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Dialogue Health Technologies Inc
TSX:CARE

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Dialogue Health Technologies Inc Logo
Dialogue Health Technologies Inc
TSX:CARE
Watchlist
Price: 5.14 CAD 0.1% Market Closed
Updated: May 10, 2024

Earnings Call Transcript

Earnings Call Transcript
2022-Q2

from 0
J
Jean-Marc Ayas
executive

Welcome to Dialogue Health Technologies Web Conference to discuss results for the Second Quarter of 2022. [Operator Instructions] Listeners are reminded that portions of today's call may contain forward-looking statements that reflect current views with respect to future events. Any such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. For more information on Dialogue's risks and uncertainties related to these forward-looking statements, please refer to the company's MD&A dated August 10, 2022, and the annual information form dated March 22, 2022, both of which are posted on SEDAR. [Foreign Language] Our operating and financial results will be presented this morning by Cherif Habib, Chief Executive Officer and Navaid Mansuri, Chief Financial Officer. On a related note, we are conducting today's call remotely since our team will be presenting Dialogue to investors right after this call at Canaccord's Annual Growth Conference in Boston. If you're attending the event, we would love to meet you in person later today. And now on to the presentation. Cherif, you may begin.

C
Cherif Habib
executive

[Foreign Language] Jean-Marc. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Q2 was another good quarter. Despite the economic uncertainty and challenging backdrop, our team has remained uniquely focused on financial and operational execution and on delivering value for our customers and members. To set the tone for today's remarks, I want to highlight 3 key messages. #1, revenue growth remains our priority. We are focused on expanding our pipeline and winning market share, but we are not going to grow at any cost. We have an eye on longer-term sustainability. Dialogue remains a growth story with meaningful opportunities, and we are not taking our foot on the gas pedal. #2, we are driving operational efficiency and are determined to reach profitability. We are investing in our business in a more targeted and disciplined fashion and at a rate that is below our revenue growth. Not only do we have a strong balance sheet to reach profitability without incremental financing, but we intend to get there quickly even if inflationary headwinds persist at current levels. It is worth repeating that we can fully deliver on our plan without raising any additional funding and have a comfortable margin of safety. #3, we are strengthening our partnerships, expanding our share of wallet with customers, enhancing our platform constantly and growing our competitive moat. As a leader in the delivery of virtual care, we need to continue investing and not take our gains for granted. We want to protect what we have built and use this as a foundation to do even more. Putting it all together, we are building a more resilient and sustainable business through focused investments, without sacrificing our growth opportunities and through a deep sense of care for our customers and our members. Let's now talk about Q2 results. All our KPIs continue to trend in the right direction. We maintained our strong momentum in the period as ARR and revenue grew 39% and 38%, respectively, on a year-over-year basis, while member count increased by 65%. Customer satisfaction with our Integrated Health Platform remains high. The average monthly net retention was once again above 100% and member churn remains low and better than planned. We continue to see impressive satisfaction and loyalty and increasing attach rate and a greater proportion of customers that subscribe to multiple services. As I mentioned earlier, we are working hard to achieve our profitability objectives through a combination of revenue growth, efficiency initiatives and financial discipline. In Q2, we made solid progress on our path to EBITDA breakeven. We realized robust gross margin improvements and good operating leverage, both of which reinforce our confidence in reaching our target by the end of next year, if not sooner. Our land and expand strategy continues to yield solid dividends, as 65% of our new customer wins in the second quarter included 2 or more services. This performance marks the sixth consecutive quarter over 50% and reinforces the strategic importance of a fully integrated platform to drive multiproduct adoption. Let me give you a few examples of our Q2 wins. A Canadian professional services firm with nearly 600 employees selected Dialogue's full IHP, allowing us to displace 2 competitors at the same time. A global leader in information management with 3,000 employees chose us for their Primary Care Service, opening the door to deploy our other products in the future. A top 10 university came to us to help support the mental health needs of their students. The agreement covers 4,000 members with great upside as it expands to a larger portion of the student population. On the expansion front, a leader in transportation and logistics switched from a competitor's EAP to ours for their 8,000 employees. The customer was already a user of our Primary Care Service through Sun Life's Lumino Health platform. And with Sun Life now offering our EAP Lumino Health, the integrated platform approach help them upsell an additional service to a very satisfied customer. In another example, a high-end fashion retailer that was already subscribed to our full suite of services saw our Wellness offer and loved it, adding it to more than 1,000 employees. Our business is diversifying rapidly. Services other than Primary Care continue to create nice optionality for us. In our direct channel, 8 of our top 10 new wins included at least one of our EAP and Mental Health Services. Within our existing customer base, we saw a similar trend as 3 of our top 5 expansions at an EAP. As I mentioned, we secured our first Wellness wins in Canada, and I will provide more details shortly. Our attach rate continued to improve, rising to 1.52 at the end of the second quarter compared to 1.51 last quarter and 1.10 in the second quarter of last year. Excluding the impact of the Tictrac acquisition, whose members only have access to the Wellness Service, the attach rate would have increased to 1.58. This steep year-over-year inflection is primarily due to expanding the relationship with our 2 most important partners, Sun Life and Canada Life. Looking forward, the addition of a Wellness Service to our platform raises the ceiling for the attach rate to 4 and provides us with a longer runway to upsell and cross-sell more services. 