated billings reached 770 million dollars representing an exceptional 52 percent year-over-year growth rate compared to 507 million in the prior year period. Revenue came in at 182 million, up 47 percent from 124 million in Q1 2025. This result meaningfully exceeded our guidance range of 171 to 173 million. This revenue beat was driven by better-than-expected billings stemming from strong performance in both yields and lives. On the yield front, we're seeing two continuing and encouraging trends we are converting members from new clients at a faster rate and our legacy clients are also growing yields this demonstrates that our platform continues to resonate with members across all cohorts and that our ai-powered personalization and targeted enrollment improvements are driving real results on the live side we've seen two beneficial drivers first as in prior years newly launched clients have come in with more lives than we anticipated And second, our legacy clients have also increased in size overall, suggesting no impact on our business from any AI-driven employee displacement. This increase in eligible lives speaks to the diversification of our client base across industries and the essential nature of MSK care in employee benefits packages to create better outcomes for members and lower costs for clients. Moving to pricing, as of the end of Q1 2026, around 80% of our contracted lives were using our new engagement-based pricing model. We expect this percentage to stay consistent throughout the rest of the year. Moving to profitability metrics, our gross margin for Q1 was 85%, up from 81% in Q1 2025. This 400 basis point improvement reflects our continued care team efficiency gains as we leverage ai and automation to serve more members without proportional increases in care delivery costs all by sending ensos to more members than in prior years we achieve strong operating leverage across all expense categories total operating expenses were 60 percent of revenue in q1 down from 69 in the prior year period demonstrating our ability to continue to scale efficiently as we grow this translated to strong profitability with 46 million in income from operations, well above our guidance range of $30 to $32 million for Q1. Our operating margin was 25% compared to 12% in Q1 2025, an improvement of over 1,300 basis points year over year. Free cash flow performance was excellent at $42 million for Q1 compared to $4 million in Q1 2025. This represents a free cash flow margin of 23% up from 3% in the prior year period primarily driven by higher billings and improved efficiency from a balance sheet perspective we ended q1 with 407 million in cash and cash equivalents during the quarter we continued executing on our share repurchase program purchasing 2.5 million shares for 105 million dollars our diluted weighted average share count as of q1 dropped to 82.4 million shares down 2.5 compared to the ending 2025 figure our diluted net income per share attributable to to common shareholders for the quarter was 45 cents. Looking forward, based on our strong Q1 performance and strong outlook for the remainder of the year, we're raising the expected outcomes for all elements of our guidance. For Q2 2026, we expect revenue to be in the range of 194 to 196 million, representing 40% year over year growth at the midpoint. For income from operations, we're projecting 47 to 49 million for the second quarter or a 25 percent margin at the midpoint. For the full year 2026, we're raising our revenue guidance to 798 to 804 million, up from our previous guidance of 732 to 742 million. At the midpoint of 801 million, this represents 36 percent year-over-year growth, up from the 25 percent previously expected at the midpoint. We're also raising our full year income from operations guidance to 205 to 215 million, or a 26% margin at the midpoint, up from our previous range of 151 to 156 million, or a 21% margin at the midpoint. Several factors are driving this upward revision to our guidance. Average eligible lives for the year are expected to be slightly higher than what we previously shared, as we're seeing stronger than anticipated growth from both new client launches and expansion within our existing client base. Additionally, our yield is trending up to slightly north of 4%, as both new and legacy clients are seeing better member yields than we initially projected. Of our guidance raised, approximately half is attributable to yield improvements and half from lives growth. The increase in our income from operations and margin expansion comes from two primary sources. First, the top line outperformance, and second, some slower hiring than anticipated, as AI has increased our efficiency across all operating categories. We do still expect to catch up on hiring as we move throughout the year. And in the meantime, these savings give us additional operating leverage while still maintaining our commitment to investing and expanding our product portfolio and commercial reach. For share count expectations in 2026, we anticipate ending the year with 82 to 84 million diluted shares outstanding, which does not include the impact of the continued execution of our share repurchase program. Before I turn it back to Dan, I want to remind everyone that we'll be hosting our annual client conference movement in Chicago on June 10th. This year, we're excited to welcome analysts and investors to attend our inaugural investor track alongside the main conference. You'll have the opportunity to hear directly from leaders across our company and get to mingle with the people who make Hinge Health a success, our clients, members, and partners. You can register on our investor relations website where we also just uploaded an agenda and we'd love to see you there with that
