Good morning, and welcome to IDEXX's 2023 Investor Day. It's a great pleasure to welcome you to our worldwide headquarters here in Maine, and welcome those of us who are joining through our global webcast. I'm Jay Mazelsky, President and CEO of IDEXX, and we have what I think you'll find to be a very informative for our program this morning. I'll also be joined by members of our management team, who will highlight selected topics in areas of their responsibility. Let me quickly go through the agenda and set the stage for this morning. I'll start off with a review of the IDEXX opportunity, our strategy, and the overall sector. I'll be followed by Tina Hunt, who has responsibility for Strategy, Sector Development and Global Operations. Hunt will spend time providing an industry update, as well as the companion animal diagnostic sector. Dr. Mike Erickson follows. He heads up our industry-leading point of care franchise. We'll talk about its capabilities, our strategy, as well as the opportunity. Mike Lane, who has responsibility for our global reference lab business, telemedicine, as well as our IT group. We'll talk about the depth and breadth of our reference lab offering and how it serves as an extension of the veterinary practice. Michael Schreck, who has responsibility for our software business and corporate accounts, will spend time talking about the strategic nature of software, how it's used by independent practices and increasingly, corporate groups who look to standardize their processes at scale using IDEXX software. That's the overview of the businesses. Then Jim Polewaczyk, who our Chief Commercial Officer, will bring it to light with a facilitated discussion with Dr. Danielson of Caring Paws Animal Hospital in Odessa, Florida. Thank you, Dr. Danielson, for joining us this morning and participating, sharing your perspective on the state of industry practice at IDEXX partnership and helping you achieve your objectives. Then we'll conclude the formal parts of the presentation with a financial review by Brian McKeon, our Chief Financial Officer, and we'll have, if all goes to schedule, about 20 minutes for question and answer at the end. Just a quick reminder, our safe harbor disclaimer is available on our website. With that, let's get started. Today, we'll spend time framing the enduring growth opportunity enabled by our long-term strategy. The key to our success, the key to our strategic success, has been consistency, centered on this notion of developing the global companion animal diagnostics marketplace. In doing so, remaining consistent, we've enabled very strong top-line growth, represented by the near doubling of annuity revenues over the last five years. We still see a significant decades-long opportunity before us to develop the sector, consistent with the now updated view of a $45 billion TAM. Innovation has been the foundational component, solving, bringing solutions that solve the veterinarian's most vexing, critical, and business problems. A commercial model where we engage through partnership and trusted matter, trusted, matter advisors, all consistent with our customers' priorities. These factors, combined, provide an opportunity for double, double-digit top-line growth, higher profit margins, and a higher return on invested capital. You know, the great thing about being in this business and supporting the profession is it's purpose driven. Our employees are here because they resonate, they're passionate about the purpose. Our strategy is consistent with our purpose, which is to be a great company that provides exceptional long-term value for our customers, our employees, and our shareholders. As we grow, we have this incredible opportunity to help make the world a better place for, for pets and animals, people, and our planet. Very consistent and aligned with our strategic priorities and initiatives. At IDEXX, innovation is key to our success. As a growth company, we rely on great employees who are diverse and engaged in workplaces which are dynamic, supportive, and representative of the customers in which we serve in the communities in which we live and work. I refer you to our corporate responsibility report, which we published last month, which has information through 2022 on the initiatives that we support, providing greater access to care for animals, protecting life's essentials like water supply, doing our part to create the future veterinary workforce. Let's move into a little bit of how we've done as a company. The financial profile in front of you is over the last decade plus. You can see that we've accelerated growth over time based on our focus on innovation, our expanded commercial model, but also our integrated multimodality solutions in clinic instrumentation and global reference labs. The key driver of this revenue growth has been this durable, high return, CAG Diagnostics recurring revenue. These revenues are generated by consumables in our expanding installed base of premium instruments, panel tests like 4Dx Plus, and tests that we send out to the reference labs. Included in that, are specialty tests. CAG Diagnostics recurring revenue, as you take a look as a percentage of the company through 2022, is 80%, approximately 80% of the company. These revenues have grown faster than the organic revenues of the company, building off this accelerated pace that we saw during the pandemic. One of the reasons for this faster growth, these incredibly attractive and dynamic sector tailwinds, which make the industry that, in which we are blessed to, to serve and support, so attractive. You can see a number of these tailwinds in front of you. My colleagues and I will talk this morning about the implication, the impact and the implications of these. The expanded pet population, as an example, which grew pretty dramatically through the pandemic and continued to build off that higher base. Evidence that the average lifespan of pets, especially those who are going to the veterinarian, are increasing, and Dr. Hunt will spend some time where we have some pretty, I think, unique data and a view on what that looks like and the implications for the business. The strengthened pet-parent bond continues to strengthen. The humanization of pets, the younger demographic of pet owner households, we think, are all incredibly positive. Then the role of innovation, not just product innovation, which may be more obvious, but care delivery channel innovation and the, the way it provides greater access to the patient and, patient care. Our decades-long focus on innovation and developing the companion animal diagnostics, opportunity, testing and software, we think, positions us extremely well to be able to take advantage of these opportunities. I go? Technology. You know, the IDEXX business is highly resilient, even through potential macroeconomic impacts, in part due to these sector tailwinds that I described. You can see from the chart in front of you that we've grown at a healthy premium to personal consumption expenditure. In fact, at the peak of the Great Recession in 2009, we grew the CAG business from a revenue standpoint, grew at approximately 5%. Our business is appreciably different than it is back then, far more capable, which gives us confidence in the durability of our business and business model. For example, we now commercially represent ourselves with our customers as, as trusted matter advisors. It's a big difference, and we continue to expand. We continue to expand our commercial footprint in partnership to support our customers. Our innovation portfolio is so much stronger than it was. Look at our premium instruments and the new premium instruments, Cat One since then, SediVue, ProCyte One, our biomarker assays and menu, like SDMA and Fecal Antigen, our software portfolio and the extensive nature of that software portfolio, and the list goes on. We offer very customer-friendly programs, which we didn't have back then, like IDEXX 360, which provides access to technology. All these things in combination, give us confidence that we're really well-positioned as, as a company, and you combine that with the secular trends that I, that I spoke to, we think, we think supports the durability of the business. Let me talk about one of the most important secular trends in some additional detail, and this is the strengthening pet-human bond, the humanization of pets. This is some data. This is IDEXX data, more recent from a survey standpoint. And I think what it highlights is those of us who are pet parents have a deep emotional connection with the pets as members of our household and family, and our willingness to really support them in their, in their, for health and, and happiness and, and well-being. The number I like to cite, which I find to be absolutely amazing, is that 84%, "Taking care of my pet's health is as important as taking care of my own." This isn't just an empty sentiment. Pet owners tell us that they're willing to prioritize. They're willing to prioritize healthcare spend at the expense of other categories, to be able to support the health and well-being of this member of their, their family. You can see from, from this chart that even though overall pet spending is, is relatively modest at about 2% of PCE total, some of these categories, depending upon the consumer or pet owner, are fairly substantial. They're willing to prioritize personal grooming services, live entertainment, going out for dinner, all of those things, to support the health of, of their pet. We think that this is, you know, significant and an important data point, as you know, you look at current and potential macroeconomic factors. Next, I'd like to pivot from talking about demographics and the sector as a whole, now go into the companion animal diagnostics opportunity on a global basis. This is a chart that we've shown in the past, updated. It represents approximately a $45 billion TAM for companion animal diagnostic space based on a significant opportunity to enable an increase in the standard of care across all regions, supported by these attractive sector dynamics, but also our strategy and the successful execution of our strategy, as well as others. The foundation of this estimate, it all comes down to increasing the relevance and appropriateness of diagnostics testing over time. Even in the U.S., which is by far the most advanced market in terms of the use of diagnostics testing, it's still underdeveloped, and I'll share with you some data that, that makes that point. Let me quickly go through this TAM buildup and the assumptions behind it. We start with the U.S. We take a look at wellness and non-wellness visits, and we apply to that best practice benchmarks, and I'll share with you what those benchmarks look like in a couple of minutes. We also take a look at clinical standards as a way of ascertaining what should the relevant use of diagnostics, you know, be? We do something very similar internationally. We make some adjustments for mix because it's more of a sick patient testing market. We apply a reasonable manufacturer level estimate of between $75 and $80 for wellness, $115 and up to $120 for non-wellness, and you get the numbers in front of you. No matter how you look at this, U.S. versus international, wellness versus non-wellness, the served TAM at only 15% of this $45 billion potential represents a very, very sizable opportunity. Let me go now a step deeper and go into the split of U.S. and our international regions, keeping in mind that our international regions is not a single country. It's a mix of many countries and regions. This is a good place to start to go to the next level. You can see from the chart in front of you that the mix in the U.S. between wellness and non-wellness visits is relatively balanced. We think that's an important benchmark because we know from our own studies that, in fact, one in four well dogs are not actually well. They may have a chronic condition, they may have an early sick or illness that hasn't been detected, which then drives the medical services envelope. In contrast, our international regions are more sick patient testing from a practice standpoint. It may be that the veterinarian has hypothesis in terms of what may be ailing a patient and tests to rule out that particular condition. When you talk to veterinarians in these, in these regions, they'll tell you they're very open to preventive care testing, very open to wellness testing, and open to using diagnostics as part of those testing protocols. It's really just a question of a belief system and creating awareness and education around the importance of it. No matter where they are in their own belief journey, we're there to support them. We have innovation and differentiated innovation. We have programs like our Simple Start program for Preventive Care, which takes a programmatic approach to being able to support the practice and their objectives. We have a commercial organization, which is so much more than account managers to include professional service vets, field service representatives, internal medicine consulting, a group to really support the practice and their objectives. As we move these customers through this journey, what we have seen as a result of this and other factors, is that medical services continues to grow. It has become the fastest-growing part of the, at least the major categories within the practice. This is an interesting chart. This is for the U.S., and what this shows, a couple, I think, of important takeaways, that the average size of the practice over the last decade plus has nearly doubled. It's gone from $1 million to just south of $2 million. The mix of medical services has grown very substantially as part of that. In fact, if you take a look at the growth rate on columns on the right, what you see is medical services has accelerated in, in terms of its growth relative to the other areas. When you speak with veterinarians, they'll tell you, "That's, w e're not surprised by that". That's what pet owners want. They want the absolute best possible care, and that's why we went to school. This is our passion as veterinarians, to provide this care. Then there are some other factors, like product sales, have migrated outside the practice, especially in areas like specialty diets. So, you know, we think that, and you can see that diagnostics is considered really part and parcel. It's the enabler to medical service growth. You can't treat unless you first diagnose. To diagnose, you very often have to use blood work. So it's a key driver in being able to enable a step up in the standard of care. It's also a key driver in practice economics and practice profitability, representing nearly 30% of the practice, profit contribution. It's, again, not surprising. Diagnostics is a profit center within the practice. It's not only used to cover the cost of the diagnostics, but other products, depending upon the procedure, as well as the veterinarian's activity and value add, as well as his or her staff. So it's a collection, if you will, of our consolidation of the medical activity within the practice. You know, we think if anything, it's going to continue to grow and become more prominent, or from a mix standpoint, a more substantial part of the overall practice. One of the reasons it's going to continue to grow is that the pet population continues to grow. We saw this, like, enormous step up in the number of pet additions over the two years of the pandemic. You have 10% versus 2% for that two-year period. Dr. Hunt will spend some time. She'll go into some additional detail and speak about that. It continued to grow in 2022, about 2x faster than what we've seen from a pre-pandemic level. The significance to that is that as these puppies and kittens, they'll become young adults and cats, and as they age, they use more healthcare and they use more diagnostics, both in an absolute dollar sense as well as a portion of the total mix. Our strategy as a company is to be able to