24% of our direct members are now subscribed to 2 or more services compared to 22% last quarter and 18% in the second quarter of last year. The full commercial launch of wells in Canada in the fourth quarter should provide a catalyst to push this measure even higher. Let's now discuss important trends that we are seeing in our business. We continue to be confident about attaining our internal ARR targets for 2022. While the economic backdrop are certainly [ unfolding ] for many, the B2B market for Dialogue services appears to be resilient so far. Employers do not view our services as luxury, but rather a stable stakes. They offer our platform to their employees to enhance their benefits plans and to provide them with tools to overcome physical and mental health challenges in order to improve morale and productivity. These benefits are especially important and appreciated during uncertain times. While we are not looking to downplay any risks related to a potential recession, we believe that the growth opportunities that we see within the B2B market should help weather an economic downturn. Furthermore, our customers are well diversified across industries and geographies in Canada, which also brings us an added level of comfort. Demand remained robust across all our services and Mental Health continues to be a top concern for employers and other organizations. This is why our EAP and Mental Health Service, including iCBT continues to see strong growth. In fact, in the first 6 months of the year, direct customer ARR grew 85% year-over-year for a virtual EAP and 26% for our full Mental Health offering. In our more mature Primary Care segment, we are seeing increased interest from large employers wanted to get a deeper understanding of our platform. We view many of these discussions as meaningful multiservice opportunities, which brings me to my next point, we are seeing strong gains from our partnership channel, especially from Sun Life and Canada Life. In June, the most recent month on record, revenue from our 2 largest insurance partners grew 54% year-over-year, as both went to market with more of our services compared to the same time last year. Our insurance partners have been particularly successful in the small and mid-market segments and this success is allowing our direct sales force to pursue opportunities with increasingly large companies, those with tens of thousands of employees. Concurrently, we are receiving meaningful inbound interest from some of these very large employers and awareness of Dialogue has never been higher. The recent additions of Scotiabank and Sun Life's EAP customers has raised our profile within the enterprise segment. Our go-to-market team has done a tremendous job to redefine certain aspects of their approach and to enhance our position for these larger opportunities. While we're excited by such development, it has been our experience that working with bigger customers tend to extend both the sales cycle and the time lag between contract signature and member onboarding. To better illustrate our efforts with larger enterprise customers, we closed Q2 with our weighted pipeline sitting at a record high, up 65% year-over-year and an impressive 37% higher compared to the first quarter of this year. Our top 10 new opportunities currently represent more than 550,000 members. These opportunities continue to advance through the funnel. As I mentioned at the start of the call, revenue growth remains our #1 priority, and we're very pleased with our current progress. I now want to provide a quick update on the integration of Tictrac. The first milestone of our plan was to launch in the third quarter an early access version of our Wellness Service in Canada. This step was completed ahead of schedule at the end of Q2, showcasing the strength of our engineering team and the modular nature of our IHP. We leverage Tictrac's content team delivered articles, as well as a variety of audio and video sessions. We also invested in the production of bilingual video content to meet the needs of our French-speaking customers and members. Importantly, every piece of content that we launch has passed through our team's clinical review process. So far, employer and partner interest has exceeded our expectations, and I'm pleased to announce that at the end of Q2, we had signed 6 customers with 14,000 members. As a side note, we use Tictrac's technology to launch as challenge for Dialogue employees and drove exceptionally high engagement and utilization. Results from the entire group were 3x better than the objectives. Our team provided amazing feedback, and we are very excited about the additional content that we'll launch over the coming months. The second milestone is to launch a commercial version of the service in Q4, fully integrated within our IHP. This step is on track, and our pipeline is developing rapidly. While Wellness interest in Canada has been very encouraging, the pipeline has been slower to convert in our international markets. As such, ARR recognized revenue from those markets are not scaling as fast as expected. To address this, we have taken the following steps. First, we are accelerating our plan to consolidate to a single application in order to realize cost synergies faster than initially anticipated. Second, we are investing in Tictrac's go-to-market team in order to accelerate traction and seize the opportunities that we know are out there for Wellness. It is still early days and the better-than-expected performance in Canada could partially offset the weakness internationally. From a purchase price standpoint, we remind you that the deal was structured with earn-outs that were specifically designed to mitigate an ARR shortfall. If we end up retaining a portion of the earn-outs, we will look for other value-creating opportunities in which to redeploy the investment. That said, we remain bullish on the Wellness business, both in Canada and in Tictrac's markets, and we'll continue to execute on our plan. I will now let Navaid discuss our financial results in more detail.