let me turn it back over to dan to wrap up thanks james looking at our strong q1 performance and the trajectory we're on i'm incredibly optimistic about hinge health's future we're bullish on our business for several key reasons first our core msk market remains massive and under penetrated we have a tremendous runway for growth even before expanding into new areas second our expansion into and migraine care. And strong client demand in this space signifies that our platform can successfully automate health care delivery for other conditions, our distribution affords us uniquely powerful paths to market, and we're deepening the value we deliver to clients. AI now lets us build faster than ever, but our distribution channels turn innovation into adoption at scale. And third, our financial performance continues to demonstrate the scalability and durability of our business model. We're generating strong cash flows, investing in innovation and growth, all while returning capital to shareholders what excites me most is that we're just scratching the surface of what's possible healthcare remains one of our economy's last redoubts of manual labor and we have the opportunity to transform how care is delivered across multiple conditions our vision to build a new health system that uses technology to scale and automate care delivery isn't just a long-term aspiration it's happening right now one condition at a time and we're moving with urgency to extend our leadership position. But our journey is just getting started. We have decades of work ahead. I'm confident our best days are still in front of us. Thank you all for joining us today and for your continued support of our mission. Bianca, let's open it up for
questions. Thanks, Dan. Operator, we're now ready to take questions. We will now begin the question
and answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question please raise your hand now if you have dialed in to today's call please press star nine to raise your hand and star six to unmute please stand by while we compile the q a roster your first question comes from the line of saket kalia with barclays your line is open please go
ahead okay great hey guys can you hear me okay yeah we got you okay excellent well hey thanks Thanks for taking my questions here, and great start to the year. Dan, I'd love to start with you and maybe dig into the migraine program a little bit. I'm curious, how do you think about the market opportunity here for Hinge in that market? And I'm sure you went through some exhaustive testing there. What were some of your findings on sort of how effective Enzo and sort of the combined offering was in addressing that problem?
Great question. And so overall, our vision is to transform outcomes, experience, cost by using technology to automate care delivery. And we see migraine as just a natural extension of that vision. The clinical need for better migraine care is pretty overwhelming. One in six American adults suffer from migraine. if there's only like 700 headache specialists in the entire country to serve tens of millions of people, and our early outcomes and member demand have been very strong. But a big unmet clinical need alone wouldn't have justified our entry. We're also extending into migraine because our existing platform that we've built makes us very uniquely capable of delivering care well and at scale. And you can see that with our 125 customers who have bought into migraine so quickly. It's also, you know, one, the clinical need is as acute as we believed. And secondly, our enterprise reputation and distribution are doing real work there. And just to underline for a second distribution, because I think there's a lot of anxiety right now of AI disruption, whether it's software or healthcare specifically, but focusing on healthcare, the hardest part in healthcare isn't actually building the product. It's getting paid for it. And we've spent a decade plus building a client base of nearly 3,000 logos, 60 plus health plan, PBM and other partner relationships. And that's just not something a new entrant, AI native or otherwise, who applicates in a quarter or even a year that requires contracts, clinical evidence, trust, integrations built over time. And so when you put that together, our migraine launch really sits on top of our clinical evidence base, which would take years to build our proprietary data, which is still compounding with every member and our hardware that, unlike software in the age of AI, isn't coming out of the tap. And again, the distribution mode I just mentioned. So those ingredients really are a recipe for a durable competitive advantage in our view. And you're seeing it show up in our free cash flow and our return on investment capital. Now, with regards to the outcomes we were seeing as well, about 56% of people in our trial that demonstrated that their pain went down from severe or moderate down to mild or none with at least one of our Enzo waveforms. And when we compared it to placebo, we're 1.9x more likely to reduce pain with our Enzo device versus the placebo device. And so we're seeing really, really strong impact. We submitted our packet to FDA in December. Really excited to get clearance from FDA in April of this year. That's awesome. Super
helpful and exciting outcomes. James, maybe for my follow-up for you, I'm staying on that topic, and maybe it's early to ask this, but how do you think about pricing for the migraine program just from a high level? And I guess I ask that just because physical therapy has ongoing exercises through your device, where this is kind of more Enzo-based. So I'm curious how you would maybe compare and contrast the pricing models.
Yeah, maybe I'll give a few tidbits, and then Dan can add as well, because he's got some good insights there also. I would just remind a few of the comments we made in our prepared remarks, which is that in the models this year, don't expect a lot of revenue, but do in 2027. This is about getting sign-ups this year. We've already got a number of clients. Dan mentioned over 125 with 2 million plus numbers attached to them. So signups are going great so far. We think this sets us up well for 2027 and just generally more usage and more consumption with 80% of our clients now on the usage-based model or engagement model, however you want to think about that. The more usage we have through ENSO connections or migraine or any other indications means more opportunities to build.