drive the relevant use of diagnostics through all life stages of a pet's life, because we think it's just so effective in uncovering disease and providing the veterinarian with the tools to identify what the best possible treatment is. We've seen a steady increase in diagnostics, both from an adoption and utilization standpoint. In fact, almost 50%, almost 50% of clinical visits include some diagnostic. It could be just heartworm or vector-borne disease, fecal screening. If you go a bit deeper in subset, you can see from the chart on the right that blood work, which includes chemistry or hematology, is much, much less. That's about 19% of clinical visits. You see there's wide variability across the deciles, and then there's a group of practices that use a lot. This is a chart you're going to see throughout this morning that includes chemistry or hematology, or chemistry and hematology, chemistry, hematology, and urine. It, it's, I think, a great representation of taking what you, you often think about as an average into the real-life world situation of the, on a practical level, the wide variability that, that you see. So when you talk to those practices at the top 2%, which are a very substantial number, what they'll tell you is d iagnostics is a part of our care protocols. It's embedded in our workflow. All the doctors within the practice follow the same protocols themselves. We think it's just the way you should practice medicine. So they've made that, they've made that journey, and we have a number of strategies throughout this morning for me and my colleagues. You'll hear about these strategies, that we have to drive this utilization from left to right, to, to increase what we think are relevant, important enablers to better healthcare. It starts really with innovation in our solution set, that we provide an integrated multimodality solution set. My colleague this morning will talk about point of care and reference labs and software, and the way it all ties together to support the workflow in a practice. I want to spend a couple of minutes and talk about software because of its importance, and then Michael Schreck will go much deeper and talk about our strategy with respect to that, which is our customers consume or they access our tests through software. Take VetConnect PLUS. It not only provides the test result, it provides the trending in point of care, as well as reference labs for 10+ years, if that data is available. It provides patient context and patient interpretation, and in some cases, with IDEXX DecisionIQ, next step recommendations. It's an important part of our overall solution set. It's an approach that we've taken that really puts the customer at the center of very purpose-built solutions. We know our customers appreciate that. They have told us so, that this combined innovation-enabled offering results at a very high level of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Let me now describe how we do this, because it's not an easy thing to actually accomplish, and it requires a large cumulative investment in R&D and innovation. The mix of that investment spread fairly evenly across research, new instrumentation, platforms, biomarker, assays, software and data, all of those things to get this best-in-class integrated solution offering. We develop products and solutions to a very firm set of first principles. For example, for our, platform approach, we look to develop a platform versus a single-point solution. A platform that offers extensibility, that provides more capability, more features over time. This isn't just for point of care, it's in our reference labs and also software business. Catalyst is a great example of this, and Dr. Erickson will speak at some level of detail to that. We also have a highly productive biomarker assay discovery process. This is an area that we've invested decades in, and have really advanced it in terms of discovery, but also getting new assays out on the, on the market. In fact, we've taken, in many cases, two to three years off the product development schedule, and you've seen the practical efforts of that. We also developed supporting disease franchises, not just single conditions that may be at the system level. If you think about our vector-borne disease franchise, 30+ years of development, our renal franchise, where we've, in the past year, just released FGF-23 for felines that identify the window or the stage for appropriate intervention, and Cystatin B, which Mike Lane will, will speak to at some depth, which identifies acute kidney injury, which we think is a very, very important contribution. Next, I'm going to talk about our point of care strategy and our platforms and how we think about that as a set up to what, what Dr. Erickson is going to go to in more detail. I'm very excited to share that we intend to announce our new point of care platform, newest point of care platform, at VMX in 2024 and begin shipping later in the year. VMX, for those of you who may not be familiar with it, biggest global animal health trade show in the world. 23,000-24,000 attendees last year. Just a great platform, a great event platform to introduce a new point of care platform, too. You know, point of care platforms, it's a big deal for us. Point of care platform, you know, all things considered, when you talk to veterinarians, they'll, they'll tell you, "If I can test in that clinic within that 10-20-minute patient window, I would, I would like to be able to do that, or I'd like to be able to have the option to do that. I don't want to sacrifice performance. I don't want to sacrifice accuracy. I want it to be easy to use, so it doesn't take 10 minutes or 20 minutes from a sample preparation standpoint. I want it to fit within the workflow of how we practice. I don't want to have to turn the practice upside down to be able to use that. This is a philosophy that we've adopted, that we live to, that we think is important. Think about ProCyte One and the easy use of ProCyte One, the accuracy that we've been able to deliver. SediVue, five drops, three minutes. It automates, I think, what is otherwise a very manual process. This is something that we're very proud of, that we adhere to a fixed set of design principles designed to really support the objectives of our customers. It represents an important vector of growth for us when we introduce a new point-of-care platform. There are some very obvious things we call direct benefits. The revenue you get from the equipment itself, the consumable stream. As we update from a Technology for Life standpoint, you get a more expansive menu. Dr. Erickson will share with you some modeling that we've done based on real-life examples and the importance of that. I'd also say it expands access for us and our commercial organizations into new greenfield accounts, as well as competitive accounts. For whatever reason, you know, we haven't been able to form the type of partnership we would like with those customers. Increasingly, these platforms generate an enormous amount of data and insights that we can use within our software solutions to be able to support patient interpretation as well as overall clinical decision support. Keep in mind that most of our platforms, and I'll share some data in a minute, are placed through these very customer-friendly programs, marketing programs, like IDEXX 360, that provide access to this technology and that inspire use of our broader solutions in global reference laboratories, in rapid assay and software. It's an extremely important event for us, and we think it's our customers. It's something our customers are looking forward to. Let me talk a bit about our customer-friendly marketing program, IDEXX 360. This has been extremely well received by customers. You can see that for the U.S., the majority of our placements now happen through this. In fact, outside the U.S., we got started a bit late, by, by intention, by the way, it required some level of localization. Customers tell us they, they love it, too. It's a, it's a way to access technology on a very, I think, friendly set of terms and potentially inspire the use of our broader solution set. It's this combination of our commercial organization, the way we engage innovation, existing, but updated through Technology for Life, as well as new innovation, customer-centric programs like IDEXX 360. All of these things combined help drive diagnostics, testing, utilization. You'll hear more about these this morning. You'll also hear some other strategies we have, but it's, it's an important part of our overall, business approach. You know, this is a picture, think IDEXX 360 and point of care instrument placements of the opportunity still before us. We have today our installed base of premium analyzers. It's about 120,000 or so. If you look at this, and this is an on-market, currently on-market product, we think the opportunity before us is about 2x that. Our playbook that I described of being able to continue to provide the most contemporary technology to Technology for Life, working with customers, helping to support their objectives and workflow, represents a really a sizable opportunity still, still before us. This is for existing platforms. With new point of care platforms, the opportunity is only going to be even more significant than what you see in front of us. You know, very importantly, I often get asked. Okay, you have this great opportunity for point-of-care placements. Doesn't that cannibalize, doesn't that hurt your reference lab business? It's a fair question. The answer to that is, it doesn't. There's isn't cannibalization. In fact, this last chart shows you is that testing begets testing. As the customer, as the veterinarian tests more, they use more of both modalities. Veterinarians will tell you, they use a combination of point of care and reference lab. Just the mix depends on a number of things. What's my individual preference from a practice standpoint? What's the patient's situation? Is the patient coming in sick? Maybe I want a test result in 10 minutes and be able to treat that patient. Maybe it's a well patient or a specialty test, and I need to send it out to the reference lab. It really does represent, you know, an opportunity to allow the, the customer to practice on their terms, on their terms. They get to be able to choose what they wanna do. In fact, what we see is, customers who use our diagnostics, our full integrated multimodality suite, grow faster, they stay with us longer, they use more diagnostics. Let me share with you some data, I think, which characterizes this, this well. An important first question that always comes to mind is, why is this the case? You can see from the, the bars and the chart in front of you, that our data tells us it is the case. There are, there are a couple reasons, and the first reason comes down to the fact that we're not just placing or selling a solution, we're supporting the customer. The relationship starts at after, after that solution gets placed. This commercial organization we have has a partnership mentality. They're there as subject matter experts to support the customer through what I describe as professional services, the internal medicine group, field service representatives, who are all prior veterinary technicians of 10+ years. They, they support the customer, and they're there to be able to help them. The second reason is, and Michael Schreck will go into this in great detail, is that our solutions are integrated, so you're able to capture the activity, the charge, invoice the customer, support staff productivity, optimize workflow, do all the things, communicate to the client, all the things that are important to running a successful practice. You can see that the clinical visit growth of the IDEXX practice is faster, is faster than non-IDEXX, right? They can see more patients. They're more efficient. The third reason, and an important one, is the differentiation of our solutions. We uncover more. We uncover more when the well patient's not well, think fecal antigen in our vector-borne disease, or when the patient is sick, and being able to provide highly differentiated parameters and biomarkers as part of a menu that is able to give the veterinarian the tools that he or she needs to determine what the problem is. You can see, based on average diagnostics revenue and average clinical revenue, there's about a 200-basis point advantage in terms of using IDEXX Diagnostics. We think that's very significant. Our integrated multimodality approach, because we give the customer the flexibility to choose on their terms how they want to use our solutions, that we've inspired them to use more of our, of our solutions and testing products over time. You can see for the U.S., we're well over 50% at this point, and that's something we're very proud of. We think our solutions all work better together. Importantly, it's also true internationally. These are two expansion countries. I picked out significant expansion countries, 2019 to 2022. What you see is they're, they're also inspired to use more of our solutions and growing, you know, quite quickly. We think this supports the premise of the importance of giving customers solution sets on their terms, being able to make sure that the investments that we've made in integrating it and providing seamless workflow experience is realized. In our belief, further supports the investments we've made in our commercial footprint and commercial expansions to be able to work with customers. It's not just existing customers. New practices are an important part of our focus. This is for North American data. New practice formation represents about 1% or so of total practices on an annual basis. You're seeing through our IDEXX 360 new practice program, that we've been able to grow fairly substantially. The partnerships, 4x, 4x, the partnerships we have with new practice formations. This is an extremely important initiative and result for our business. These are new practices that are starting. They want the best in technology, contemporary, modern technology, not just from a diagnostic standpoint, from a software standpoint. They want consultation. They want to be able to ramp and grow over time. As they grow, we grow, and we've designed programs to be able to support them. In fact, a couple of, I think, important data points. 