N
Navaid Mansuri
executive

[Foreign Language] Thank you for joining us today. Our annual recurring and reoccurring revenue or ARR, continues to grow at a very strong pace. During Q2, we added nearly CAD 7 million in ARR to end the quarter at CAD 97.1 million. This represents growth of 39% year-over-year and 8% sequentially. Excluding our legacy Optima business, which is in EAP, ARR in our virtual business increased 56% compared to last year. We continue to make solid gains with our Virtual EAP and Mental Health Services and our new Wellness program has quickly become a contributor to net new ARR in Canada. Since the start of the year, 66% of net new ARR came from non-Primary Care services, well on track to reach our goal of at least 60% for the full year. We are very pleased to see new growth levers emerge to complement our all-important Primary Care segment. The addition of Tictrac contributed CAD 2.5 million to our overall ARR. This is below the original CAD 4.5 million that we communicated in April when the transaction was announced. Foreign currency fluctuations and a small amount of customer churn contributed to a portion of the difference. The remaining variance bears explaining. One of Tictrac's large insurance partners, representing approximately GBP 1 million of ARR has been transitioning from a white label product to an API. This was done because the insurer wanted to tie Tictrac's Wellness functionalities to its own platform and to its other services. As the insurer redeploys the service to its customers in various geographies, Dialogue will recognize the ARR accordingly and record the associated revenue. While the timing of the rollout is not in our control, the ARR is not lost, it's simply deferred until each market is individually relaunched by our partner. We are choosing to apply a more conservative approach to ARR recognition now that we have a better handle on the specifics of the agreement. Tictrac and the insurer have had an ongoing relationship for more than 3 years, and we expect to develop it further in the years ahead. As Cherif mentioned, our pipeline is at a record high, and we expect to convert many of the opportunities into signed ARR in the coming months. Concluding on this topic, I want to emphasize that we are confident in our ability to meet our internal ARR expectations for the year. That said, larger customer wins are less predictable from a timing standpoint and some expected wins have already been pushed into Q3. This will likely have an impact on our recognized revenue for the year, though we do not expect it to alter our path to profitability. We reached 2.4 million members at the end of the second quarter, representing growth of 65% year-over-year. Excluding acquisitions, organic growth was strong at 47% year-over-year. Compared to the first quarter, we added more than 350,000 new members, representing a 17% sequential increase. Member Service Units or MSUs, rose 128% year-over-year to more than CAD 3.6 million from approximately CAD 1.6 million at the end of the second quarter last year. The significant increase is a result of Dialogue's land and expand strategy, which continues to drive multiservice sales among new customers while upselling existing customers, as well as the acquisition of Tictrac. We continue to see strong customer stickiness. During Q2, in our mid-market and enterprise segments, churn was low at about 1,500 direct members. In our small business segment, where customers typically have only one product and are more sensitive to price changes, we saw slightly higher churn than in Q1, although it remained well below our expectations. While the impact of churn customers was minimal in Q1, it impacted both our Q2 member growth and our average monthly net retention rate. Despite that, we recorded an average monthly NRR of 100.4% in the second quarter as the churn customers were more than offset by the price increases and the organic expansion of our customer base. It's important to note here that this exercise of raising prices, the first for Dialogue on a large scale, will result in healthier and more robust economics for the business as we have already started to see in our Q2 results. The price increases will continue to cycle through our results in the second half of the year. Going forward, to effectively portray the true strength of our go-to-market effort, we will transition to reporting our NRR on a rolling 12-month basis. In the current form, the average monthly NRR does not capture the compounding effect of growth over the measured period. We believe the better approach and one that will be more comparable with other publicly traded subscription models is to look at a longer time frame and to measure the growth based on the starting and ending ARR for a given cohort. In the 12-month period ending June 30, 2022, the net retention rate for our direct customers was 118%. This measurement better illustrates the adoption of Dialogue's IHP over time, the price increases, the organic expansion or contraction of the cohort and, of course, churn. Revenue grew 38% year-over-year to CAD 23 million, driven by our land and expand strategy, as well as our