Yeah, and we've worked for a building model for migraine as well. It'll be the same as our digital physical therapy model. We want to keep things as simple for our clients as possible. And as James mentioned, it'll be our usage-based model. 80% of our books are already on it. And, you know, we have in-app treatment sessions for digital physical therapy and in-app treatment sessions for migraine. For migraine, you're right that a lot of our treatment sessions are mediated by our FDA clear neuromodulation device, Enzo. However, we also have exercise treatment sessions for migraine as 75% of migraine sufferers also have musculoskeletal pain or comorbid musculoskeletal pain, particularly neck pain. So overall, we want to make sure that those with a comorbid musculoskeletal condition could still be treated for their musculoskeletal condition and those treatment plans will be blended. And our aim is to just have a bigger impact with our clients so we can improve their outcomes, experience, and lower
their cost. Got it. Super helpful. Thanks, guys. Yeah, thank you. Your next question comes from
the line of Jaylander Singh with Truist Securities. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Thank you. And thanks for taking my questions. And congrats on a very strong quarter. So it is very encouraging to see consistent yield improvement and outperformance now slightly north of 4% in the quarter. Given what you've seen, you've been seeing in legacy clients as as well as trends in new lives and all the impact from your initiatives. How do you think about the long-term view on where your yield can get to? What is the feeling there? And will that be dependent on you guys rolling out new programs like Migraine, or you can achieve that with your existing offerings and solutions?
Great question. This is Dan. So the way we see it is about 9% of people see a physical therapist in any given year. We think with better access, lower costs, that should be closer to 12% to 15% of people should see a physical therapist. After all, about half of us have a musculoskeletal condition in any given year. We are currently trending towards a little over 4% yield this year for additional physical therapy program. But you can see where we're targeting long term. At the low end, the 9%, and we think we're expanding the 10% of people who could see a physical therapist. Now, migraine, however, simply expands that opportunity whilst de-risking our ability to continue growing yield overall by giving us more shots on goal. But overall, what we're really chasing is clinical impact. We want to help more people every day with our care programs so we can transform outcomes, experience, and the cost structure.
Got it. And then my follow-up on the CMS access program. Can you expand on what you needed to see to participate in that program? It seems the company had an intent to apply to the program, but ultimately decided against it.
Great question. Look, we applaud CMS's goal of expanding access to evidence-based care, and it's great to see CMS be entrepreneurial. You're right, we did not apply. We believe that the access program as currently designed will not deliver any aspect of the triple aim. Moreover, it's structured in such a way as to necessitate the removal of any clinical oversight, putting one of the most vulnerable patient populations in our opinion, Medicare, at risk. Even for employer populations who are a full generation younger, we provide a care team. And notably, we've had conversations with CMS. We're hopeful they'll continue to iterate and develop models that increase access to high-quality care for Americans on Medicare. But right now, we will
stay on the sidewalk. Great. Thanks a lot. Your next question comes from the line of Richard Close with Canaccord Jenny Withy. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Yeah, thanks for the question.
Excuse me. Congratulations. Dan, I was wondering if you could put some added details on the commentary with respect to the pipeline being substantially higher, and then I have a follow-up
for James. Sure. So we're seeing broad-based interest across several different client segments from SMB employers to large enterprises. Our SMB segment, in our SMB segment, we recently hired several new reps and they're delivering very strongly. The number of lives you've added to the pipeline in that segment in Q1 is up over 100% year over year. What we're particularly encouraging is the interest in our expanded capabilities as well. Prospects as clients who haven't yet bought Hinch Health have been on the sideline or they're with a different solution are very excited about our migraine program and Pinch Select, which gives us a lot more ways to add value and to start conversations with prospective clients. Again, our sales cycles haven't been really changed. They still follow a seasonal pattern where most decisions will happen on the back half of the year as it's happened in the full decade we've been in business, but the quality of conversations has improved
because we're solving more problems for our clients okay and as a follow-up james um maybe walk us through the eligible lives coming in higher than anticipated and then you know driving the guidance revision as well um how does that work i mean don't you know the lives um like when you're signing a client and you know is it just coming in with more more lives uh when all is said and done or how does all that work there yeah great question let me break it into two so
we're obviously we added call it rounding to five million new lives last year about 80 percent of our new lives coming into this year came from existing clients so half of our upside in lives comes from those existing clients when they give us the new files coming into the new year they just showed up with a lot more lives than we expected so our clients are growing uh in head count and that's you know a great thing for them and obviously a great thing for us and sort of goes against the narrative that everybody's getting rid of their employees at least for our clients it's the opposite right now and then the other half is our new clients that come on board what we do is when we sign them up we take an estimate of the number of employees obviously informed by the people that we've done a contract with at the client they'll give us an estimate of number of employees, but we don't get the final count until we get their official files when we get into the launch sequence with them early in the year. And we generally, we always have taken a pretty low estimate just so we always come in above that. And that happened again as we came to 2026, got an estimate of what we thought those aggregate lives would look like for those new clients. And when the final files came in, they came in quite a bit higher. Okay. That's helpful. Thank you. Yep.