75%, approximately 75% of these new practice formations that we partner with, buy our entire in-clinic suite, so chemistry, hematology, and SediVue. Over half of these practices are also using our diagnostic imaging equipment as well as our software equipment. There's a lot of focus on software, as you can imagine, in these practices. They want to make sure that they get off to the right start. I think practice owners appreciate that when they buy a PIM system and a technology, end-to-end technology stack, that's something typically that they're going to live with for a very long time. You can see that there's benefits to them and there's benefits for us. These are IDEXX practices. On the left, those are practices that don't use our software. In the middle, those are practices that use our diagnostics, but also use our PIM systems. Then on the right, more of an end-to-end technology approach, where they're also using VetConnect PLUS in, in mobile form. You see the amount of diagnostics they use is fairly substantially more. Michael Schreck will, will speak to that and speak to some of the reasons, you know, for that. Let me begin to tie a couple things together. Over the past five years, diagnostics revenue has grown faster than practice revenue, which has grown much faster, premium to clinical visits. As veterinarians are providing the care that we, as pet owners, ask of them and that want, and as veterinarians, they want to be able to deliver. This is supported at a practice level, and this is for the sector, 10+% diagnostics revenue growth. What you see is, as IDEXX, we've outgrown the sector, and we've outgrown the sector at a fairly appreciable, you know, basis, over 300 basis points, recurring revenue. The reason for that are all the reasons that I described this morning, the differentiation, the way we engage our customers in a partnership model, subject matter experts, the overall value proposition, including customer support and customer success, the end-to-end solution. All these things, all these things matter and has resulted in this very strong value proposition. I'm going to share with you a little bit of a different cut. These are for our international countries and, and region expansions. What this shows is the role, I'm going to highlight or spotlight on the commercial engagement piece. What this highlights, the role of our commercial team, with, again, within this partnership mindset as trusted advisors. When they call on customers as subject matter experts and are trusted, the customer grows faster, and we, in turn, grow faster, and sometimes appreciably faster. These are three expansion countries you see. It actually doesn't matter whether these are existing IDEXX accounts. We still grow faster. Or competitive accounts. Obviously, we grow much faster because these are, they're not using our stuff today. The playbook that we've developed in the U.S. very successfully works extremely well outside the U.S., and I think supports the investment thesis of the importance of partnering with customers, with an ecosystem, with a commercial system that supports their objectives and is aligned with their objectives. The investments that we've made, just over the last several years, seven international country expansions outside the, outside the U.S., really over the last, you know, two-plus years. From our perspective, this has been successful. We know how to do this. There's typically a relatively short return on the investments that we make. I announced as part of our Q2 earnings call that we're doing a modest investment in the U.S. We're excited by that. We think there's still tons and tons of opportunity, even in the U.S., our most advanced market, but still relatively underdeveloped from the standpoint of best practice benchmarks and, and clinical standards. In doing so, along with the other elements of our strategy, we believe that this supports the $45 billion TAM and that opportunity I described earlier. It's not just commercial engagement. Customers will tell you it, it's the customer experience, and all those things are extremely important to them. They want to be able to focus on their patients, and they want us to be able to focus on supporting them and do what we do best. You can see that we - there's lots of different ways of measuring this. We have customer satisfaction surveys for events. This is a Net Promoter Score, which, which gets at the loyalty element of this. Across all our major modalities, we have world-class customer loyalty, as represented by Net Promoter Score through a double-blinded survey. This gets back to a couple of things that we do, and I think we do quite well. As a company, during the pandemic, customers didn't have to worry about business and product continuity. We were there for them. They could focus on the patients and the surge in patients. We were able to, you know, maintain turnaround times, invest in logistics. We had in some cases, spend money on things like broker buys to make sure that the products that they needed were there when they needed them. Coming out of the pandemic, we continued to invest, and you'll see some of the investments we made, whether it's in reference labs or logistics centers, IT systems, all the things that create what we think is world-class capability, and what our customers tell us is world-class capability. This gets reflected in very high retention levels. These retention levels, it's a dimension of our growth formula. This is for the U.S., but we have very similar or even higher retention levels outside the U.S. for our products. You know, these are customers who are voting with their wallet and loyalty and saying, "You know, we like what you're doing for us. We appreciate the investments that you make in the profession and our practice that allows us to achieve our objectives. We think that, again, it's this combination of the approach that we take, our Technology for Life, orientation of keeping customers completely updated on, on features and functionality and capability, which is important, and then which reinforces the durability of our CAG Diagnostics recurring revenue business. Let me now tie it together over the next couple minutes. We see this consistent approach and opportunity for a $45 billion TAM, supported by this diagnostics sector growth, strong execution, and increasing the standard of care. These, these projections are calibrated to reflect the increase in blood work utilization in a couple of different ways. In the U.S., it's really a function of taking what the top end of the marketplace or sector is doing today and saying, "Let's bring up the average across the sector." 25 years, we believe that from a sector development opportunity, that the use of diagnostics will be much more substantial, more in line with what that top tier is doing. Internationally, we're saying, as a result of the efforts that I've described and what you'll hear this morning, we believe that on average, which is about 7% of clinical business include blood work, it can be at the average of what we see in the U.S. today. I think that these are reasonable estimates, reasonable approaches as a result of the potential to bring innovation and commercial engagement and awareness, education, and ultimately, consideration and use of our diagnostics. In conclusion, we have an amazing business. It's attractive, durable, recurring revenue business model. We're a leader in a sector with tremendous growth opportunity. We're well-positioned, based on decades-long investment and capability and infrastructure, to really be able to tap into this opportunity, increase the standard of care enabled through the use of diagnostics and services and software, and grow this business while continuing to provide exceptional financial returns. With that, I'd like to introduce Dr. Tina Hunt, who heads up our corporate strategy, sector development, and global operations business, who's gonna provide an overview of the overall companion animal diagnostics sector and industry update, and share with you some, I think, what you'll find to be very interesting data. Tina? Thanks. Thank you, Jay. Good morning. That's my beautiful girl, Ishka, up there. Very good morning to all of you. At IDEXX, we are very fortunate to participate in the pet healthcare industry, which is strong, resilient, and very attractive globally. This morning, we will review some of the underlying sector trends that point to the long-term and very durable, favorable tailwinds. As Jay highlighted, there is massive multi-decade opportunity ahead of us to continue developing this sector by executing strongly on our strategy as a company. One of the big headlines during the pandemic was the unprecedented increase in pet adoptions. The health benefits of pets are pretty well documented, there was an even more acute focus on the companionship and well-being, the absolute joy of having pets as part of our family. Even last year, with an increasing number of remote employees returning to on-site work, the pet population, this is the net pet population, increased at double the pre-pandemic average of about 1% globally. In U.S., over the past three years, the pet population has increased by 12%, and we see this phenomena pretty much everywhere around the world. Pets have become an increasingly important part of our lives and our families, and we expect that this trend will continue. Who are these new pet parents? I see many of you in the room. While all generations have adopted pets over the last couple of years, there is an outsized contribution from the Gen Z and millennial pet parents. Together, these cohorts make up 45% of the dog owners in U.S. today. They will soon be the majority. These younger pet parents are even more attached to their pets. They pay a lot more attention to their health. They are, as Jay highlighted, much more willing to spend on, on their medical care, sometimes even above their own. As the data in the middle row shows, each generation of pet parents places a greater importance on regular checkups, on wellness exams, as well as preventive diagnostics than the generation before. A very favorable demographic trend. These younger pet parents, they have, they're digitally native, so they have different expectations. They want online scheduling, digital communications, immediate access to information. Veterinary clinics are leaning in with the latest software and technology in order to meet the needs of these younger customers. Now let's look at the pet demographics. This data from almost 9,000 U.S. practices shows that as pets age, they have increasing needs for medical services, medical care, and diagnostics increases both in percent and dollars of their total spend. Now, let's add to this the surge in pet population, the 12% in U.S. over the last three years, and most of these pets were adopted as puppies and kittens. As these pets continue to age, they're going to have growing healthcare needs over their lifetime. It's a very strong tailwind for our business, and we can further help build on this trend by executing on our core strategy of advancing pet healthcare with our innovations and our unrelenting focus on the success of our customers and their mission, which is very closely aligned with our own mission of helping pets live healthier, longer lives. It's based on the fundamental belief that access to higher quality healthcare, enabled by our diagnostics and technology, will have the same benefit for pet lifespans as it has done for human longevity. I am so thrilled to share this brand-new data with all of you this morning. These are pet lifespans for 2.5 million dogs and cats. Since 2010, the average lifespan of a dog has increased by 12% or 1.4 years, and for cats, by 1.7 years or 14%. Wow! There could be several reasons for this. The stronger bond resulting in a higher quality of life. More pets have access to healthcare, better diagnostics, diet, drugs, which results in more positive patient outcomes, health outcomes. For dogs, smaller breeds have a longer lifespan, mix is a factor. More cats are exclusively staying indoors now, which is safer for them. Whatever the causal reasons, these longer lifespans translate to a meaningful driver in the growth of diagnostic spend over the life of a pet. This is very encouraging data and also on a personal level. I'm sure many of us in this room have lived through the heartbreak and sorrow of losing a pet. Their lives are way too short. I personally have lived through many lifespans of my own pets, and I'm elated at the prospect of having a couple of extra years with Ishka and my 2 wonderful cats. There is much more that can be done here to keep building on this trend. Let's go deeper into the data that Jay shared earlier. Of the pets coming in for a clinical visit, 81%, 81% do not get any chemistry or hematology blood work, which is just routine diagnostics to understand the health status of a pet. On a more positive note, the clinic visits that do include blood work, at 19% today, have been steadily increasing at a clip of 50 basis points annually. It is instructive to look at the chart on the right, which shows the blood work inclusion rate by practice deciles. Huge variability in behaviors, ranging from only 6% of the practices, including blood work in the lowest decile, to 34% in the top decile, all the way up to 40%. The practices on the right are showing what's possible. It's just not widely distributed yet. Let's double-click into this data. As Jay highlighted, non-wellness testing remains the largest driver of diagnostic utilization and revenue globally. Broadly speaking, a non-wellness visit includes pets that are not well, maybe coming in for a surgery or are just not feeling like themselves, which is a common pet parent descriptor. Only one out of four of these pets on average, pets who are not well and cannot tell the clinician what's wrong with them, only one out of four gets any blood work. There is a huge opportunity to continue increasing the frequency and utilization of diagnostics. We can do this without adding one more clinical visit, just the frequency and utilization of diagnostics. Most veterinarians will agree that they would love to have that information as they're trying to diagnose what's wrong and develop the care plan for the best possible health outcome for their pet. As a pet parent, I would expect nothing less. Would you? We are further expanding the breadth and depth of the tool set, the clinician's tool set, with our new test menu innovations, contextualizing the patient... individual patient health status with deeper clinical insights with the technology. My colleagues will talk more about this in their presentations this morning.... Shifting gears from non-wellness to wellness testing. Here, on average, only one in nine pets gets blood work during a wellness visit. The charts on the right point to the massive opportunity to increase preventive diagnostics in young and adult pets, who make up majority of the wellness visits today. The wide distribution at practice level that you see in this decile chart and the ones on the previous two slides, is a result of, it's underpinned by a set of beliefs. Our job is to help customers along their belief journey with our medical evidence and education before we can convince them to change deeply embedded behaviors. The top 2% of clinics, where almost every second pet get preventive diagnostics, intuitively know or believe the data that I'm about to share. Why are diagnostics during a wellness exam important? There is strong evidence that incorporating routine diagnostics, chemistry with SDMA, hematology, and urinalysis in preventive visits at every way, every age, it not only helps establish a healthy baseline for their pet, it can uncover hidden or subclinical health issues which may not be as obvious. This latest data shows the likelihood of finding clinically relevant abnormalities with preventive diagnostics in seemingly healthy dogs at every life stage. Of note, by adding urinalysis, we see 50% more findings. There is a reason why urine is called liquid gold in veterinary medicine. This data is even more compelling for cats, who are very good at hiding their illness and pain. Is my cat, who is laying comatose by the window, just enjoying the sunshine, or is there something else wrong with him? The only way I can know for sure is through regular checkups with diagnostics. This translates to extra years with our pets, keeping them healthy by diagnosing things earlier, because you have to diagnose before they can be treated. Our commercial teams are partnering with clinics with a full suite of tools, best practices, protocols, client communication resources, to help them implement preventive diagnostics. The trends that we talked about, humanization of pets, increasing pet ownership, greater access to medical care, these are true in most countries around the world. While we see tremendous runway to increase utilization in U.S., there is phenomenal potential to keep growing this sector globally. As part of our broad sector development efforts, we follow the proven playbook of developing and publishing rigorous scientific evidence, getting the buy-in of key opinion leaders and extensive customer education. Let me share some of the, some examples of some of the work that we do in these three areas. Our customers rely on our evidence-based approach to help guide diagnostic protocols and clinical behavior. An example of this is the dog parks and dog walk study that highlighted the broad prevalence of intestinal parasites in dog parks across U.S. and