acquisition of Tictrac. Going forward, we will report Wellness revenue within the renamed Primary Care Mental Health and Wellness segment. This segment continues to perform very well in the second quarter as revenue increased 46% year-over-year to CAD 15 million and 41% on an organic basis. The EAP segment generated revenue of CAD 6.8 million in the period, up 22% year-over-year. Importantly, our virtual EAP grew nearly 110% on a sequential basis, an accelerating trend that was due mainly to the onboarding of Scotiabank and Sun Life members. Lastly, our occupational health and safety business in Germany saw a steady progression in the second quarter as revenue increased 58% year-over-year to CAD 1.2 million and 9% sequentially, even as the euro weakened meaningfully in relation to the Canadian dollar. Our efforts to improve gross margin started to gain traction in Q2, and we also benefited from a retroactive price increase at Optima. Our gross margin in the second quarter was much stronger on a sequential basis and improved more than 800 basis points compared to last year. We took many actions in the quarter that helped drive the increase. We continue to raise pricing to eligible IHP customers, to migrate Optima clients to our virtual platform, and to meaningfully scale our virtual EAP to the onboarding of Scotiabank and Sun Life members. We made several internal moves from automating certain back-office functions to improving our intake and scheduling approach, all of which were done without impacting patient experience. We view these changes as systemic and expect margin improvements we attained in Q2 to continue in future periods. From a service mix perspective, the addition of Tictrac added 40 basis points to our margin during the quarter. This too will continue, and we expect the benefit to be slightly higher in the back half of the year as Tictrac only counted for 2 months in Q2. At Optima, we implemented a price increase to one of our largest customers. The change was retroactive to January and added 80 basis points to our Q2 margin that will not recur in the second half of the year. Finally, our overall gross margin benefited from lower-than-normal utilization at Optima. We do not expect this dynamic to persist and anticipate requiring more contractual practitioner hours in the second half of the year compared to Q2. Most of the factors mentioned here are here to stay, and we believe that we reached a new step function in our gross margin. For the second half of 2022, we anticipate gross margin to be between 46% and 48%. We are taking important steps to build a more resilient business model, and I'm proud to see our entire team working tirelessly to ensure that we reach our ambitious objectives. Operating expenses increased 30% year-over-year to CAD 16.3 million in the second quarter, including the acquisition of Tictrac. Excluding Tictrac, our operating expenses in Q2 were CAD 15 million, increasing only 3% from CAD 14.5 million in the first quarter. As a percentage of revenue, the operating expense rate was 470 basis points lower year-over-year as we continue to drive operating leverage in our business. Inflationary pressures persist across all of our cost lines. We are executing despite these challenges and doing everything that we can to offset them. We have slowed down hiring across the company, except for revenue-generating roles and within our patient-facing teams. We also realized some synergies at Tictrac as we combine forces. These moves will be more apparent in our Q3 results, but we can already see their impact in Q2. For each of the next 2 quarters, we expect operating expenses to range between CAD 17 million and CAD 18 million. This includes a full contribution of Tictrac, which accounted for only 2 months in Q2. Moving on to adjusted EBITDA. We recorded a loss of CAD 4.8 million in the second quarter or negative 21% of revenue compared to a loss of CAD 5.7 million in the same period last year or negative 28% of revenue. We are very pleased with our progress in Q2 despite the losses at Tictrac and expect to see further benefits in the second half of the year. Before closing, I want to reiterate our plan to achieve breakeven EBITDA by the end of 2023. We continue to pursue growth opportunities across both our direct and partner channels. We have taken many actions to improve our gross margin and believe we have reached a higher range that is here to stay. We are focused on controlling costs, despite inflationary pressures, and we made a commitment to investors that we would not require more funding following our IPO. Looking at our balance sheet, we have CAD 61 million in cash at the end of the second quarter, which is more than enough to attain our profitability objectives and provides us with significant margin of safety and even some dry powder left over for incremental M&A. We remain very much a high-growth business, and we'll continue to look for strategic acquisitions and areas of investment that could accelerate our growth, enhance our profitability, strengthen our platform and broaden our geographic footprint. Thank you again. We'll now open the floor for questions. [Foreign Language]