Your next question comes from the line of Ryan Daniels. A kind reminder to press star six to unmute. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Yeah, guys, congrats on the strong results. Thanks for taking the question. Just one on Hinge Select looks like continued momentum there, both in number of providers and covered lives. So can you talk a little bit more about what you're hearing in the marketplace about demand for that offering? And then I'd be curious about your intentions on, you know, expanding that to other areas like ambulatory surgery centers or even broader patient navigation opportunities.
Great question. And I'll start with our focus areas on HinchLac. Our key focus areas as we continue to invest this program or this product is, one, improving the density of our provider network. We've hit over 4,100 provider locations. We want to get that substantially higher over the course of the year, expanding access within our book of business, particularly making Hinchlect available via our distribution partners. And we're very proud to say that now through the top five national health plans are allowing Hinchlect to be bought via our partnership with them and with our shared clients as well. We want to continue to expand the distribution of Hinchlect. And it's also having a big impact. So we're seeing about 85% of members we're able to engage are able to move forward with conservative care as we're avoiding low value, high cost care, imaging, procedures, elective surgeries. And these are the highest risk members to begin with, which is exactly the outcomes we're going for. And it's really allowed us to expand the ROI conversations we're having with our clients. It's one of the top discussions we're having with prospects as well as our existing clients, Hinchlect. We anticipate most of the pipeline that we close for Hinchlect will be in the second half of the year. But undoubtedly, it's a more complicated sale than migraine.
Okay, perfect. Very helpful. And then as my follow-up, just as you look at the product expansion recently, obviously the focus on chronic pain, you've now got the migraine program. It seems like there's a lot of correlation there to maybe broader behavioral health or mental health conditions. And I'm curious what your thoughts are on that as a potential expansion area or adjunct to kind of what you're moving into today.
Great question. And, you know, we, you know, again, our vision is to use technology to scale and automate the delivery of care. And we think most care will eventually be amenable to care delivery itself will be amenable to automation. You know, it's going to take many years, many decades even to capture most of health care. We've, you know, $640-ish million of trailing 12 months revenue. We're only about 1% of the PT market in America itself is just 1% of total health care spend in America. So we are, we're 1% of 1%. We got a lot of growth to do, or growth ahead of us within Shell. And so we're looking at our roadmap. One of the few things I could say with confidence that is not, at least in the near or medium term roadmap, is mental health. However, it's a crowded space. We're excited about the way it's evolving. However, there's a lot of other areas where you're almost competing with non-consumption. You know, neurology is an area that's vastly underserved, and that is long overdue care automation. And we're really excited about, you know, planting a flag here in neurology, as well as several other areas we're looking at. We're not saying never to mental health, you know, I planned my change in four years, five years, certainly 10 years, but at the moment, it's not on our roadmap.
Okay, thanks for the comment. Great question.
Your next question comes from the line of Craig Hattenbach with Morgan Stanley.
your line is open. Please go ahead. Yes, thanks. Just have a question on the continued progress on member yield expansion. Any other details you can share, be it HingeConnect, kind of effective marketing campaign strategies, just some of the things that are keeping that
momentum going? Sure. So on new clients, we're seeing master member adoption, which we attribute to, you know, a more wholesome, better product as they're launching with our latest product features from day one. And this is combined with our improved outreach techniques, including our target enrollment initiatives that leverage our Kin2Connect data. And for legacy client, the yield growth is similarly coming from improved product and member experience. You know, we're capturing more members and needing care while bringing members back at higher rates than historically we've seen, coupled with those improved target enrollment initiatives. And we really like these trends. That's why we're raising yield expectations. They're slightly north of 4%. But, you know, I do want to emphasize it's not just enrollment that's performing well. We've invested enormously in our post-enrollment engagement because, after all, if somebody signs up or rolls but doesn't do their treatment, we simply won't have a good shot at improving their outcomes and reducing costs. And our post-enrollment engagement is performing really, really well. We believe it's trending two to three times higher than second place, and that's where we're able to drive so much of our ROI for our clients.