Europe. Our medical marketing and sales teams are doing a remarkable job of bringing this information to our customers, so they're aware and can act on it. This has translated to over 150% increase in the fecal volume coming to our reference labs in U.S., where we started much earlier. An increasing majority of these panels include Fecal Antigen, our highly differentiated offering. Since we often introduce innovative diagnostics that are brand new to the industry, we partner with key industry groups and global thought leaders and meet their very rigorous standards first. We did this when we added tapeworms to our Fecal Antigen offering with CAPC, our Companion Animal Parasite Council. Mike Lane will talk more about this new menu addition. Another example is the strong advocacy and endorsement of our renal biomarker innovations by IRIS, which is a global organization of highly regarded nephrology experts. It started before the launch of IDEXX SDMA, its subsequent inclusion in IRIS's chronic kidney staging guidelines, all the way up to the upcoming launch of Cystatin B, which already has strong advocacy for the role that it will play in diagnosing and treating acute kidney injury. This early endorsement of Key Opinion Leaders is critical for us as we prepare and educate the broader customer base on our new innovations and helps accelerate market adoption. To inspire belief journey and help influence customer behavior change, we deliver extensive education to our customers globally. They look to IDEXX and our over 700 veterinary professionals to expand their understanding of the latest advancements in veterinary medicine. We deliver this free continuing education through multiple channels. Our professional services, veterinarians in the field, an online learning center, a myriad of in-person education events, an example of which you see up there, and publishing hundreds of peer-reviewed articles. Our customers also value consulting with our highly qualified specialists on difficult cases. There's a lot that we do in order to. This is the broader ecosystem that Jay talked about, our innovations and the efforts that we do to continue developing this sector. Let me pivot to talk about the demand and capacity dynamics of the veterinary industry that many of you are very familiar with. We believe that the underlying demand for the global underlying demand for pet health care is strong and durable and will continue to grow. After a tumultuous time of, like, highs and lows, veterinary clinics have established a more stable operating rhythm. They're adding staff and no longer cutting back on hours. They have adapted to a new, more balanced normal. This chart illustrates the significant, very significant uptick in clinical visits during the pandemic, especially in 2021. Veterinary clinics were very busy, complex, hectic places to begin with. Now, you add this unsustainable growth on top of that. It is no surprise that they needed to reset to a more manageable operating cadence. If you step back and look at it, the pullback is actually very modest. Over the last five years, clinical visits have grown at a CAGR of 3%. Veterinary staff is seeing a lot more pets today than they were in 2018, and they're building off this much higher base. They're also realizing that they can't keep doing things the same way. It is not sustainable. They're investing in software and technology, and we're positively influencing with productivity to help them serve these growing pet healthcare needs, because there's still a latent demand out there that is not being met. Almost 1/3 of the pet parents that we surveyed in U.S., U.K., and Germany, just a couple of months ago, said that they had a hard time obtaining veterinary care when they needed it. The demand is clearly there. These pet parents are looking to take their pets to a clinic. They just haven't been able to get timely care. The data from Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that veterinary clinics are adding staff. Their ability to pay better wages as a result of the recent price increases is probably helping here. This doesn't show, however, the hours worked or the productivity of the employees. We believe that we can help clinics with significant untapped productivity opportunities. Earlier this year, we published our landmark, Finding the Time study, based on very robust data, clinic observations, and analytics. This publication includes very practical playbooks that veterinary staff can leverage to first understand where they are on the productivity index, and then how to dial up specific productivity levers in three categories: workflow, technology, and culture. This study was very well-received by the industry. We're starting to partner with clinics to help them incorporate some of the best practices, tools, and technology. There is much more that we can do here, especially by scaling with digital workflows and best practices with our corporate customers. Michael Schreck will touch on this a lot more during his presentation. IDEXX's deeply integrated software and diagnostics ecosystem greatly optimizes clinic workflow, resulting in significant efficiency and productivity benefits. The more we can automate the manual and repetitive tasks in a clinic, the more the staff is freed up to do work that only they can do, practice to the top of their license. For example, by digitizing communications with pet parents, which is a very manual and time-consuming process today. Or helping busy clinicians move faster through case management, leveraging our AI-powered insights and tools, saving even a few minutes per patient can quickly add up to hours in a day for the veterinary staff. Hours freed up that they can now devote to seeing more patients, all while keeping balance in their lives. We are hugely vested in making our customers very successful. There are a lot of pets and pet parents that are counting on it. Let me wrap up by summarizing some of the key points. We stay very bullish about the animal health industry and believe in its tremendous long-term potential. Pet populations increase everywhere around the world. In US alone, there were 21 million net new pets over the last three years. As these pets grow older, they're going to have increasing healthcare needs, and they are living longer. The pet-human bond is only getting stronger, with pet parent demographics moving increasingly towards the younger generations, who have an even stronger conviction on the importance of diagnostics. At IDEXX, we're not sitting still, as we continue to help develop this sector with our technology, diagnostics, software, and deep customer engagement. My colleagues will share a lot more about this, starting with Dr. Mike Erickson, our Head of Global Point of Care Portfolio. Mike will provide an update on the strong execution and the very exciting innovation strategy across that portfolio. First, we'll take a 15-minute break. Thank you. Okay, welcome back from break, everybody. We're gonna get started here. Good morning. I'm Mike Erickson, and I'm delighted to share an update with all of you on our IDEXX Point of Care Diagnostics lines of business. The stakes are high at the point of care. The pet is in the practice, and the clinical team needs answers fast, while the pet is still there. Doctors need results that they trust, with accuracy that matches our highly sophisticated reference labs. They wanna know that their diagnostic equipment is outfitted with the latest and best technology that's available. Of course, all of this has to be integrated back into their clinical workflow and their practice software. These are the incredibly stringent veterinary practice operating requirements that our IDEXX Point of Care Diagnostic solutions deliver on more than 400,000 times a day, all around the world, on behalf of more than 500,000 practice team members and more than 100 million pets every year. Let me talk a little bit more about this requirement around time to results. We call it the IDEXX real-time care workflow. All of our IDEXX Point of Care analyzers are load and go, what that means is that the sample goes from the pet to the analyzer with less than a minute of handle time, and the results come back in under 10 minutes. This 10-minute time to result is crucial. This is what enables the practice team to plan and actually implement a treatment plan while the pet is still in the practice. This is what enables them to go into surgery with confidence that the patient will survive anesthesia. This is what enables them to communicate their diagnostic results, and importantly, the value of their clinical interpretation of those results to the pet parents when they come in to pick up their beloved family member. We know that practice teams are slammed, Tina showed the data, and they don't have time for messy, multi-step sample preparation. Diagnostics in the practice has to be intuitive, it has to be hassle-free. It has to be all of those things without in any way compromising the quality of the results. We understand these requirements, and we are executing on behalf of our customers all around the world to ensure that they're getting the Point of Care Diagnostics experience that they require to be successful. I want to talk a little bit more about our execution track record. 2022 was another record year for premium instrument placements, and that continued into this year with more than 9,000 premium instrument placements in the first half of the year, and a record second quarter, both for overall placements as well as placements into new and competitive accounts. As part of this, we've just been absolutely delighted by the positive response to ProCyte One, our latest new platform innovation. Strong ProCyte One placements have brought that installed base to just shy of 11,000 globally, and we're just two and a half years into the launch of that instrument. Keep in mind that all of these different platforms work together as a suite, such that the, for example, attach rate of ProCyte One to Catalyst is over 95%. If you take all of these things together, these high-quality placements, a growing installed base, expanding menu and utilization, high satisfaction and loyalty, and realization of price for the value that we're providing our customers, all of these together underpin our consistent double-digit growth in vet lab recurring revenue. That's continued into this year. We saw 15% vet lab recurring revenue organic growth in the second quarter. What enables this kind of consistent execution? It's, it's really two things. It's a combination of the strength of our customer-facing teams, partnering with customers all around the world-... and our industry-leading point-of-care solutions. It's people and it's product. Jay talked a bit about the people in our customer-facing organization. I want to talk more about our point-of-care product suite and what sets it apart. It starts with our instruments. At IDEXX, we design and develop our instruments from the ground up to meet those stringent performance and cost requirements for veterinary practice that I talked about. Our instruments are purpose-built for that use, they're purpose-built to work together. Over the past 40 years, we've invested to build world-class capabilities across the entire multidisciplinary spectrum of assay development, instrument engineering, data science and embedded software, practice workflow optimization, large-scale manufacturing, and clinical study validation. At times, we do in-source innovation from partners on the outside, but we never just put an IDEXX name badge on someone else's piece of equipment. We are intimately involved in every step. We customize, we tailor, we integrate, we make sure that it meets that high bar and that everything works together. When we build a new platform, we're not interested in being incremental. We bring forward new platforms when we are confident that we can provide game-changing capabilities at the point of care, in the form of dramatically expanded clinical insight and transformational workflow. Take SediVue, for example, a complete urinalysis, four to five drops of urine in under three minutes, a fraction of the effort and time that's otherwise required to do that using a centrifuge, making a slide with a microscope or a slide scanner. Take ProCyte One as another example. Unprecedented ease of use in point-of-care hematology, combined with sophisticated laser flow cytometry, all in a very compact benchtop footprint and at a very accessible price. Jay talked about the new platform that we're announcing at VMX next year, and I'm very proud to say that that platform will be built by IDEXX here in Maine, right alongside the ProCyte One and Catalyst One instruments. As good as our instruments are, they also just keep getting better, and this is because of our Technology for Life strategy. This constant drumbeat of new innovation, new capabilities that we bring to all of our platforms over time. This is an example for the Catalyst. Nine new tests, 12 years. Catalyst does chemistry testing, immunoassay, and electrolyte testing, all at the point of care. Multiple new slide programs in flight. In fact, our next new slide for the Catalyst will launch in the second half of next year. I should add that customers who adopt our new specialty slides on the Catalyst also exhibit a 7% higher growth in their core chemistry slide utilization. There's a very compelling multiplier benefit from these new slides, in addition to their greenfield growth contribution. The outcome of Technology for Life for our customers is that their investment in their IDEXX platforms actually appreciate over time. A Catalyst that was purchased 8 years ago is every bit as capable and every bit as valuable as a Catalyst that's purchased today. The practice team could go home on a Tuesday, come back to the practice on a Wednesday, and find that their Catalyst has new capabilities, more menu, updated software. All of this happens behind the scenes automatically via the IDEXX SmartService connected network. Let me talk a little bit more about one of our newest slides on the Catalyst, and that's IDEXX SDMA. Now, as a reminder, IDEXX SDMA is remarkable for its ability to detect a decline in kidney function far earlier than the alternative. This is really important, not, not just for early detection of kidney disease, but also because the kidneys are a way station for a whole myriad of different clinical issues, everything from hypertension to, to cancer. So, as a result, inclusion of SDMA is very important for the blood work for all pets, sick, sick and well. Now, in our reference labs at IDEXX, we automatically include, at no additional charge, SDMA in every chemistry panel that we run, so the inclusion is 100% by definition. It, it's a little different for the Catalyst. For the Catalyst, customers need to see the value and opt in and actually pay to add the IDEXX SDMA slide to the Catalyst. You can see in North America, we're closing in on a third of all the chemistry panels run on the Catalyst, now including SDMA. Strong affirmation of its value. By the way, around the world, 2/3 of all Catalyst customers are actively purchasing SDMA slides. Last year alone, we sold more than 5.3 million of these slides, and we expect this to continue to grow as we continue to partner with customers and inspire the inclusion of SDMA. Now, when we bring new innovations like IDEXX SDMA to the Catalyst or to any of our platforms, I shared how the platforms appreciate in value for our customers. They also appreciate in value for IDEXX. We measure this with something we call the economic value. It's just a seven-year, forward-looking, cumulative gross profit view. What you can see is that the economic value for the Catalyst has more than doubled since 2014, when we launched the Catalyst One. This is a powerful example of Technology for Life, combined with instrument platforms that are fully connected and have the versatility