HealthStream Q1 2026 Earnings Call - Record Revenue and EBITDA Drive Strategic AI and Career Network Investments

Conference Operator, Conference Call Operator: Good morning, and welcome to HealthStream’s first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, I would like to inform you that this conference is being recorded and all participants are in a listen only mode. At the request of the company, we will open the conference up for question and answers after the presentation. I will now turn the conference over to Mollie Condra, Head of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications. Please go ahead, Ms. Condra.

Mollie Condra, Head of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications, HealthStream: Thank you, and good morning. Thank you for joining us today to discuss our 1st quarter 2026 results. Also on the conference call with me is Robert A. Frist Jr., CEO and Chairman of HealthStream, and Scotty Roberts, CFO and Senior Vice President of Finance and Accounting. I would also like to remind you that this conference call may contain forward-looking statements regarding future events and the future performance of HealthStream that could involve risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Information concerning these risks and other factors that could cause the results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements are contained in the company’s filings with the SEC, including Form 10-K, Form 10-Q, and our earnings release. Additionally, we may reference certain non-GAAP financial measures relating to the company’s past and future expected performance on this call.

The most directly comparable GAAP financial metrics and reconciliations are included in the earnings release that we issued yesterday. With that start, I’ll now turn the call over to CEO, Bobby Frist.

Robert A. Frist Jr., CEO and Chairman, HealthStream: Good morning, everyone. We do have a lot to cover this morning, and I’ll ask Scotty and Molly to be on guard in case I have a coffee fit. Working off a bit of a cold, that’s my issue. I’m gonna get through it, though. Just in case, Molly, be ready. All right. Well, good morning, everyone, to our first quarter 2026 earnings call. We have a lot to go over, starting with the strong financial growth we delivered in the quarter, which included record-setting revenues of $81.2 million. That’s up 10.5% year-over-year. Record-setting adjusted EBITDA, which has just pushed through the $20 million to $20.1 million. That’s up 24.1% year-over-year. Operating income grew 71.6% year-over-year.

The strong performance in Q1 is allowing us to increase investment, you know, kind of beyond our original plan as we started the year, including in growth initiatives related to our current products, new products on the horizon, and accelerated use of AI. I’m gonna talk about some of those investments towards the end of my sections. We’re reaffirming our 2026 full year guidance and continue to anticipate revenue between $323 million and $330 million, net income between $20.4 million and $22.8 million, and adjusted EBITDA between $73 million and $77 million.

Our strong cash balance of $66.5 million and untapped line of credit and no long-term debt continue to position us well to take advantage of M&A opportunities as they arise, as well as other capital deployment strategies that we believe will benefit our shareholders. As a reminder, last quarter I described four reasons why HealthStream sees real opportunity in today’s rapidly expanding AI environment. As AI continues to develop, I am pleased to reaffirm our increasing belief in each of those four reasons today. First, our healthcare user base continues to expand. Unlike companies facing seat compression from AI agents, healthcare keeps hiring and keeps growing, with roughly one-quarter of all new U.S. jobs over the next decade projected to come from the healthcare industry. Nurses, our largest user base, are leading that growth. AI is not expected to reduce demand for nurses.

If anything, it should free them to spend more time with patients and less time documenting. Second, our customers utilize our enterprise applications as system of record for managing their learning, credentialing, and scheduling programs. The data in these applications serves as a source of truth for our customers as they carry out their operations. I believe they’ll use that source of truth in training their own AI. Third, Well, in addition, around the data profile, in parallel, our career networks, which is gonna be an area of investment, generate proprietary individual level data that we believe is valuable for finding, developing, retaining, and engaging the healthcare workforce. NurseGrid alone, for example, now reaches roughly 1 in 5 U.S. nurses, telling us where, when, and for whom they want to work.

Third, our hStream platform is built to incorporate AI as a core element rather than bolting it on. Platform elements like the hStream ID, which we’ve talked about extensively in the past, and our growing API footprint serve as essential infrastructure to help enable AI-driven innovation in healthcare workforce technology. Fourth, our ecosystem ties it all together. Millions of caregivers, thousands of healthcare organizations, and dozens of industry partners, combined with more than 30 years of domain experience in the hStream technology platform, creates something difficult to replicate. AI cannot manufacture an ecosystem like HealthStream’s, but it can enhance it. In turn, our ecosystem can enhance AI in what we believe will be a virtuous loop of value creation for our customers and investors alike.