Operator

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Jerome Dubreuil at Desjardins Securities.

J
Jerome Dubreuil
analyst

[Foreign Language] First one for me would be, amid the reopening, a lot of investors were wondering what was going to happen with the operations, and we're seeing that everything appears to be going smoothly. But in terms of your approach, has your go-to-market strategy evolved or what are the main changes you are seeing in this new context?

C
Cherif Habib
executive

[Foreign Language] Jerome, can you please clarify what you mean by the reopening?

J
Jerome Dubreuil
analyst

Yes. The reopening of the economy, people going back away from the work-from-home dynamics and back to the office.

C
Cherif Habib
executive

Understood. We haven't seen any changes. I mean, we've -- I think we've been saying clearly, the Dialogue was not a COVID-stock. And I think the last couple of quarters with the reopening are showing that we're not seeing any changes of dynamics in the demand. From a go-to-market perspective, our go-to-market team is continuing to execute on plan. No major changes. I would say that the only kind of positive is that we're able to meet our customers in person again. And I think that, that makes a big difference in terms of creating those relationships. And we did quite well for a couple of years doing all of our sales in bizdev over Zoom. But I think now that we can see our customers face-to-face and spend more time with them at -- in their offices, that's been a plus. But other than that, we haven't seen any other changes in demand.