to expand their clinical use cases over time. I've talked about our instruments, talked about how we make those instruments. I've talked about Technology for Life. The next source of value that underpins our consistent execution at the point of care is the fact that all of our IDEXX point of care platforms are part of IDEXX's fully integrated diagnostics and software ecosystem. Jay showed this slide earlier, depicting how our Point of Care Diagnostics, our reference lab diagnostics software, it all comes together into a seamless solution for our customers. Just want to focus you on the circle there on the left, the point of care circle. All of our IDEXX point of care platforms and instruments are connected to IDEXX SmartService. This is our global Internet of Things platform, connecting all of our instruments around the world. This is what enables us to automatically bring new capabilities to these platforms, as I described before. This is what enables us to proactively monitor and manage instrument health all around the world. This keeps practices up and running. This keeps doctors focused on their patients. This is what ensures that when customers run their diagnostics on IDEXX instruments, all the charges are captured into their practice management software and on the invoice. This is also what enables us to support seamless diagnostic workflow protocols, where testing may begin in the practice, but then reflex to the IDEXX reference lab for deeper analysis, and all the results for that patient merge into VetConnect PLUS and are powered by IDEXX DecisionIQ. All of our instrument platforms are plug and play into this existing ecosystem. This ensures that at launch, they're part of the suite. They're an integral part of our total offering. We've been on this integration journey for decades. It's hard work, but it's built into the fabric of how we innovate at the point of care. Let me now turn to our point of care suite and to the question of adding new platforms to the suite. I first just want to echo Jay's excitement about our two new point of care platforms and our announcement at VMX next year. With this news, you could be asking, or you're probably asking, how, how these new platforms generate value, both for our customers and for IDEXX. Jay shared an overview of that. I shared some examples with the Catalyst. I wanted to further bring this to life using SediVue as an example of a new point of care platform in a new testing category. The first part is the direct economics. Here it's important to appreciate that new platform economics grow in value over time. In the beginning, we're focused on building an installed base. Consistent, strong instrument placement drives that steady revenue, instrument revenue line that you see there. As the installed base grows, it drives layer upon layer of diagnostic recurring revenue. As we expand utilization with those customers, that adds another vector of growth. So you see over time, that diagnostic annuity stream accelerating. Now, in addition to these direct economics, there are also very compelling multiplier benefits that come from new platforms. Take a look at the left-hand side of this slide, and what you'll see is that SediVue dramatically expanded our overall contributions in the urinalysis testing category. Note to Jay's earlier point with respect to point of care and labs, it did not cannibalize the reference labs at all. The reference labs grew really strongly over the same period. It turns out that practices, doctors, they have very distinct clinical reasons for wanting to run their diagnostics, either in the practice or sent to our reference labs. In the case of urinalysis, even when they're sending samples to our reference labs, they're almost always also running urinalysis in the practice. It's just that it was really time and labor intensive to do that before SediVue, with its slide-free, load-and-go technology and AI and highly accurate, base interpretation. That's the story on the left. If we look at the right-hand side, what you'll see is that our best customers see the value in our total suite, and they go all in with us, including SediVue. These customers enjoy a 3.5 x higher growth in virtually every category of testing that we measure. Testing begets testing. This is a consistent benefit that we see from all of our new platforms. Another multiplier benefit is data. New platforms generate new streams of data and insights that we, in turn, can harness to provide even more powerful and more intuitive diagnostic interpretation algorithms for our customers. With SediVue, all told, we've seen more than 1.2 billion images, and we've used that to roll out a whole series of updates to SediVue's AI-based neural network interpretation engine, which has enabled faster, more accurate, and more decisive insights for SediVue customers. To summarize, new platforms generate value in multiple ways for our customers and for IDEXX, in both direct ways and indirect ways. This is the outcome of the instruments being, in their own right, outstanding, but also the combination of these instruments into a comprehensive, cohesive, and purpose-built suite. I want to close out my presentation by sharing a brief update on our rapid assay business, which is a very important part of our overall point of care offering. Our SNAP franchise and platform is a truly remarkable story. It goes back three decades to the launch of our canine heartworm SNAP i n 1992, followed by a number of investments in innovation, moving into multiplex capabilities, expanding into new testing categories. More than 700 million SNAPs have been run over the past three decades, benefiting countless millions of pets. Today, there's just no question that SNAP is the trusted standard for rapid testing. It has superior accuracy. It's the only rapid test that's a true end-to-end solution, and it has a Net Promoter Score of 80. That means that effectively, it's all promoters, and there's essentially no detractors. Very, very high advocacy. As you can see on the left, these investments that we've made in the SNAP have resulted in accelerating growth in the franchise, which has continued into this year. We saw 11.5% global recurring revenue, organic growth for SNAP in the first half of the year. I just want to expand a little bit on what I mean by end-to-end solution. What this means is SNAP brings together these four different components. It starts with superior accuracy. SNAP stands apart for being backed by more than 350 peer-reviewed publications. The second piece is SNAP Pro. Customers put SNAP into the SNAP Pro, and it does all the work for them. It runs the test, it records the results, it gives time back to the practice. In fact, if you add up all of the time from this, it amounts to over 48,000 FTE days worth of capacity that our customers are benefiting from as a result of SNAP and SNAP Pro. That's a lot of capacity that we're giving back to the profession. Then, because SNAP Pro is part of IDEXX's fully integrated ecosystem, SNAP is fully integrated. All the benefits of integration also accrue to customers when it comes to SNAP. That includes charge capture. We know that when diagnostics aren't integrated, charges get lost, but that doesn't happen with SNAP, and we're giving our customers upwards of $70 million back into their practice PNLs every year, thanks to SNAP integration. Then again, because of this integration, SNAP results are powered by VetConnect PLUS and IDEXX DecisionIQ. This end-to-end solution, it's highly beneficial for our customers, and in turn, it translates into higher utilization, growth, and loyalty for SNAP. What's also remarkable about SNAP is that as long as we've been at this, and as strong as the growth has been, we're still in the early innings of addressing the unmet need for vector-borne disease screening all around the world. This is a slide for the U.S., what you can see is only one out of five dogs are getting full screening, which includes not just heartworm, but also Lyme disease, anaplasmosis, and ehrlichiosis. These are three tick-borne diseases that are been rapidly spreading across the country. They've got confirmed presence in all 50 states. If we just focus in on that 17% segment there, those are dogs that are coming in, are getting screened, but only for heartworm. That segment alone represents a $200 million opportunity for SNAP. We're focused on that, and we're focused on working with our customers, bringing this data, and helping to inspire a higher standard of care with full 4Dx Plus screening technology. The bottom line here is that there is a huge runway for growth and for elevating the standard of care when it comes to vector-borne disease screening all around the world. In closing, I just want to thank our entire cross IDEXX team that supports our point-of-care businesses. This team is steadfast in the commitment to partnering with customers and to elevating access to high standards of care for point-of-care diagnostics all around the world, and we are executing on this mission day in and day out. By doing this, we're generating material value for our customers, for independent practice customers, for our corporate customers, as well as for IDEXX. We have line of sight to a tremendous path ahead for continued growth and innovation, both in our existing platforms and our new platforms. Thank you very much. With that, I want to invite my colleague to the stage, Mike Lane. Mike leads our Global Reference Laboratories business and IT. Mike will talk about innovation and service excellence in the lab. Thank you, Mike. Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here with all of you to share the significant momentum and tremendous opportunity we have in front of us as we execute our innovation, growth, and profitability strategies for global reference laboratory services. The momentum of our execution is the result of 30 years of cumulative investment in developing highly advanced capabilities, unparalleled global network. From our first laboratory in Japan 30 years ago, to our newest laboratory in Perth, opened just last month. This global network of 80 laboratories delivers the full breadth and depth together to our customers of our diagnostic menu. Now, 65,000 customers around the world. To give you a sense of the timeliness of the diagnostic results, 7 million courier stops a year, picking up samples in the morning and delivering results that same day, or picking up samples in the evening and having those results back the next morning or during the next day. All supported by a global network of medical specialists, that form a follow-the-sun service network, increasingly 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, to provide exceptional service and extension of the veterinary practice and their care team. Also supported by a lab information ecosystem that supports the unique needs of our global network, empowers VetConnect PLUS with the most differentiated and timely diagnostic results. Now, $1.2 billion in scale, these highly advanced capabilities in R&D, IT, logistics, network, menu, commercial capability, enable us to deliver exceptional service day in and day out to our customers. Foundational to delivering this service day in and day out is VetConnect PLUS. We've invested heavily in VetConnect PLUS as the go-to diagnostic resource for clinical insight and workflow efficiency, elevating standards of care. VetConnect PLUS is one of a kind, combining and unifying diagnostic results across modalities in the palm of your hand, available anytime, anywhere, at no charge to our customers. From diagnostic ordering, to checking on status of results, to sharing results in high-resolution digital images with pet parents so they understand the health of their beloved pet. This is a foundational element to delivering this exceptional service. This is what I mean by exceptional service. Jay shared our high customer loyalty, north of 97%. We measure customer loyalty in a variety of ways. This is a recent Net Promoter Score result for VetConnect PLUS, world-class, north of 60, and you can see the value that our customers place on VetConnect PLUS. In fact, those practices engaged with VetConnect PLUS grow 2x as fast and are 6 x more loyal. Also foundational to this delivery of exceptional service day in and day out is our highly differentiated diagnostic menu and consulting services. We've got a long track record of investing in R&D to develop novel markers to help veterinarians elevate the care that they can provide to their patients. We've done it again in 2023 with three significant menu additions, starting the year with the Nu.Q Canine Cancer Screen, further expanding our portfolio of cancer diagnostics. Over the past year, introducing flea tapeworm to our Fecal Antigen technology, expanding our parasitology offering. We're really excited about further expanding our leading renal diagnostic portfolio later this year with the addition of Cystatin B. We have tremendous opportunity to continue to grow diagnostics, support our customers, and partner with our customers through our trusted advisors in the field. This is a snapshot of our U.S. customer base, 23,500 practices. Over 2/3 of U.S. veterinary practices send some diagnostics to the IDEXX Reference Lab. You can see the full breadth and depth here, and there are many practices that don't send us all of their testing, and there's tremendous opportunity to further partner to increase this. This may be because they use multiple laboratories for certain testing, or it may be because they're doing some of the testing themselves. For example, you know, looking through a microscope for eggs in a parasitology sample, which with our Fecal Antigen technology, we can support them as an extension of their practice and help their practice efficiency. In other cases, they may not be doing the testing at all. For example, maybe not fully having adopted care protocols like IDEXX Preventive Care. We see similar patterns of adoption and penetration and opportunity around the world, and tremendous opportunity for our field trusted advisors to partner with our customers to continue to grow diagnostics. An example of this is IDEXX Medical Consulting. IDEXX Medical Consulting is a team of 700 medical specialists. These are highly trained veterinarians that, generally have either PhDs, board certification in advanced disciplines, for example, anatomic pathology, clinical pathology, radiology, cardiology. They partner as a direct extension of the care team of the veterinary practice, generally on the most difficult cases that the general practitioner is facing. Important to recognize, a general practitioner is dealing with such a wide variety of patients in any given day, dealing with well and preventive, providing nutrition advice to pet parents. When they're dealing with their most difficult cases, this is often when they reach out to this team of IDEXX experts to support them. An example of how we support the veterinary practice with these most difficult cases is cancer diagnostics and our end-to-end solution around cancer diagnostics that we continue to develop. Nearly 150 million dogs and 90 million cats around the world are at risk of developing cancer. In fact, in the U.S., cancer is the leading cause of death for dogs. 6 million dogs a year impacted by cancer. Cancer is complicated. It's not one disease, it's a collection of diseases and conditions, this is an example where we can help the veterinarian. Starting with our core diagnostics at the point of care, as Mike described, ProCyte, hematology being so important to cancer case management, or our point-of-care digital cytology solution, where we can provide, in less than two hours, 24/7, 365, an expert interpretation for a lump or bump that's commonly found by a pet parent or by a veterinarian on a dog or a cat. This leads further to advanced genomic tests and liquid biopsy tests at the laboratory. All supported by this network of board-certified