Building on that foundation, I’m pleased to share that we have meaningfully expanded our internal rollout of AI across the company and are making great progress. Adoption is broadening across teams. Our employees are putting these tools to work in their day-to-day, and we are encouraged by the early productivity and quality benefits we are already seeing. It’s still early days in terms of realizing the benefits of AI. With driving innovation as 1 of our company’s 6 constitutional values, I believe our employees are on the front foot of ensuring that HealthStream is an innovator in this promising area. Before we go further in our call, I want to briefly summarize our business for the benefit of anyone who’s new to HealthStream’s story, and I hope there’s lots of you on the call today.

First and foremost, HealthStream is a healthcare technology company dedicated to developing, credentialing, and scheduling the healthcare workforce through technology solutions, each of which are becoming more valuable because of the interoperability they are achieving through our hStream technology platform. We have also started to open our sales channels directly to healthcare professionals and nursing students through our 3 career networks. These help nurses, CNAs, and students throughout their career journey. The company holds 20 patents for its innovative products, which have been awarded over 40 Brandon Hall awards. Historically, we sell our solutions on a subscription basis under contracts that average 3 to 5 years in length, which makes our revenues recurring and predictable. In fact, 97% of our revenues are subscription-based.

We are profitable, have no interest-bearing debt, and reported a strong cash balance of $66.5 million at the end of the first quarter of 2026. This strong cash balance allows us to allocate capital to product development, M&A, share repurchases, and dividends. We are solely focused on healthcare and more specifically, the healthcare workforce and those preparing to enter it. The 12.5 million healthcare professionals and nursing students in the U.S. comprise the core total addressable market for our solutions. At this time, let’s turn it over to Scott Roberts, who will turn our attention to our financials and hear a report from Scott. Scott, take a look at 2026 first quarter and give us your financial outlook.

Scotty Roberts, CFO and Senior Vice President of Finance and Accounting, HealthStream: All right. Thanks, Bobby, and good morning, everyone. I’ll be happy to cover our financial results for the first quarter with you this morning. For the first quarter, our revenues were a record of $81.2 million, which was up 10.5%. Operating income was $7.5 million, and it was up 71.6%. Net income was $5.9 million, up 36.4%. Earnings per share came in at $0.20 per share, which is up from $0.14 per share. Adjusted EBITDA was also a new record of $20.1 million, which was up 24.1%. Our revenues increased by $7.7 million or 10.5% and were $81.2 million compared to $73.5 million in the prior year.

Revenues from subscription products were up $7.6 million or 10.7%, while professional service revenues were up $0.1 million or 4.3%. Our organic revenue growth rate was 5.8%, and the inorganic growth rate was 4.7% in the first quarter. Inorganic revenues are associated with the Virsys12 and MissionCare Collective acquisitions that we completed in the fourth quarter of 2025. The first quarter of 2026 is the first full quarter with both operating as part of HealthStream. I’m pleased to report that both post-acquisition integrations are progressing well. Virsys12 is extending our reach into payer credentialing, a meaningful expansion of our addressable market, and myCNAjobs is building momentum, connecting CNAs and home care providers with the organizations that need them.

Together, these two acquisitions contributed $3.4 million in revenue in the first quarter, and we continue to see compelling opportunities to cross-sell and integrate their capabilities into the broader hStream platform. In addition to the revenue contributions from these two recent acquisitions, our core business was supported by strong subscription growth performance from CredentialStream, which grew by 19%, ShiftWizard, which grew by 29%, and CompetencySuite, which grew by 17%. Revenues from our legacy credentialing and legacy scheduling products approximated $7.6 million of our first quarter revenues and declined by 16% compared to the first quarter of last year as we continue our efforts to migrate customers from those solutions.

Our remaining performance obligations were $687 million as of the end of the first quarter, compared to $613 million for the same period of last year. We expect approximately 39% of the remaining performance obligations will be converted to revenue over the next 12 months and that 67% will be converted over the next 24 months. Gross margin was 65.8% compared to 65.3% in the prior year quarter. This improvement was primarily related to the growth in revenues, including contributions from the recent acquisitions. Operating expenses, excluding cost of revenues, increased by 5.3% or $2.3 million. Product development increased by $1.6 million or 12.9%. Sales and marketing increased by $0.8 million or 6.7%.