Got it. And then just as my follow-up question, you could see it in the numbers and performance in terms of the AI efficiencies that you're delivering. What's the confidence and the ability to sustain that? When I think about kind of the care team, it's been running roughly flattish. How are you thinking about AI and technology continuing to scale as your members continue to increase?
um you know we are investing in ai like many businesses out there up and up and down our organization we're fortunate that you know a third of our headcount already is in r&d such that we have a lot of folks who are using ai in you know every facet of their job um day to day and that's allowing us to weave that throughout the organization in terms of our care team efficiencies there's a lot more room to grow in terms of those efficiencies, but not just on our care team. We're looking at a lot of other efficiencies for our cost structure. We also like where our cost structure is right now to begin with. At an 85% gross margin, we're at the point where we want to continue to invest in the product experience and not just run off the score on gross margin. I don't think that's the right long-term decision for business of our scale. We want to continue to reinvest in the product, inclusive of the care team experience. or reinvesting the product, even if that means treading water on gross margin moving forward.
Yeah, maybe I'd just add to that, Greg. I think as a reminder, we doubled the distribution percentage of our INSO devices in 2025 relative to 2024, and we've said that we're going to send even more INSO devices in 2026. So that's the competing factor against the care team efficiencies that sort of flattens out gross margin a little bit, around 85%, maybe a little bit more room to grow there because of the care team efficiencies, but we are going to be sending more ENSO devices because it produces better outcomes and more opportunities to use our product. I think we said in a past conversation that the engagement in our product on the therapy sessions goes up dramatically more when someone uses ENSO, which improves the ROI story there. So a lot more ENSO coming out this year. where I do think there's opportunities still quite a bit is in the operating margin line. We've largely hit our target margins. If you recall back to our IPO, our gross margin target was 82% to 85%. We're already at the high end of that. And we're getting really close already to our operating margin. In fact, actually at 25%, we are at our operating margin target that we had. So well ahead of schedule. That is one of the topics we'll be addressing at the investor day at movement. So we'd love for everyone to come. We'll give an updated model and you can sort of reasonably conclude there will be higher targets, at least at the operating margin level than what we have today out there.
Got it. Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Jessica Tassan with Piper Sandler. A kind reminder to press star six to unmute yourself locally. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thank you so much for the question and congrats on the results. We're looking forward to the movement conference. I guess on the migraine product, I'm interested to know how are you all delivering ROI there? Are you helping clients avoid prescription drugs? Are you helping mitigate some of that incremental $8,000 of average healthcare spend per migraine patient per year? Just how are you thinking about delivering ROI, and are you holding your new products to that same 2.4 to 1 ROI standard that we know is prevailing across the existing MSK product?
Great question. And you're right. A lot of the migraine costs are driven by peripheral health care costs of people with They're not sleeping as well sometimes. They're just not as healthy. And if you could address their migraine, you could hopefully address overall total health care spend as well. But you're also trying to say a big conflict of direct migraine spend is these new migraine drugs that have come out, which, by the way, we are not opposed to. These drugs are effective. For many people, they could provide very meaningful relief. However, they are very pricey. They could be $800 to $1,400 per month, these migraine drugs. They do not come without side effects. And by giving people a non-pharmaceutical option in their toolkit to address their migraine pain, our hope is that it's a good complement to their pharmaceutical regimen, such that they do not have to use these drugs as frequently, and they could reduce costs overall there as well. And in regards to our ROI studies, we'll actually be hopefully publishing ROI studies in the near future on our impact for migraine. Okay, great.
And then just second question would be on Hinge Select. If you guys go to the market with that product during your selling season, can you just give us an update on how you're planning to kind of price or commercialize this offering? Should we think about it as increasing or as kind of one of the sessions within the existing ARPU number for clients within yield or just how should we think about layering it into the model for 27 as you start to kind of accelerate sales heading into next
Thanks. Is it, sorry, just to clarify, you're asking like how we'll model the impact of intellect in our client base or our revenue model or?
Yeah, exactly. So basically asking, you know, will a HING select in-person physical therapy session just appear within that ARPU number and be priced effectively the same as an Enzo session or a virtual MSK session?
You know, there is an admin fee attached to every in-person session delivered, whether, you know, we send it to in-person physical therapy or imaging or a doctor visit in person. There is an admin fee that is charged and that is added to our revenue there for us brokering that in-person visit as part of our network. We're actually going to share a lot more about HinchLite model at our investor conference and movement as well. but you're thinking about it in the right way in that there's a certain admin fee attached. But it's not a PEPM.
Great. Okay, got it. Thank you, guys.