radiologists and clinical pathologists, building on 1.5 million cancer pathology cases that we receive already today. We look forward to continue to innovate and invest and develop this diagnostic category to support tens of billions of pets around the world that can face cancer. An example of a diagnostic category that we have developed over a number of years is parasitology. Tina touched on the global opportunity here. Recent Pan-European study, one in four dogs tested positive for a parasite. With the addition of flea tapeworm, our Fecal Antigen panel is now that much more relevant globally because flea tapeworms are anywhere there are fleas, and there are essentially fleas all around the world. Notoriously difficult to detect because flea tapeworm often does not result in eggs in the sample. This is a real breakthrough in testing, with thousands of patients benefiting from the detection of flea tapeworm. Whether it's a laboratory looking through a microscope for eggs, or it's the practice themselves looking through a microscope, or a point-of-care instrument that's looking for eggs, it's not generally going to find flea tapeworm. In fact, the way flea tapeworm is generally detected prior to IDEXX Fecal Antigen is by the pet parent finding these worms on the pet or in their home. Highly unpleasant for the pet parent and unhealthy for the pet to go undetected. Fecal Antigen technology finds what the microscope misses. In fact, 5x more of these common parasites. Another diagnostic category that we've been developing for a number of years is a renal category, and Mike Erickson touched on this. This is importance of the kidney to the health of the patient. This is why IDEXX has invested so much over a number of years to develop this area to support our customers, and we're really excited to introduce Cystatin B with a play out of the SDMA playbook, adding Cystatin B to 2 million non-well panels looking for kidney injury. First in the industry, tests for kidney injury, which is about a third of kidney cases. This novel biomarker, backed by IDEXX IP, is a breakthrough in kidney injury detection and will support all the recurring revenue growth drivers, just like IDEXX SDMA, supporting our trusted advisors in the field to earn new customers and help customers grow with this higher standard of care, as well as support loyalty. Cystatin B is integrated as part of our full renal diagnostic solution. With SDMA for kidney function, SediVue at the point of care, where urine fresh is best. FGF-23, we introduced last year to support veterinarians with nutrition decisions relate for cats with chronic kidney disease. Now, Cystatin B, all integrated in the middle here with VetConnect PLUS in DecisionIQ. Now, as we develop these diagnostic categories, whether it be cancer or parasitology or renal, we see that as standards of care increase, testing increases at both the reference laboratory and point of care. You heard this multiple times today. Here are two more big data studies, decile charts, like Jay described, for chemistry and hematology. You can see the split, that as practices test more, they test more both at the point of care and the reference lab. If you think about a couple of care journeys that illustrates this, think about that well pet coming in, and that early preventive care screen goes to the reference lab. One in four, just based on chemistry and hematology, the veterinarian and the pet parent discover more. They discover an abnormality, and that abnormality may then be monitored at the point of care ongoing. Another patient may come in not well, and of course, the veterinarian takes advantage of the full power of the IDEXX VetLab Suite and real-time care, as Mike Erickson described. Then they may find something that they need more advanced or confirmatory testing at the lab. Testing begets testing. As we grow diagnostics, as we expand standards of care through our differentiated diagnostic tests and services, we're also, by design, enhancing productivity and efficiency in the laboratory. Each of our laboratory departments utilizes a combination of automation, digitization, AI, to deliver the most accurate and timely results, which leads to efficiency and productivity in the laboratory. For example, the way we develop assays like IDEXX SDMA and Cystatin B on our high throughput chemistry, allow us to add this higher standard of care to panels at no additional charge without impacting lab productivity, or add Fecal Antigen to our novel multiplex platform with flea tapeworm now, with actually higher productivity and efficiency in the lab. We're increasingly digitized across our global network of images for our specialists, providing the ability to level load and support the productivity of our specialists with cases around the world, and increasingly with AI tools that help our laboratory technicians and our specialists focus on what only they can do with expert interpretation, and take away some of that administrative and workflow steps to enhance their productivity. As we expand standards of care by partnering with our practices to deliver these novel markers to expand and elevate care, we see high loyalty, the foundation of recurring revenue growth, and as you can see, accelerated growth, and we also see expansion of profitability through efficiency. We've got a long runway, as I've described, to continue to grow diagnostics and see this dynamic of growth and expansion of productivity and efficiency. Let me summarize by saying our customers rely on us deeply as an extension of their practice, as an extension of their care team, and we, we take that very seriously. What we do is not easy to support that, and we're after it every day, all day, around the clock. Developing advanced capabilities over 30 years in network, in IT, R&D, commercial capability, logistics, in an incredibly talented and dedicated global team that wakes up every day to support the really important mission that the veterinarian has and their team to care for the pets in their hands. Thank you. I'd now like to introduce Michael Schreck, my colleague, who leads IDEXX Veterinary Software and Services and Corporate Accounts. Well, thank you, Mike, and Mike. I hope, I hope you're enjoying the Mike triple play. It's like having three Mikes for the price of one. It's great to be here with you. I'm Michael Schreck, and I'm responsible for our global veterinary software business, as well as, corporate accounts, which is our enterprise, our, our largest enterprise, customers, and we support them through, through that group. I'm excited to be talking about software today and the momentum we have in the business, and particularly talking about it in the light of our corporate accounts and their changing dynamic. That's something I'm going to highlight as we walk through. The convergence, you'll note that I've added corporate accounts to my, my remit since we last met, that's no accident. IDEXX is committed to supporting the growth of our customers through the convergence of software and diagnostics. You've gotten a sense from that from every presentation previously presented. It's critical. It drives growth for our customers. It creates capacity, time. Now, our corporate customers are looking for organic growth in a way that they, they need it, and software is going to deliver it in a more powerful way at scale, and so that relationship is very powerful. Now, on a personal note, I've been here at IDEXX for three years, and I can tell you that we've been preparing for this moment the whole time I've been here. This is a once-in-a-generation moment. This industry is migrating at scale from on-prem to cloud systems, and those modern tools and technologies, which I'll highlight, are critical to finding time, creating capacity, and raising the standard of care. Only IDEXX has prepared to do this at scale with resources, technology, talent. That's why we're so committed to cloud-based software. To kick us off, I want to highlight a few things that I talked about last year and a few things that are new. On the continuation front, I said software would be at the center of our customers' most important priorities: raising practice productivity, elevating the standard of care, deepening connections with pet parents. That's never been more true than today. IDEXX committed to be a cloud-first software company, I'll describe, as I walk through this, why that's so critical to the success of this industry and the growth of our customers. It's also yielded a high margin, high growth, high retention, standalone business. I hope you've gotten a glimpse. It does way more than that. It delivers what this industry needs right now. It needs to find time, it needs to deliver capacity, it needs to help balance the lives of these practitioners, and software is going to play an outsized role in that. Now, corporate groups I've mentioned already, and you've heard, their experiences are changing. Acquisitions are down. Inorganic growth is not the lever it was. Organic growth is going to be the key. Now, speaking as a management member of a management team, going from one side with inorganic growth to organic growth quickly, swiftly, that's hard to do. So IDEXX is leaning in to support our customers, especially our large enterprise customers, with enterprise-class software, best practice digital workflows, and obviously, the instruments and lab environment that we have, that integrated ecosystem. It will all be further enhanced and powered through artificial intelligence. It's put simply this way. You've gotten a sense through this morning, I hope. The more you rely and use our ecosystem, the faster you grow, the more diagnostics you utilize, and your standard of care rises. Now, this is a different visualization of the slide that Mike and Jay presented, which is our software ecosystem. You've heard we've been investing in this for decades. It's critical to our diagnostic experience. Our customers experience their diagnostics through our software. Software is how we add differentiated and sustainable value to our customers, whether it's through workflow or whether it's through insights or whether it's through integrations. You get a sense for that here. Ultimately, however you order your diagnostics from us, we want you to have a seamless and consistent experience. One of the things here that's new is the outer ring, which is, again, giving what our enterprise customers need. This industry has built most of its software applications focused on the practice and its needs, which makes total sense. The enterprise customers, who will be over 50% of the revenue in this industry, they need different tools. The C-suite needs different tools. Regional management needs different tools, whether that's insights at the C-suite level, control of the practices, creating automation, standardization, having unified data platforms, having security that's appropriate for an enterprise-class organization. All those things are things that we are bringing that have never been done in this industry before. This is the strategy that I presented last year. It's a vertical SaaS strategy. It's creating a deep and purpose-built platform so our customers get more value, the more applications we add to it. Given that this is a once-in-a-generation moment where the entire industry will be moving to cloud, we committed to be a cloud-first software company, and we committed to build value-add applications on top of that platform that creates incredible value for our customers, and I'll walk you through some of that. We also have a software team where the sun never sets on our development teams. We did that by design. Essentially, that gives us three shifts globally every day to work on our software, and so we're committed to accelerating the value that we deliver to our customers through software. Now, I mentioned that one of our key objectives is to add enterprise-class features to support our enterprise customers. I'll highlight, particularly, best practice digital workflow helps our customers find time, and then I'll highlight how artificial intelligence also lets them deliver clinical outcomes with high confidence. Let me walk you through this. I said it all starts with cloud. I'll describe why that is in a second. You can get a sense for the acceleration that's happening in this industry, and when you see how we're performing, you'll probably get a sense for how we're driving it. We committed to this because our industry needs this, and we're committed to leading that change. You can see now that the acceleration is already at least 50% faster than it was just a few years ago in terms of the number of practices that are looking at and, and migrating to cloud. Why does cloud matter? Let me give you three good reasons. There are many, but I'll give you three. One is, you've heard it, there is not a single customer that we serve who said, "I'm going to go to medical school so I can practice IT." They didn't say that. They said, "I want to practice medicine." When you have a server that's in your closet, I've seen it in a practice's bathtub, I've seen it as a lunch table. That's tough. You're practicing IT, so cloud takes that off their hands, and we take care of that. Second, if you have that lunch table server, you probably didn't upgrade your software recently. All the great work that our team does around the clock and others in this industry may not be in their software right now. On the cloud, it happens seamlessly, instantaneously, overnight. We always... Our customers always have our latest work.... Always. That's critical because they tell us things every day that they need, and we can deploy it overnight. That's the second reason. The third reason is really the vertical SaaS strategy that I'm gonna walk through, which is we can now create seamless, native-like integrations between the platform and value-add applications like payments and workflow, and the like. It's much harder to do that on a server. There's a lot of reasons why helping our customers move to a modern platform to help them find the time that we know they need, and deliver clinical outcomes that they want to deliver, 'cause that's why they got into the business, to practice medicine. We, we, we survey our customers a lot. You've gotten a sense for this. One of the things we ask a lot is about their intent to migrate from their on-prem to, to a cloud-based system. These practice management migrations have been going, as the previous chart showed, at a modest pace. It's accelerating. You can see here that these practices are telling us that they are 2x more likely to look at a new cloud platform migration than they were just two years ago. We've been watching this because we know it's coming, and we knew we had to prepare for this kind of scale. You can see, and it's, we're grateful, that when asked, what would they consider, unprompted, as far as what would they migrate to, what would be the most likely consideration set? Our two cloud-based software platforms were number one and number two. For those of you that aren't familiar, ezyVet is our advanced, cloud-based, flagship PIMS platform, and Neo is our brilliantly simple general practice platform. You can see that ezyVet is 3x more likely to be considered than its nearest cloud competitor. We love our position, and we're ready for this acceleration of demand. How is this playing out in the marketplace? You can see that we're placing 3 x as many practice management systems as we did just a few years ago. What we're most excited about is that it's almost all cloud. We declared we'd be a cloud-first company, and it's working, and the industry is moving. We're delighted about that. We have a large practice management base, as you know, and we are passing... Over half of them will be on our cloud platforms in 2023. We're the only major player who can say that, because we're this committed to bringing modern technology to our customers. The second part of any