Depreciation and amortization increased by $0.6 million or 5.7%, while G&A expenses declined by $0.7 million or 7.7%. These operating expense increases were partially impacted by the recent acquisitions, while the G&A expense decline resulted from our office sublease. To wrap up, our net income was $5.9 million and was up 36.4% over the prior year, and adjusted EBITDA improved to a record high of $20.1 million and was up 24.1%, and the adjusted EBITDA margin was 24.8% compared to 22% last year. We ended the quarter with cash and investment balances of $66.5 million, compared to $57 million last quarter. During the first quarter, we paid $7.5 million for capital expenditures.

We returned $1 million to shareholders through our dividend program, and we repurchased $7.5 million of our common stock. Under the share repurchase programs that we announced in November of 2025 and March of 2026. In addition, we made $1.8 million of the minority investments in companies that we expect to leverage our ecosystem and our platform. Our day sales outstanding were 39 days for the first quarter compared to 37 days in the prior year first quarter. Our objective is to maintain our DSO in the 40-45 day range or better. I’m pleased with our continued progress in this area. Cash flows from operations came in at $27.1 million for both the current year and the prior year first quarter.

Cash flows were partially impacted by the minor increase in DSO that I just mentioned, as well as higher payments for sales commissions following the strong bookings that we achieved in the fourth quarter of last year. Our free cash flow was $19.7 million, which is up from $18.2 million from last year, which is an increase of 7.9%. Capital expenditures came in at $7 and a half million, compared to $8.8 million last year. Ending the quarter with $66 and a half million of cash and investments, free cash flows and no debt, we are well-positioned to deploy capital to improve our shareholder value. As a reminder, we maintain a disciplined approach to capital allocation and how we prioritize our use of capital.

Our utmost priority is making organic investments back into the business, which is evident by our annual CapEx and R&D plans. The second is pursuing acquisition opportunities, which we have a long track record of executing. The third is returning a portion of profits back to shareholders in the form of cash dividends. Our fourth priority is that our board may authorize share repurchase programs. Yesterday, as announced in our earnings release, our board of directors declared a quarterly cash dividend of three and a half cents per share to be paid on May 29th to holders of record on May 18th. During the first quarter, we made share repurchases of seven and a half million under two board-authorized share repurchase programs.

We repurchased the remaining 5 million under a $10 million share repurchase program that was authorized by the board of directors in November 2025. In March 2026, the board authorized a new $10 million repurchase program, and we made 2.5 million of repurchases under this plan during the 1st quarter, and we’ve continued to make repurchases during the 2nd quarter. This program will terminate on the earlier of September 12th, 2026 or when the maximum dollar amount under the program has been expended. We may suspend or discontinue making purchases under the program at any time. I’ll finish up this morning by just recapping our financial outlook for 2026, which we are reiterating the guidance that we previously announced in February.

We continue to expect our consolidated revenues to range between $323 million and $330 million, net income to range between $20.4 million and $22.8 million, adjusted EBITDA to range between $73 million and $77 million, and capital expenditures to range between $31 million and $34 million. For the second quarter, we expect our revenue growth rate will approximate 9.5% and adjusted EBITDA margin will approximate 23%. Consistent with our operating budget for the year, we have several planned operating expenses that will begin in the second quarter, including higher labor costs, higher marketing costs from trade show sponsorship and attendance, and new technology investments to support our infrastructure, among others. In addition, our strong performance in the first quarter provides us with additional capacity to accelerate investments towards several initiatives, such as our career networks.

These guidance expectations do not include the impact of any acquisitions or dispositions that we may complete during the year, gains or losses from changes in the fair value of non-marketable equity investments or contingent consideration, or impairment of long-lived assets that we may complete during the year. That’s all I have for today. Thanks for your time this morning. Bobby, I’ll go ahead and turn the call back over to you for some more updates.

Robert A. Frist Jr., CEO and Chairman, HealthStream: Thank you, Scotty. I wanna start this section off the call, as I usually do, with some business updates that highlight successes we’ve achieved in the learning, credentialing, and scheduling areas, along with updates on our career networks. Let’s start with the learning product family, which includes the Competency Suite. Many customers are increasingly taking advantage of the opportunity to purchase a bundle of several of our most popular workforce applications and content libraries, which we call the Competency Suite. Customers purchase a subscription to the Competency Suite for all of their employees that are applicable, particularly the clinical staff, which comes with unlimited use. We saw strong momentum of this product in the first quarter with a 17.3% increase in revenues achieved. Our American Red Cross Resuscitation Suite continues to be in demand by customers.