J
Jerome Dubreuil
analyst

Right, good to hear. And then thanks for the color on your cost control, too. You mentioned that you have slowed down hiring. Does that mean you are currently satisfied with your current offering or else, what would you need to see an acceleration again in hiring? Are we in a new normal in terms of the growth of the hiring we could see?

C
Cherif Habib
executive

Yes. We've -- as Navaid said, our go-to-market hiring and our member-facing hiring are not slowing down. These will always be matched with -- on the go-to-market side with our ARR targets and on the service op side with our predicted utilization rates. But I think where we've made kind of more disciplined decisions is in everything else. And we prefer to be more disciplined on the rate of hiring to avoid a layoff down the line. And I think you've seen in news, tech companies that grew too fast and did layoffs, and we're trying really hard to not be in that situation and we don't foresee to be in that situation. And that requires more careful and disciplined spending in the shorter term, again, to avoid a longer-term issue. And on top of that, we're very committed to our path to profitability. We're very committed to reach profitability by the end of next year like we said we would. So we need to be very, very disciplined on the cost side.

Operator

The next question comes from Paul Stewardson at iA Capital.

P
Paul Stewardson
analyst

Just calling in for Chelsea. It'd be great to get some color on the kinds of operating efficiencies that you're talking about when you mentioned the technology investments and how that is decreasing cost of services? What does that look like on a bit more [ granular stuff ]?

N
Navaid Mansuri
executive

Paul, so a lot of it is leveraging our technology investments. As you know, we've built our own virtual platform. So leveraging that platform to automate certain manual tasks. So previously tasks that were done by our -- members of our Care team that were manual in nature. By automating some of those tasks, we can take a lot of cost out of the system. So it's a continuation of that and leveraging, as I said, leveraging technology to -- whether it's scheduling or it could be in the form of notes or back-office functions that were previously required to be done manually. And as you're dealing with thousands of member visits a day and over 2 million members, you can imagine sort of even little changes can have a meaningful impact. So that's what we're focused on doing. So all of these are designed to drive efficiencies without negatively impacting the member experience.

P
Paul Stewardson
analyst

And just for the follow-up, in terms of the significant increase in gross margin. Obviously, a big piece of that is these operating efficiencies and the price increases. But there was also -- I think you mentioned a little bit less in terms of user engagement on the platform of users using services. Can you talk about how much that might be a seasonality effect versus what you're expecting to see in the back half of the year as obviously, more and more in-person services are happening on -- in the healthcare system. Is that something that you see kind of persisting a little bit or really just been a seasonality effect that will wash out?

N
Navaid Mansuri
executive

Paul, let me clarify. So on my comment in my prepared remarks, so our virtual services, the utilization level is very stable and steady, across all of our services, whether it's Primary Care, Mental Health or EAP. The comment that I made was specifically around Optima. So Optima, as you know, is not a PMPM model, for the most part, it's driven by utilization. So there is seasonality and historically has been seasonality in that business. So when the utilization falls below a certain level, we use less external practitioners and we leverage our internal practitioners and utilize them more. So those naturally have a higher margin. So because of that mix is what I was talking about in terms of the positive impact from lower utilization, but specifically at Optima. And that is seasonality that we see every year in our business. So that's what I was alluding to.

Operator

The next question is from Endri Leno at National Bank Financial.

E
Endri Leno
analyst

The first one I have, perhaps for Cherif. And when I'm looking at that Q2 wins matrix that you have in there, I'll say there's a bit of a change from last quarter, is that you get kind of more multiple services at new clients, whereas I think the last quarter or before, it was led by Primary Care. So can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing in the market? Is there more acceptance of the IHB? Is it more of a push from Dialogue or more of approval from this -- from the customers, specifically as it relates to larger size ones?