Your next question comes from the line of Rishi Joluria with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Wonderful. Thanks so much for taking my questions. Great to see continued strong execution of the business, especially given the uncertain environment, to say the least, that we're in. Dan, I wanted to start with you and continue on the migraine side. A really exciting announcement, obviously a huge opportunity ahead. If you think about the incremental investments that you have to make there, maybe can you walk us through what do those investments look like? What is the timeline to get kind of, quote, market-ready to look like? For example, is the current Enzo device ready for that, Or do you need to kind of retool it for, you know, to make it a little bit more migraine specific? If you think about marketing campaigns and driving awareness within your existing customers, what do those investments look like? Help us understand some color there. And then I got a quick follow-up for James.
Great question. It's something we've thought a lot about. And I think more digital companies, the thing about it, they become multi-product companies. And so we've actually spent the last several years preparing for this moment. So first of all, it's actually investing in our tech infrastructure and our key capabilities to what's determined in Silicon Valley is called platforming your capabilities so they can be mixed and masked and used for future products. And that's like platforming from your enrollment capability to your enrollment, or I should say your member outreach capabilities or outcomes collection, your treatment conditions or treatment delivery. everything has been optimized such that they could become reusable components. And Migraine is the exemplification of that strategy. And it largely leverages what we've already built. There are some new things that you have to build, but I'd say 75% was already built in our infrastructure, which is really great. Now, the long pole specifically for Migraine, whereas as you pointed out, hardware, that is almost always slower than software, but we had a head start. It was adjusted for migraine, our neuromodulation device. And of course, from there, another long pull was our data gathering. And then from there, our FDA submission and discussion with FDA leading up to the clearance. And we're always evaluating other areas where we can automate care. And so we'll look for conditions with meaningful spend where we feel we could transform outcomes and experience at a fraction of today's cost. And ideally, where we think we can move in pace, but I'd say that the resources needed for migraine, it was very efficient relative to the resources needed to build digital physical therapy where it is today. And we anticipate future products to be similarly capital efficient, given they will continue to leverage capabilities that we've already built.
Okay, got it. Super helpful. And James, if we think about, you know, the growing portion of your customer base that's on the consumption or engagement model, so to speak. Can you speak a little bit about what are you observing in terms of metrics within your existing customer base? You know, be it, are those on the engagement model, do they exhibit higher yield because there's maybe lower cost to adoption? Is it helping on the ARPU side as they get over that kind of 13 session barrier or break even point I think you've talked about prior? Or is it even helping with landing new customer logos as well because the view of the startup cost is seen as lower. Maybe just help us understand what you've observed so
far in your business. Thanks. Yeah, great question. All of those observations you made would be relevant at the client level, the benefits leader, the person making the decision on whether to go with the engagement model or the paid upfront model for the member that's actually using the product. They see no distinction. They probably don't even know whether the company they work more is on the consumption model or on the paid upfront model. So from a usage perspective, there's no distinguishable difference between the two. And I'd say it does help in our client
conversations in that there's a lot of, I think, rightful cynicism sometimes in the digital health space or healthcare space that products are built and sold to employers or sold to health plans or from Medicare to manage plans. And there's not a lot of engagement, yet they're paying a case rate, There might be paying up front for the case and the case rate is there or they're paying a PEPM and the service provider isn't really on the hook to ensure people are actually using the product and getting better. And what our engagement model demonstrates is our confidence that we will actually engage people, that we are not just going to enroll people, that people are going to use our product and they're going to get better. And we put our fees at risk for ROI, we put our fees at risk for clinical outcomes, and we put our fees at risk to ensure that people are actually using the product. And the fact that, you know, other digital health companies, including MSK, have struggled to match this pricing model, which is so favorable, client-friendly, and so many clients prefer the model. The fact that they've failed to match us really underlines the fact that they don't have the engagement that we do. You know, as mentioned before, we feel like we probably have two to three times higher engagement on a per member basis than anybody else in digital MSK. You know, we build products that people want to use, and you see it in our numbers.
Very helpful. Thanks, Dan.