In the first quarter, we provided the marketplace with 18 updated courses, which included education content in our BLS, ALS, and PALS programs. The updated content was deployed simultaneously across the entire customer network in a single day, all aligned to the new ILCOR science guidelines. Among the sales successes we had in Q1 with the Resuscitation Suite was a decision by Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to renew and expand their number of users by 50%. They also informed us that the expansion will be beneficial as they have been named the official medical provider to the 2028 L.A. Olympic and Paralympic Games. That’s super exciting for our teams as well. Let’s move to credentialing, where our flagship product, CredentialStream, continued its strong momentum in the first quarter.

Revenues from sales of CredentialStream in the first quarter were up approximately 19% over the same quarter last year. One thing we love to see is to see our customers growing along with us, and some of our customers meaningfully expanded through the M&A last year. In fact, two of our largest CredentialStream sales in the quarter were significant expansions due to M&A and enterprise-wide standardization on CredentialStream. We take it as a strong vote of confidence when our customers trust and rely on CredentialStream so much as a system of record that they choose to stop using solutions from our competitors and standardize on CredentialStream when they expand their operations. We’re dedicated to repaying that vote of confidence by helping these customers improve their operating results by reducing the time it takes to onboard, enroll, credential, and privilege their physicians.

There’s just huge economic benefit when a health system or one of our customers can show demonstrable improvement in the time to revenue on these physicians. We believe our software plays an essential role in getting that outcome. Virsys12, which we recently acquired in order to expand our market share, that product offering and expertise in the payer credentialing space also delivered one of our top three credentialing wins in the quarter. We’re still in the earlier phases of our expansion to the payer market, and we are pleased to see Virsys12 already contributing to that effort. Let’s move to scheduling, where our core product, ShiftWizard, continues to deliver strong revenue growth, with first quarter revenues up approximately 29% versus the first quarter of the previous year. It continues to be our top-performing pro-product in our scheduling application suite.

Our top two ShiftWizard deals in the quarter were once again takeouts of a competitor that is horizontally focused instead of solely focused on healthcare. Our sales leaders attribute these wins to the fact that our growing ShiftWizard customer base is increasingly touting the value of the healthcare-specific solution that ShiftWizard provides. When the rubber hits the road, scheduling and staffing clinicians are simply different than scheduling the labor pool for retail or factory shifts, and the market is taking note of that. Let’s turn to our career networks. They include myClinicalExchange, NurseGrid, and myCNAjobs. Importantly, career networks directly benefit both individual healthcare professionals as well as the healthcare organizations seeking to employ and engage them. For individuals, HealthStream career networks serve as a career catalyst through every stage of their pre-professional and professional journey.

Last year alone, myClinicalExchange connected over 364,000 nursing and allied health students to clinical placements. NurseGrid, the number one app for nurses in the Apple App Store, engaged over 683,000 monthly active users. myCNAjobs, which connected approximately 70% of America’s direct care workforce in the home caregiver space. In doing so, these solutions guided caregivers through every stage of their career journey, helping them discover their path, build meaningful professional relationships, access focused learning, and advance to what’s next in their career. For healthcare organizations, our career networks provide employers with direct access to the largest, most engaged audience of nurses and caregivers through targeted recruitment, development pathways, and in-app promotion.

myClinicalExchange served as the first touch point for helping over 715 health organizations and over 1,900 schools seeking to place nurses and allied health students into clinical rotations. NurseGrid was utilized by nurses in approximately 37,000 unique clinical sites as NurseGrid users manage their professional calendars and engagement across those sites. Finally, myCNAjobs helped over 8,000 healthcare organizations access our home caregiver and CNA community to promote work and learning opportunities. To date, the usage of our career networks has created over 450,000 hStream IDs and counting among students, nurses, and allied health workers. In aggregate, career networks contributed approximately $3.78 million in the quarter.