C
Cherif Habib
executive

Endri, you are right that we're seeing more and more multiservice wins. And for us, this is something that we celebrate. This is something that we really like because it really reinforces the IHP strategy. Our -- what we say internally is, we want every service to be strong on their own, but we want them to be stronger together. And these multiservice wins, I think, demonstrate that. And to answer your question, is this a result more of a stronger push from Dialogue or a pull from the market? I think it's a combination of the 2. We've been kind of evangelizing this approach for the last year or so. And I think the market now is telling us loud and clear that this is a preferred approach. And I think some of the recent moves and evolution of some of our competitors clearly show that the IHP strategy is the winning one and we're fully committed to it. I think that regarding your comment about size, I think it is easier to start with a multiproduct or a full suite deployment at a mid-market client than it is a very large enterprise client. So some of those examples show that. With larger clients, the -- what we've seen is that they will often start with a smaller number of services, but the fact that we have an IHP is a way to future proof because in the back of their heads, they know their road map over the next couple of years, and they want to go with the partner or the provider that has the best integration that's clearly us. So these are the dynamics we're seeing, and we're very, very pleased to see every quarter an improvement in that number and seeing that the IHP really resonates in the market.

E
Endri Leno
analyst

And the follow-up, I have there maybe for Navaid, but perhaps a combination, is that -- you mentioned that there will be a bit of a slow revenue recognition from a large customers that they take some time. Are you able to provide any color there? I mean, without, I guess, providing quarterly guidance, but any kind of color you can say in terms of what kind of growth or how do you see kind of revenue evolving by the end of the year? And as a side note to that, I mean, all these kind of shutdowns or delays in emergency departments across the country, could that have a positive impact to a faster recognition or a faster launch by these large clients?

N
Navaid Mansuri
executive

No. So the comment that I made, Endri is, I mean as we work with larger and larger customers, there's -- not only is there a longer sales cycle, and this is completely driven by the customer, not by Dialogue. They can choose for budget reasons or operational reasons to launch a few months later. And Scotiabank was a good example of that. We announced the deal in -- early in the year, but they only onboarded their members on April 1st. So it's completely driven by the customer and -- but that's what we're seeing is that, not only is the sales cycle longer, they tend to want a little bit more time between signature and rolling it out to the entire population. So that was the comment that even though we're confident in our ability to meet our ARR targets, because of that delay, some revenue recognition that we had anticipated earlier may start a little bit later.

Operator

The next question is from David Kwan at TD Securities.

D
David Kwan
analyst

Can you hear me?

C
Cherif Habib
executive

Yes.

D
David Kwan
analyst

Okay. I want to focus on the EAP business. It's been, I think, a couple of years now since you've acquired Optima and had some good client wins in particular with the Scotiabank and the Sun Life contracts in particular. But I was curious to get some color on where you guys are in migrating their existing customers to the IHP, and maybe where kind of gross margins are now because I think when you talked about it, it was in the range and kind of targeting closer to the mid 40%s with your [indiscernible]?

C
Cherif Habib
executive

David, I only heard half of your question. So I'll answer the half I heard and then maybe you can repeat the other half. So the half that I heard is, how are the migrations to the IHP from Optima going? They -- it's going well on the small and medium and midsized clients. The larger clients is still a challenge, a lot of change management. So not going perhaps as fast as you would like. And I think if I picked up some of the words when you were continuing is, yes, you are right that these migrations are a net positive for our margins and that all of the remaining customers on the Optima side are operating well below probably half of our targeted overall margin. So it's definitely the way you get done.

D
David Kwan
analyst

I guess, like where could you say -- I'm just trying to get a sense of what the uplift could eventually integrate all of their customers on to the IHP. Like let's just take the margins for this quarter if all of those Optima customers were on the IHP, where could margins have been this quarter from, I guess, the high 40%s, it was the 49% range?

C
Cherif Habib
executive

So, I mean, as we've said in the past, our Virtual Service margins are consistently above 50%, and they have been for some time. So once all of our Optima customers are migrated from the lower margin to the Virtual Service, that's where you would see the margin. So it's a few 100 basis points.