Your next question comes from the line of Elizabeth Anderson with Evercore ISI. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Good afternoon, and thanks so much for the question. Dan, you just mentioned it in passing in your prior comment, but I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about your MA and sort of full risk strategy. I know that's not as key as some other parts of the story, but still an important area of expansion for the business. So just wanted to hear sort of your updated thoughts on that and sort of how you see things going and the sort of plan into 2027. Thank you. Great question. And so we are,
there's there you could say in the u.s there's there's three key groups of of covered lives um that that we're targeting your self-insured lives fully insured and medicare advantage medicare manages is uh the a area that is going through a lot of change right now uh and original medicare has been a particular medicare advantage i think a lot of the sponsors in here have been going through a lot of change as well and so we've been particularly focused on on it our our self-insured and fully insured group. And our fully insured group, I think last year, was up the highest it's ever been. And in Q1, probably contributed more to new lives than just about any Q1 that we've ever had before. And we're also seeing strong growth in our federal plans as well, which is a separate subgroup of self-insured employers, given it's a different decision-making process with federal. But fully insured and ASO are growing very robustly, particularly fully insured. And it really underlines, by the way, the ROI we're able to deliver. We forecast we probably have like a logarithm more fully insured customers than second place in digital MSK. And what we like best about a fully insured customer buying Hinch Health is that these are actuaries for a living. And that means they've really looked at our numbers, they've looked at the ROI we're able to deliver, and they have underwritten the cost of Hinch Health for these fully insured lives, and that really is a powerful validation of our approach and our
outcomes. Great. Thanks so much. Great question. Your next question comes from the line of Brian Patterson with Raymond James. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Thanks, guys, and I'll echo my
congrats on the strong quarter. I'll keep it to one. So I know you mentioned that you have 80% of customers on the new pricing model, and I thought you said that that would stay about at the same rate i'm curious why wouldn't that migrate closer to a hundred percent uh is there anything keeping that from a customer perspective just wanted to make sure i understand that dynamic
thanks guys to be honest it's just stasis some customers will move slower some customers will move faster and um what we're seeing is that it's it's going to continue to take up and uh but it's not like the biggest priority to change billing models for for some customers they have like they're changing their health plan they're changing their pbm maybe they're trying to onboard a new mental health vendor and to to change building models and as requires like legal input to update the contract etc and it's just not the highest priority for some customers
you can probably safely say brian the last couple years after we introduced the model which is last year and this year's selling season close to 100 percent have come on under the engagement model but the legacy some of those older clients to dan's point just hasn't been a top priority for
Yeah, almost no new customer is on the older building model. Almost all new customers are engaged in consumption model. Got it. Thanks, guys.
Your next question comes from the line of Scott Schoenhaus with KeyBank. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Can you hear me? Yeah. Yeah, we got you. Okay, good. Thanks for taking my question. So I wanted to talk about the new My Green program. I guess, Dan, you talked about, obviously, you think 12% to 15% yield was your prior kind of ceiling. Maybe talk about where that is now with the migraine program. And then my follow-up, I'll bundle it all together, is how do you effectively target these customers in this new program? Historically, you've leveraged claims data and EHR data. And what else are you doing to target these people in your migraine enrollment program?
Great question. And so for traditional physical therapy, about 9% of people see a physical therapist in a given year. And that's relatively consistent across the floor types. Some of the floors a little more, some of the floors a little less, but it's roughly around 9% of adults. And yeah, you're right. Our opinion is that that's underutilized and that there is more demand and more need, frankly, for physical therapy in America than is currently being delivered. and that access has constrained utilization of physical therapy. We also see physical therapy as, you know, high value spent. The more you spend on physical therapy in America, whether it's digital or in person, by the way, the lower your downstream cost. So we would like to continue to increase or improve access to PT so that more people use it. And for PT in particular, yeah, we'd like to expand at 10 from 9 to 12 to 15. Migraine gives us a parallel path for traditional enrollments. Some will, you know, be enrolling in migraine and digital physical therapy, some will enroll in only digital physical therapy, and some will enroll in just migraine. And CalTel, where, you know, our yield forecast will share more at our movement conference, at our investor conference in movement and more over time, as it's a new product, but with one in six adults impacted by migraine, you know, about 20% of women, about 10% of men, we are confident that there is a large unmet clinical need there. um and i covered all the questions that i missed part of it uh targeting how are you effectively
targeting you know you for the for the pt patient you've used you've leveraged medical claims data historically and then live ehr data you know how are you targeting these people that have
migraine issues it's similar pharmaceuticals is a little bit more of a relevant data point as well for migraine that is not always as relevant for physical therapy and musculoskeletal care A lot of meds in musculoskeletal care, relatively few people actually do receive opiates. So if somebody was just taking Tylenol Advil, which won't show up in the data, obviously it is over-the-counter, but some of these migraine meds are not over-the-counter, and so they will be showing up in the RF spend. And so it'll be very similar approaches that we've taken with our digital physical therapy product, both broad awareness for people suffering in silence or just going through a primary care physician, looking at claims, looking at pharmacy spend, as well as, you know, member to member enrollment or referrals, but, you know, basically leveraging all of our similar channels for dropping awareness that we do for digital physical therapy with slightly more emphasis as well on RX data.
Perfect.
Great question.