While this is modest compared to the company’s total revenue, we believe that growth potential, differentiation, and diversification of career networks makes them an important area for incremental investment. We are already rolling some of the profits from the quarter’s outperformance into new sales hires for this area, the career networks, and into scaling the 3 solutions. I’m pleased to announce the promotion of Michael Collier as we wrap up this quarter’s news from Executive Vice President of Corporate Strategy, Development and Operations to Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President. In this expanded role, Michael will lead enterprise operations across HealthStream, including customer experience, corporate development and M&A, implementations, legal, human resources, and other critical areas. He’s taken on a lot. He will also serve as executive sponsor of the company’s AI transformation, driving AI readiness across operational teams.

Since joining HealthStream in 2011, Michael has been instrumental in our growth, including leading more than 2 dozen successful acquisitions. We look forward to his continued leadership in this expanded capacity. Before we move on, I want to remind our shareholders and investors that if you’re already a shareholder, then you know that our annual shareholders meeting is scheduled to take place virtually on Thursday, May 28th at 2:00 P.M. Central. Notifications of the meeting and access to the proxy statement, 10-K, and shareholder letter were sent out on April 13th. We encourage you to vote your shares and participate in the future of our company. Now I want to close with the same reminder I share with you every quarter.

If you’re interested in a recurring revenue and profitable healthcare technology company that expects to deliver growth, then HealthStream may be the right investment for you. If you’re interested in a company whose core user base, the clinical workforce, expanding faster than any other sector in the job market, then maybe HealthStream is the right investment for you. If you like a company whose software serves as a system of record on behalf of healthcare customers, then HealthStream may be a company for you. If you favor ecosystems over point solutions, then maybe HealthStream is the right investment for you. For all these reasons, HealthStream is positioned for another exciting year of helping the nation’s top health systems find, develop, credential, schedule, onboard, and retain this growing healthcare workforce. Maybe HealthStream is the right investment for you.

I’ll turn it over to our sponsor and the operator to begin the Q&A session. Thank you.

Conference Operator, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. At this time, we will conduct the question and answer session. Now to ask a question, you’ll need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question today is from Matthew Hewitt with Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Your line is open.

Matthew Hewitt, Analyst, Craig-Hallum Capital Group: Good morning, team, congratulations on the strong start to the year. Maybe first up, obviously, a nice pop in gross margin. Sounds like some of the acquisitions or the acquisitions were aiding in that. Should we anticipate a little bit more lift here in Q2? Longer term, how could that play out? I mean, are you anticipating, you know, annual improvement in gross margins, or is it more about driving operating leverage as you kinda go forward?

Robert A. Frist Jr., CEO and Chairman, HealthStream: Scotty, I’ll let you take that one to start us.

Scotty Roberts, CFO and Senior Vice President of Finance and Accounting, HealthStream: Yeah. Really, Matthew Hewitt, no significant expectation of improvement in gross margin. I think the 65.8, what we delivered in Q1, was probably a little bit ahead of where we expected to be in the quarter, and it’s just, you know, revenue mix. We got a little bit of improvement in revenue in the first quarter from a variety of things. Some of it’s timing, things that we anticipated to come in in, say, Q2 or Q3 kinda moved forward in the year. Some of that’s just, you know, early activations from customers that we had sold in, say, Q4. You know, some consumption-based revenue, things like that were pulling forward, so got a little bit of improvement in margin because of that.

you know, some of our ambitions for, you know, moving to the cloud could compress margins a little bit over time as make some of those transitions, but that’s still, you know, a good ways in front of us to see how that plays out. That’s just something that’s on our to-do list for this year, to begin this year, anyway.

Matthew Hewitt, Analyst, Craig-Hallum Capital Group: Got it. Maybe a question for you, Bobby, since you addressed it in your prepared remarks. You spoke to how AI is expected to drive increasing efficiencies with nurses. What do you think will be the downstream effect of that? Will that allow them more time to care for patients? Will that allow more time for them to work on their training and education and those types of things? From a hospital’s perspective, does that mean if the nurses are becoming more efficient, maybe they don’t need to hire as many? I’m just trying to think what the downstream effects of AI adoption by the nursing group would be. Thank you.

Robert A. Frist Jr., CEO and Chairman, HealthStream: Yeah. Overall, we see a shortage of nurses. We see the early successes of the deployment of AI in our customer base are around ambient listening. Ambient listening definitely frees up more time for the nurses and caregivers to spend with patients, which I think is greatly appreciated by all patients, helping the health systems put a more friendly face on their adoption of technology. I think the early use and adoption is in areas that will directly impact the patient experience in a positive way. As far as demand for nurses go, I in every report that I read, seem to think that there’s far more demand than there will be supply for the next, you know, 5 years plus. I don’t see fewer caregivers.