good vertical SaaS strategy is you've got to add more value for your customers along the way, on top of that platform. Whether it's payments or procedure workflow, or whether it's marketplaces, or whether it's pet-parent engagement applications, we've built a whole line of things that add value to our customers. The ezyVet and Neo placements this year, over 70% of them have included payments and/or workflow. It's working. Our ezyVet customer, as an example, their annual recurring revenue this year is over 50% greater than it was in 2020. It's working for them, and it's working for us. There's a long runway here, as far as additional applications and value add that we can deliver to our customers that help them grow, deliver better care, and deepen their engagement with pet parents. How is it delivering, as far as financial results? Brian will walk through this in more detail, but I just wanted to give you sort of a high-level view. This software segment has been growing its recurring revenue even faster than the company's recurring revenue growth. Since 2019, we've had a 21% compound annual growth rate in recurring revenue in this segment, and it's accelerating. In Q2 of 2023, we had 23% growth year-over-year in recurring revenue in this segment. When you have recurring durable revenue and you add value through additional applications, then you have high 90% retention, you get operating leverage, you get gross margin leverage. You can see here, that has grown even faster than our recurring revenue. That's a beautiful thing. You can see our gross profit in absolute dollars is over 2x bigger than it was just a few years ago. We're excited about our software business. Let me pivot a little bit. Our enterprise-class customers have had a really significant change in their context. You can see that their cost of capital has shifted, high multiples have remained, so acquisition activity has slowed. As a management team and our C-suite customers have made a pretty aggressive pivot towards organic growth. Organic growth is gonna require you to run these acquired networks of hundreds and hundreds of hospitals in a standardized way. The only way you can do that at scale is with software. Now, you've seen a version of this chart on the left a few times. This is slightly different, which is, this is an aggregation of a number of our larger customers. You'll notice the message is the same, right? The deciles are basically the same. That's because they were acquired, and then their practice, as they practiced independent, they still practice the same as a part of a group. Now, if you have to pivot to organic growth, this is an opportunity. This is the single biggest opportunity, which is deliver standardized care across the network. Now, to do that, they're facing a situation where they have a collection of practice management systems. To be able to operate consistently, you're gonna need to have one, and we're grateful our customers have leaned in. We've leaned in with them to say, "We can help you do this at scale." We've been preparing for this moment. We have the expertise, we have the technology, we have the talent, we have the resources to support you at scale. So our enterprise sales funnel is 10 x bigger than it was just a year ago. The scale here is different. Now, in addition to having that, we've also tuned our product and our channel and our support and our delivery, because what they need is different than what practices need at the practice level. They need C-suite insight to run these networks at scale. We've tuned our ezyVet Enterprise product. We're unveiling it in 2024. It will be tuned to their specific needs. As importantly, if you're going to do this at scale, you darn well better have resources, technology, and talent to support that kind of scale. So we've created the first software platform tuned to enterprise, but we've also created the first channel and support mechanism that's purpose-built just for our corporate customers. Let me pivot to workflow. This is critical to our practices, both independent and our corporate accounts. I brought two examples today. On the left, this is an example of customers on our software platforms. When they engage with us around best practice workflow, which includes inventory management, digital intake, automated protocols, those, those customers grow faster. They grow faster, 4x faster than those that don't. They're on the same software platform, but when they, when they train and the software reinforces the best practice, they grow faster. On the right is a different example. To do a consult, often you have to look at multiple tabs in a practice management system. Just to prepare for the consult, it's probably six to 10 clicks. We said, "Let's just put that in one place, a one-stop consult page," and we put that inside of Neo. Our customers that have adopted this are. We're seeing a four-minute improvement in how long each visit takes. Now, four minutes may not seem like a lot, but think about that. Four minutes, that's over one hour per DVM per day that that creates in terms of capacity, an hour. Whether they use that to treat additional underserved demand, which we know is there, or whether they elevate the standard of care, or whether they go to their son's soccer game, all, all worthy, and software creates that for them and speaks to, speaks to the important needs of our, of our industry. Mike mentioned this, I think everybody mentioned this. VetConnect PLUS is critical. It is essentially our most powerful and most distributed workflow product. It is how you interface with our diagnostics, whatever modality you choose to use, and we're constantly adding value to this experience. As Mike said, you'll grow faster if you use it, and you're more loyal to IDEXX if you use it, for good reason. I'll give you an example. This is our flagship diagnostic experience. ezyVet is our flagship practice management experience. We spent a year building it. It's natively embedded inside of ezyVet. You don't need clicks. It's all right there. You can have the full VetConnect PLUS experience directly inside of your practice management system. You know what happened? These customers were already ordering 5% more diagnostics than they were before. Nothing else has changed, just brilliant workflow, native integrations, creating value on a cloud platform. Jay showed you this slide. Hopefully, you get a sense for best practices locked in with software creates value, it creates time. It elevates the standard of care. It also means you're going to grow faster, we, we want to support that. You utilize, you utilize diagnostics at a different level. Whether you're large or small, these are our most loyal customers. Large or small, you'll grow faster if you're on an ezyVet PIMS. You'll utilize diagnostics up to 24% more if you're on an IDEXX, or in this case, ezyVet. As Jay said, if you adopt the workflow that a mobile VetConnect PLUS will do, and you do that every day, you'll grow even faster, and in this case, utilize diagnostics up to 58% more. You've heard a bit about our artificial intelligence applications. We do that in our instruments, we do that in our labs, we do that in our software. It's a powerful part of how we create value for our customers. This is an illustration. In case you haven't seen it, I wanted to show it to you. On the left is a VetConnect PLUS result. On the right is the embedded artificial intelligence that we call Decision IQ. The right looks at the left using millions and millions of data points and says, "I can tell you what the interpretation should be." Now, with clinical confidence and hyper efficiency, that clinician can make a diagnosis with absolute confidence. In addition to that, it will recommend a next step, and those that engage with this platform order follow-up testing 2.5 x more often than those that don't. Another example, workflow and data and cloud, creating growth and value for our customers. How does that come together? We're excited as this expands to all of the disease categories that we test for. We're excited to come back and tell you about how that's creating additional growth at scale. Stay tuned for this. Let me close. Software is at the heart of the most important things our customers are prioritizing. They need and want practice productivity. They need to find time, and we can help them do that through digital workflow, through better user experiences, through artificial intelligence. Similarly, they all want to deliver the best care possible, so elevating the standard of care is embedded in their DNA. Software can help them see additional opportunities to do that. If you're a corporate group, having standardized protocols, taking that decile chart and flattening it out creates massive operational efficiency, consistency, and organic growth. Of course, you've heard about these digital natives who come out of the womb with an iPhone. They're here, and they're almost half of the pet parents, and they adopted it at an incredible rate. They expect to be interacted with on their phone. This all gets accomplished through cloud-based software, bringing our customers to modern tools that allow them to do this and prepare for, for today and the future. We couldn't be more excited about that. It clearly yields a very attractive standalone software business, and we're delighted about that. As you can tell, I think we're more excited about the fact that this helps our clients, our customers, find time and deliver better care. It's about enabling growth, and that's what we're most excited about. The bottom line is, the more you engage with our software ecosystem, the better it gets, the faster you grow, and the more diagnostics you utilize. I hope this is giving you a sense for why we're so passionate and so committed to being a world-class, cloud-first software company. I hope you've gotten a real sense for why this is so important to our industry and to our customers, and how uniquely positioned IDEXX is to deliver against this once-in-a-generation moment to support massive cloud migration and to lead our industry to the future. I assure you, we're just getting started. Thank you. After a break, after a 10-minute break, I'm being told. Which means I went over five. Awesome. My colleague, Jim Polewaczyk, is going to have a conversation with one of our customers, Dr. Danielson. 10-minute break. Thanks, everyone. All right. Welcome back, everyone, and good morning. I'm Jim Polewaczyk, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer here at IDEXX, and I am so pleased to be joined this morning for a virtual fireside chat by Dr. David Danielson. Dr. Danielson has been a practicing veterinarian in the beautiful Tampa, Florida area for almost 30 years now. 30, yeah. Two years ago, ventured into practice ownership when he and his wife, Michelle, opened the doors of Caring Paws Animal Practice in Odessa, Florida. If we do our job correctly over the next 30 minutes, you're gonna hear some great insights from Dr. Danielson relative to our industry, the dynamics within a practice, and, both as a practicing veterinarian as well as now a practice owner, as well. Thank you so much for joining us. You're welcome. For making the trek up to Maine. I know it's a lot cooler up here, so. It, it is a lot cooler. Yeah. Yes. We ordered the weather especially for you. It works. Yeah. That's awesome. Let's dive right into it. Okay. We'll turn the clock back two years ago. All right. We're in the midst of a pandemic. Yeah. I was working at a five-doctor practice at that time, and the pandemic changed everything. You know, we closed the doors. We didn't let anybody in the practice. We actually, my wife and I had a plan to take a trip to Africa. I've been practicing long enough. I had accrued a lot of time. Everything changed. We're sitting at home, and it kind of caused reflection, and this is something that we've talked about over the years, and it's kind of a dream I've had to have my own vision for a practice and decided to do it. I think it gave us the incentive to take the leap, and it's been amazing. Yeah. You're two years in now. Yeah. Talk a little bit about sort of the operating rhythm of the practice and what you're seeing from clients these days. It's been extraordinarily busy, of course, for everybody. We are. I had a thought in regards to how to, to position the practice. I do depend a lot on the staff. As a sole practitioner, I see about 30 clients a day, and to do that, I actually have teams of both a technician and assistant. I have two, three teams that I work with, and specifically, they do all the technical work. It's allowed me to really see a ton of patients and give them good care. It's been a real growth. I mean, we're out now about two to three weeks as far as getting booked. You're still accepting new clients? We are. It's very exciting. Again, I do slot urgent care slots, and I actually am, I just actually hired another doctor, so we're trying to ramp up capacity, to anticipate, you know, him coming on and, and having that. That's exciting for us. Can you share a little bit about sort of the growth you've experienced over the, over the past few years? Yeah. It, it's been, again, profound. Over the last, two years, I think we looked into that, it's like 48% growth, and it has been a, a tremendous amount of, I guess I'd say IDEXX that helped in that. I have a lot of clients that are seeking, me out and the, and the clinic out, to solve problems. So I, I really like the fact that they're seeing value in what we do, and, and I think it's really fueled our growth. Yeah. Let's take a step back. You're a sole practitioner for the most part. Yeah. open six days a week. Six days a week. Yeah. so we talked a lot today about increasing your capacity and focusing on your productivity. I know your wife, Michelle- Yeah. is beating on you for that. Yeah. Every day. Michelle handles all the backstage operations for the clinic, so- She was vice president at Raymond James & Associates, so when she retired, I mean, she has a profound business mind. We decided she does the business, I do the medicine, and it's worked out wonderfully well. As far as the practice and trying to maintain that growth, it's really been a matter of having, empowering the technicians. Specifically, it's allowed me to do my diagnostic working stuff, but they really do help to run it. I think of it almost, I don't want to say like a restaurant, but I do have an expediter who helps to guide, okay, room two, room three, room four. I move kind of through the day. As the animals come in, they already have an expectation of what types of diagnostics I want. They've pulled the blood. They've either processed or sent it, and I don't have to spend a lot of time convincing clients to do things. There's an expectation of what is needed, by the patients, by the children, actually. But that takes a lot of work, right? I mean, the Finding the Time study we referenced talks about drivers of productivity and capacity, workflow, culture, technology. Yeah. You've created a culture in a short period of time... Yeah that sort of optimizes your, your capacity. Talk a little bit about how you've gone about doing that. Over the years, some of the problems I've had in other, in my other practice was, I have a vision, to be honest, pets are children, and this has been something I've advocated for my entire career. I, I've had pet children. I now have a daughter, too, but they mean so much to me that I've expressed that in the practice, and it's a philosophy that from front to back, I want everyone to think about the animal first. It's always a focus down to the animal. This has allowed the staff to, to buy in or understand the value of diagnostics. I think of it as a five-year-old child. If you brought your five-year-old child in, what would you want? The best. You'd want the best diagnostics. You wouldn't want anything to be missed. It isn't difficult, or I haven't found it to be difficult, in