Your next question comes from the line of Ryan McDonald from Needham Co. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hi, thanks for taking my questions. Congrats on an amazing quarter. I've got two on the migraine, one for Dan and one for James. Dan, as you're talking to your clients that are already initially adopting migraine, the 125 thus far, I'm curious, what do those conversations look like as those customers balance sort of up front, managing up front healthcare costs with sort of ROI in the back Are they thinking about migraine care in a way where they're going to have clinical eligibility requirements? Because when we look at the TAM, obviously, it's a much smaller population that are sort of clinically diagnosed with migraines. So are they sort of, I guess, capping sort of utilization in the early stages that they experiment on it? And then, James, for you, given that Enzo is sort of a core component of the migraine program moving forward, how should we think about the rate with which sort of Enzo deployment grows within the member base as we start getting into, you know, next year and what potential impact that could have on gross margins over time?
I'll start on the migraine enrollment and the sales process. Because, you know, we're having very, very productive conversations with our employer customers. And overwhelmingly, when we speak to somebody, either they or somebody in the team or a spouse is afflicted with migraine. I've gone more inbound from customers or on LinkedIn since our announcement saying, hey, I'm impacted. How soon can I personally sign up? Or my wife is impacted. How soon can my wife or my spouse sign up? And so we really struck a nerve, a pun unavoidable, with our migraine care program. And when we speak for employer customers, there's a recognition that, yes, their costs have got up. In fact, I was in one conversation where they immediately pulled up their pharma spend and said this was one of their largest or fastest growing areas of spend. But then there's a recognition that this is an unmet clinical need that people, that they have not been able to deliver good care for. And there's a huge amount of dissatisfaction with the status quo. I think three in five people are dissatisfied with their current level of their migraine care, particularly because it takes them so long to speak to a specialist. And there's a recognition from employers that when somebody does have migraine, whatever their job is, they are not going to show up to work that day. And if they're working remote, they're not going to be very productive. They're going to be in a dark room with the door closed and not looking at a screen. And whether they're blue-collar or white-collar, they're pretty much out of commission for that data. So there's a recognition of its impact on their overall employee base. And so we've had a pretty straightforward conversation. So there's a need for ROI. There's also a recognition that their members or employees, as well as the dependents of the plan, need access to better care.
Yeah, I'll just add on to the second question, maybe just a quick reminder that in our cost to get sold, about half of it comes from ENSO costs and about half from the care team. And largely, any ENSO increases have been offset by efficiencies in the care team. We see that again in 26 and likely again in 27. Specific to your question, though, we did increase our ENSO distributions in 25 by about 2x over 2024 as far as percentage of members that received it. I imagine this year we will probably bounce up again about 40 percent increase over last year, given what we're already planning, plus migraines. You can imagine what we're planning this year. We already had an idea of migraines, so it's not like something brand new to us in the last month. So we already factored that into our forecast for the year.
Awesome. Appreciate all the color. Congrats again.
For your final question today, we will go to Stan Berenstein with Wells Fargo. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Thanks for squeezing me in here. Maybe two quick ones for me. First, for the 20% of lives still on the subscription pricing, have there been any changes in pricing at renewal? And then I have a follow-up.
No. No, the short answer is the pricing has remained the same on the upfront model for several years now.
And then on the pipeline, you called out Q1 substantially higher versus prior year. I think you also called out SMB as materially stronger. Is the sales cycle any different for SMBs versus maybe larger enterprise accounts? Any color there would be helpful.
Sure, yeah. SMB, the sales process is much faster. It's just smaller organizations make decisions much quicker, and it's just a much, much faster, more efficient sale.
Hey, maybe if I could just add, Stan, I just want to make a reminder. We talked about adding more capacity and more personnel in our SMB team, a couple of different conference calls last year. And for me, anyway, I think it's just great to see that when we put our minds to investing, we make smart decisions on where to put those investing dollars, whether it's product to put out things like migraine or whether it's in the SMB space in our commercial side to drive more pipeline there. I think we're pretty wise around here on how we choose to invest.
Great. Thanks so much.
That is all the time we have for questions. I will now turn the call back to Daniel Perez for closing remarks.
First of all, thank you everybody for dialing in and for learning more about our business and for our investors who have put their capital into our business as well. We are, as you can see from our quarter and our expanding product portfolio, we are not standing still. There's a lot of runway ahead. And as I mentioned briefly, we are just 1% of 1% right now in terms of the total time that we believe we've tackled. It'll take as many decades ahead, but we're excited about the progress. And hopefully you're going to see a lot more at our client conference movement, where we also have our industrial conference on June 9th and 10th, as well as in the coming quarters as we share more products. So we'll be a good rest of your day.
This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.