I see more and a better opportunity to be more personalized in the care delivery. We view that as an opportunity to be a close ally to all those health systems. We’ve kind of continued to expand the value that we provide by these career networks, helping health schools not just develop and retain the ones they have and say, for example, through our learning capabilities, but now helping find, identify, match new talents for them to employ. We’re servicing more of the continuum of the workforce need and at a time of great need for more workforce. We think we’re well-positioned with the mixture of our product sets to be a great ally to these health systems.

Matthew Hewitt, Analyst, Craig-Hallum Capital Group: That’s great. Thank you.

Conference Operator, Conference Call Operator: Thanks for your question. Our next question is from John Pinney with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open.

Richard Close, Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Hi. It’s Richard Close here. Just Scotty, maybe a question on the revenue. $3.4 million acquired revenue. I’m curious, you know, is it okay to annualize that to get to $13.6 million expected contribution from the acquisitions this year? I’m just trying to get a sense of like, you know, the organic growth that is embedded in the annual guidance.

Scotty Roberts, CFO and Senior Vice President of Finance and Accounting, HealthStream: I believe our expectation, we mentioned this, I think on last quarter’s call, was for the 2 acquisitions, we were targeting around $13 million for the full year. Maybe the annualization of Q1 might be slightly ahead of that $13 million, I think $13 million is where we would still try to forecast it to.

Richard Close, Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Okay. Great. That’s helpful. Thanks for the reminder there. You know, you’ve been providing some, I guess, commentary on, you know, the legacy license drag in the past. I’m just curious if there’s any update in terms of what the impact there was in the first quarter.

Robert A. Frist Jr., CEO and Chairman, HealthStream: Yes, I think, let me pull up my remarks. I think it was around, you know, total. One thing we did disclose this quarter was the amount of revenue from those legacy applications in the quarter. I think it was around $7.6 million. The decrease was, I think, around just 16%-17% versus first quarter of last year. Try to give a little more color on the magnitude of that bucket of revenue relative to our consolidated revenue and also kind of the continued rate of decline. Again, we continue to look for opportunities to migrate those customers to the new applications. We do see some trade-offs there in that decline. Some of that’s moving into the CredentialStream and ShiftWizard. There’s still some, you know, attrition going on as well.

Richard Close, Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Okay. I guess my final question, you know, clearly if you annualize the first quarter EBITDA, it gets you above the high end of the annual range. I appreciate you calling out investments. Maybe a little bit more details on those investments and the timing of them. Is it?

Robert A. Frist Jr., CEO and Chairman, HealthStream: Yeah

Richard Close, Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: like spread out, all throughout the year? Just trying to better understand, like what the cadence of EBITDA will be two Q through four Q.

Robert A. Frist Jr., CEO and Chairman, HealthStream: Yeah, let me start, and then Scotty can add some color to it. I think first, the first area of investment we looked at was, you know, we had a budgeted plan as we ended the year to hire in the sales organization. Specifically, we’ve decided after this Q1 performance that we’re going to add to that original plan. Even more specifically in the myCNAjobs area, we think the products warrant a stronger and bigger sales organization. We’re going to go ahead and start building that in the first half of the year, particularly in Q2. From a timing standpoint, we’re going to post some new positions in the sales area around our myCNAjobs and try to hire them.

Secondarily, the area is a high-growth area for us, and to keep it current and stay with it, we’re gonna increase our planned investment in the technology infrastructure, specifically around myClinicalExchange. We’ve got some work to do there. That was an acquired product originally. We’ve continued to enhance it. This will give us a chance to enhance it even faster and expand it. The constituent base for that is growing rapidly, and we wanna make sure that it meets the needs of that expanding market. We’ve had some unique opportunities present in the market, where we think we’re well-positioned against some competitors there. Now is the time to both invest in the sales organization and the technical infrastructure for that category of product.

Even more specifically, that’s career networks in general, but more specifically, even myClinicalExchange, we’re looking for putting more into the tech stack there as well. Now remember, that’s interesting software. It has three constituent audiences. The students are a user, the nursing schools are a user, and the healthcare orgs are a user. It’s an interesting, kind of network effect piece of software that has a kind of a market effect. As the school adopts it, the hospitals in the region adopt it, and that gets the students to use it as well. There’s lots there to do technologically, and we’re gonna go ahead and increase our rate of investment in that tech stack.