D
David Kwan
analyst

Okay. And if I could slip in one more question also related to the EAP. You guys had built up a new contact center, I think, to support the Scotiabank win there. I'm curious to see what kind of uptake you've seen from other customers, whether they're existing EAP customers or new ones that you're hoping to just get across the finish line? What kind of interest have you had in adding that to kind of the base EAP offering?

C
Cherif Habib
executive

Yes. We -- just to give you some added context on that, David, we charge a premium for the contact center. So when we -- our go-to-market team is in discussion with a prospect, there is the virtual EAP at a certain price and then the contact center is an add-on. And I would say that some customers see the extra value. We think that the virtual platform is more than adequate enough, and we think that it's a much better experience than the contact center, just to give you an example, when you call a contact center, they have to identify you and there's a few questions, security questions, et cetera. All of that is bypassed when you go virtually because the security methods are embedded into the application. So we believe it's a better experience. However, it is a cost for us to operate a cost center. And if a customer wants it, they pay for that -- for an extra cost. I would say it's mitigated. I mean some companies are really willing and happy to go to the fully virtual approach and some require a bit of change management and they don't want to lose that contact center. So not -- it's very early days. But it's still -- it's too early to draw any conclusions.

D
David Kwan
analyst

I guess maybe it's too early, but is it mostly kind of the larger organizations that are looking at this option versus the smaller customers?

C
Cherif Habib
executive

I would say so, yes.

Operator

The next question is from Scott Fletcher at CIBC Capital Markets.

S
Scott Fletcher
analyst

There was some commentary from one of your peers that HR departments are dealing with a challenging time right now and a lot of them are seeing mandates to control costs. Has that -- have you seen that in any of your sales conversations and whether that's sort of resulting in deals getting pushed out or customers may be looking to go for less services than they had initially signaled?

C
Cherif Habib
executive

I think we've had some isolated discussions of that sort. As a general rule, like we said in the prepared remarks, we haven't seen an overall trend of people moving away or not requiring our services. So nothing -- again, some anecdotes here and there, but nothing concerning or nothing at a large scale. What I would say though is, when you buy 3 or 4 services, whether it's Primary Care, Mental Health, EAP Wellness, et cetera, from 4 different providers, you will pay more than if you consolidate all of them in our IHP. So actually, the drive to be more efficient from an operational point of view and to be more efficient and more careful on the spend point of view actually helps us because people know they need these services, they just need to make sure that they're buying these services in an optimal way, and we've been positioned in the IHP as the best way to do so. So puts and takes, but I think overall, the need of HR departments to focus and stay disciplined, I think, helps us and drives more demand for the IHP.

S
Scott Fletcher
analyst

And maybe as a follow-up, are you seeing sort of a harder line on price? And is there any willingness on your side? Obviously, you're pushing price increases to existing contracts. So is there any sort of willingness to maybe take a bit of a haircut on a PMPM rate in order to win business if customers are sort of feeling that pressure from a budget perspective?

C
Cherif Habib
executive

Yes. Good question. I mean we are very confident in the value that we deliver, and we expect to be paid fairly for the value that we deliver and we price our services in such a way, we need to be careful with our margins and the overall sustainability of the business. So are we flexible on pricing? I mean, of course, yes, like everybody is, but we need to be very, very disciplined. And we're very careful about not winning, buying revenue or when the unit economics don't make sense. So we're trying to stay as disciplined as possible there.

J
Jean-Marc Ayas
executive

These are all the questions we have for today. For anyone that would like to meet with our team, we'll be hosting meetings at the CIBC Annual Eastern Conference at the end of September in Montreal. You can also reach us at any time by e-mail at investors@Dialogue.co, and it will be our pleasure to answer to any of your questions. Cherif, the floor is yours again to conclude today's call.

C
Cherif Habib
executive

Well, thanks, everyone, for your participation on today's call. We really look forward to speaking with you again when we release our Q2 results on November 14th. Have a great day, everyone. Bye-bye.

N
Navaid Mansuri
executive

Bye.

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