Richard Close, Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Is that front-loaded into the second quarter, or is all that spread out-

Robert A. Frist Jr., CEO and Chairman, HealthStream: That-

Richard Close, Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Sort of through-

Robert A. Frist Jr., CEO and Chairman, HealthStream: That part will be spread out. It’ll include a mixture of CapEx and OpEx to enhance the platform, the application suite.

Richard Close, Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Okay. Okay, thank you.

Robert A. Frist Jr., CEO and Chairman, HealthStream: The sales team will be as fast as we can hire and onboard them. We already have several open positions in the sales team we’re trying to fill, so we’re using some outside recruitment to go faster there, as well as our incredible internal teams to try to find the talent we need to staff it up. I’d like to see that be front half loaded on the sales organization so that we might get some back half benefit. Certainly we’ll get benefit early next year, but, you know, salespeople take a little bit of time to ramp up and get productive in closing deals.

Richard Close, Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: All right. Thank you.

Conference Operator, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Our next question comes from Vince Colicchio from Barrington Research. Your line is open.

Vince Colicchio, Analyst, Barrington Research: Hey, Bobby. What differentiated, Shift Wizard in the competitive takeout wins? Were any of the wins, involving large enterprises with Shift Wizard in the quarter?

Robert A. Frist Jr., CEO and Chairman, HealthStream: On a relative basis, we did have some larger wins. They’re not massive systems, but a 10,000 employee system went with ShiftWizard in the quarter. That was a huge win. Yeah, we’re seeing more of the larger to medium-sized, or as medium-large, I’ll call them, not the super sized health systems, make that decision. That was nice to see a couple of wins there. Yeah. Just in general, we think the, as I mentioned on the call, the vertical specific nature of the software is just, we think more appropriate for this environment. We have a great long-term vision for the software as well.

We’re starting to outline a little bit more of that, on some of the work we’re doing to work to integrate our career networks with our scheduling systems, which aren’t done yet, but I think we’re getting some excitement around the future direction of where we’re going with this platform, integrating both our applications and hopefully also our career networks. There’s some positive energy around that messaging as well.

Vince Colicchio, Analyst, Barrington Research: Can you give us an update on your bundling effort in the small hospital market? And somewhat related, how’s the competency center doing in that part of the market?

Robert A. Frist Jr., CEO and Chairman, HealthStream: In the smallest market, we’re seeing a little bit of uptake. We’ve created several what we call market bundles. These are specific to the skilled nursing space, the long-term care space, the small hospital space that are called the critical access hospitals. We’re seeing some uptake. We’re investing in the sales team there and getting some good bundle selling, we’re pleased with that. It’s the bigger bundles, though, as you point out, in the Competency Suite that are really helping drive growth. I like adding the users of those smaller clinics and facilities because, you know, we’re an ecosystem. We want all these healthcare professionals because they may change jobs over time. We want them in our network, even at the small hospitals.

The revenue growth is coming from, say, the bundling of the Competency Suite to the mid-market and bigger health systems, where we’re seeing uptake. In the Resuscitation Suite, when we see a medium to large health system switch to the Red Cross solution. The actual I think the revenue growth contributions are coming from the mid-market and above. The small markets are very important to us. We’re getting much better at both having the appropriate mix of products for them, and we view the market holistically.

Like, I think a physician in an urban or rural market are important to have in our network as well as the nurses in these rural centers because, again, they are mobile over their careers, and we think of it as servicing the totality of the healthcare workforce, not just the urban centers.

Vince Colicchio, Analyst, Barrington Research: Thanks for all the color. Nice quarter.

Robert A. Frist Jr., CEO and Chairman, HealthStream: Thank you.

Conference Operator, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. I’m showing no further questions at this time, I would now like to turn it back to CEO Bobby Frist for closing remarks.

Robert A. Frist Jr., CEO and Chairman, HealthStream: Well, thank you, everyone, and so especially to our little over 1,100 employees who are delivering these great results. We have an exciting year in front of us and look forward to reporting the next earnings report here in another 90 days or so. Thank you, all. We’ll see you throughout the quarter.

Conference Operator, Conference Call Operator: Thank you for your participation in today’s conference. This does conclude the program, and you may now disconnect.