getting the staff to understand my desire and to then express that to the clients, and it seems to work. I don't find that I'm spending time struggling to get clients to do what's right by that animal, because the philosophy is, this is a child, and of course, I attract people who have that like mind. Mm-hmm. communication is a key piece of, of culture- Absolutely. Training your staff to have that communication with clients throughout that journey. Yep. Talk a little bit about how you, you know, as you recruit and try to retain staff, what's that feel like these days? It's been hard. It's a different world now. We get, and again, I don't believe it, but, you know, we get ghosted sometimes. We'll have them come in and then just not call or. It's a challenge, but I feel that if they do have, maybe that's a blessing, because I want those that join me to share my philosophy. We are busy, so if they can't handle that environment, then it wouldn't work out anyway. I find that a lot of the staff that have come and are working with me, may be those that I knew when they were little. I've had several now that were part of the other practice years ago, maybe worked in the kennel or knew of me and kind of then reach out. I like the fact that they already understand where I'm coming from and share that philosophy, and that makes it a lot easier. I have a conversation right at the beginning about what I expect and what I'm passionate about in regards to, if you don't feel the same way that I do, that this is a child and deserves that level of care, it doesn't work, and they don't stay, or they, they decide to go elsewhere. Mm-hmm. It's strange that they wouldn't, right? Because I know that we all feel that. I think we all feel that way about our pets, and you'd want the person caring for your animals to have that same like mind. Well, I think you told me that, you know, pets are the new children, and, plants are the new, pets. Yes. Yeah, right? Exactly that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly that. Yeah. You're dealing with clients every day. You're seeing 30 to 35 patients a day. Yes. What's, what's sort of the average mindset of the pet owner coming in these days? What are they, what are they looking for? I think that in our practice, they're looking for a relationship where there's a, a connection there. They know that I'm really trying to keep that bond going for as long as I can. A lot of people seek me out 'cause they know that I'm going to try to achieve longevity, so quantity and quality of life. It's also a matter of solving problems. A lot of clients are very frustrated, rightly so, that they've been through three or four different iterations of trying to fix an issue. Unfortunately, a lot of times, they're, they're not getting good service. I don't know why, but do the culture, do the biopsy, run the allergy screen, do the, do the Nu.Q if you're fearful of cancer. There's opportunities that I've found, specifically through IDEXX, where I can answer questions, and it's really peace of mind. People are looking to know that their animal is being cared for, but they want to not have to fear that there's a problem undetected. I'm really not having that many issues in getting clients to understand that and to buy into, you know, it is, it's peace of mind for me, too. I do blood work on my own children for the same reason, because I don't want to miss something and feel that I could have done something and didn't have that opportunity. You've talked a little bit about technology and, you know, and it has a number of connotations associated with, but what are some of the sort of investments you've made in technology in your practice as you started up, that you find most beneficial? Again, the, the computer systems, we are using a cloud-based, which has, has helped, too. I've actually invested in tablets now that the staff... I really try not to touch the computer, actually. The way I've, I've worked the teams is I have a technician assistant, one of them acts as a scribe, and as I'm speaking to the client, they're entering those. They enter all the notes. I go over my assessment, my plan. They have be able to write it out, digitally, and able to get it put into the system so I can spend my time interfacing with the client, not... They hate it. If I spend three seconds on the backend, they come over and say, "Get away," 'cause I, I just, it's annoying to watch me type. That has helped. The, the other things that we've obviously invested in with, with IDEXX is the, all the systems, so we're able to do in-house work, but also, send those out pretty quickly. You know, trying to communicate with clients, I have had to, forced to get away from voicemail and trying to get away from calling, 'cause people don't answer the phone anymore. People don't listen to voicemail, so I am using email and texting, and that's actually started to help. I can at least interface with the client and express, you know, the value of what we're doing. Mm-hmm. You've mentioned diagnostics a couple of times. Mm-hmm. Share with us sort of your thoughts, philosophy on diagnostics, both as a clinical enabler, but also how they contribute to the economic health of the practice as well. Well, it's been mentioned many times this morning about how doing diagnostics then drives other diagnostics. That has been absolutely true. I think the value that I find is we are screening specifically to see if there's a problem, but, you know, to get peace of mind if everything's good, to get a benchmark, and so that we can compare down the road. I think there's a level of expectation from at least my clients, that I'm going to be doing diligence. If I miss something, then I feel guilty. Why didn't I do that test? Why didn't I have the forethought to care enough to at least screen for it? Mm-hmm. I think the, the beauty of this now, from my perspective, is and I actually have apologized to clients because if they mention to me, Hey, why don't you culture that? I should have been the one to say that, right? Say thank you, or, you know, can we do more testing? It's always important that it's a shared experience, but I want them to have the expectation that we're gonna do that kind of thing, and, and almost they're driving for it. They seek me out for that purpose, because of frustration. You know, they've already been through a bunch of stuff. I had one three days ago where this ear that had been vexing this poor dog forever, it was just a horrible infection. I don't know how many different places it's been to. No one had ever cultured it, and she actually came to me because she'd heard that I would culture. Mm-hmm. I did, and then I think it's gonna cure it because we'll know what we're fighting. We talked a lot about clinical belief today, and, and that sort of separates sort of utilization, diagnostics, and so forth. From your perspective as a clinician, what helps inspire clinical belief in a, in a veterinarian? What inspires a client to believe in a veterinarian? Well, both. I mean, you need to believe in it as the clinician. Then you need to be able to communicate that value to the client. From my perspective, first, it's communication, and it's being able to articulate what it is that I'm looking for in that blood work. Where's the value? This is where it becomes challenging because you want to be sure that that client knows they've invested that money well, that it, you know, you're doing this for a reason, but it's expressed that you can't just call them up and say, "Hey, blood work's great," and then hang up. It doesn't mean anything, and they won't do it again. What you have to do is go through the CBC and the profile and say, "I was looking for this. This is good. There's no infection here." Every little bit of it, and then, of course, with the profile you're looking at, SDMA has been a tremendous benefit to my practice in that I like to even point it out as a purpose to do, but also when it's normal. I don't say, "Hey, it's getting normal." I go, "We have an option now where there's an early marker," and I explain that it's eight and 14, so we're looking for. This will be something we can watch for trend. I say it gives us an opportunity to know what's going on with the kidney, to check function, and to realize when we see that coming, we need to start paying attention. Mm-hmm. Lastly, the value here, many a time when I've had an SDMA that might be slightly up, "Hey, I'm doing blood pressure." It brings them back into the practice. It allows another interface where we might find a skin infection or other issue, but also it's excellent medicine because we may and do find hypertension, which is something that I wish I thought about doing more in general, but certainly, the SDMA has allowed me to do it much more frequently, and this is good medicine. You, So let's switch topics just a second. You're gonna be bringing on a second veterinarian- Yes. very shortly. Yes. You're gonna have a life again? Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. I hope so. Talk to us a little bit about, sort of, how difficult it was at finding, you know, somebody else to join, and-? It's, you know, again, I have a very specific philosophy in regards to how I want to practice. I've really, strived to, to have the, the gentleman who's gonna join me, again, is someone I knew from the very beginning when, he was in the kennel at the other practice, and I saw in him a spark and passion for this and kind of cultivated that. Throughout the years, when we did work together, he was my technician, he was my surgical tech. I really, organically grew him. I, to be honest, my perfect me. I wanted him to not have the phobias and anxieties that I do. I want him very proficient in surgery, where I might not be, maybe orthopedics, things that I'm not good at, I wanted to flesh out in him. I think, you know, he's an excellent clinician. It brings a new perspective for me. I'm old now, so having someone who may be more hip and aware of things I might not, it's gonna be good for practice. I don't know how old you are. I feel old. a little secret about David Danielson. He's actually a TikTok star. Oh. If you want to look him up after this, he's got a number of very instructional videos on tips and tricks for your dogs and cats. Share a little bit about that, 'cause. Well, it's I don't have TikTok on my phone. I never do I don't... I never see myself. I can't because it makes me sick. to be honest, but I do surround myself with young people who are more in the know. I have or had an intern. She actually just got into vet school, so I had to let her go, she was very much into this stuff and actually pushed me to get more involved 'cause she, she does her own thing. I made a commitment that I would do a daily TikTok, I guess I've heard I'm very popular in South Korea, I don't know I don't know how pop... or I think it helps in the practice. I had a few people that say, "Oh, that's so cool." As whether it really affects the growth or not, I'm not sure. Where it is, I think, helpful, is it does give me an opportunity to, if I have a question or rather than people go out on Dr. Google, I say, "You know what? I talked about that," you know. "I have it out there. Check it." I don't receive or a YouTuber. I've addressed some of these things, and people will sometimes comment that they enjoyed the fact that they could understand something that I'd mentioned in the room by listening to me explaining later detail, you know, on their phone. Yeah. It saves me time, too, having to repeat and repeat. I can say, you know, I sometimes even do graphics, so it really helps to better articulate some of the conditions that we're dealing with. Well, I think it also touches upon professional dynamics and how this rising generations of owners want to be communicated with as well. Talk a little bit about you know, your thoughts on the role of technology versus that personal interaction... Oh, yeah. On expressing client value. That is something I-- that actually motivated me to go out on my own, way back at the beginning of my practice. I loved the intimate relationship, the family kind of vibe that the practice had. Of course, things grow, and even as we're growing, find that it gets busy, and it's hard to have that kind of connection. I want to capture that family atmosphere, this connection where people could call you, and you could say, "Hey, Mrs. Smith, you know, how's Fluffy?" You kind of know or have an, an intimate understanding. I think the fear or the, the part is, is that lost with the new generations and with now the fact that technology is taking such a role, I think there is a loss of that empathy or that connection. That's really something that I've really strived to reconnect. Also to have the staff do so, so it's not just me that a client feels comfortable with, that a staff member can get a phone call and/or they come in, and they have created a bond. I think that's been part of the reason we have this success. I do feel that the next generation is even more in need of human connection. There's such a distance now created through the phone and these other technologies that having someone that you can be face to face with, that you can, you know, and touching the dog, they're seeing this connection, and we can bond. It's been. I, I really think that's important and something that I really want to emphasize, I think is needed in the profession, just to recapture that connection. I appreciate that. Appreciate that. Maybe, maybe just touch upon the relationship you have with IDEXX. What, what are some of the things you appreciate about it, and what are some of the things we could do a little bit better? IDEXX has been a very important part of the practice. In fact, at the very beginning, it was a matter of having to make choices, right? You're opening a new practice. I'd used IDEXX at my other practice, and we also had other entities. At the beginning, I needed to be sure that the, you know, the lab that I used would be able to give me that clinical support, but also would have available those things like SDMA and, you know, now proBNP, that would allow me to be able to answer questions regarding things that I'm worried about. It really has been, it's been amazing, the growth and my ability to kind of use those tools to help my patients and, you know, the integration, I think, of my practice philosophy with having that knowledge, having that support, has made a big difference. I almost... Gosh, it's, I just labbed three days ago. I was in a room, I listened to this dog's heart, and I picked up a murmur. It was like a grade 2. I looked back, and it had been noted in, at another practice and then another practice still. The client had never been told, apparently, or had no understanding of it. I think the implication of that is that, well, is it causing clinical harm? I'm not waiting for that. I explained to her what BNP was about, and we could do something to get an objective understanding. Is there damage to the heart and something we could watch for trends? She was ecstatic, and we did the blood. There was a bonding there now because she realizes that I have a way of giving her peace of mind. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's been, it's been an excellent relationship for that purpose. And as these new things come out, like Nu.Q and all, I have a very dear client of mine who, again, had lost a dog to cancer, and by having that available, I did it on one of his, and actually it came back high. We may have gone now to oncology. I did ultrasounds. I found an issue in the liver, and it has afforded us the opportunity to be aware of something that we wouldn't have been, and they are so worried but ecstatic that I think we've bought time and maybe resolution by having that foreknowledge. Yeah, I appreciate that. So that's sort of the clinical benefits to the diverse portfolio of what we can offer. You, you've also touched upon the economic benefits that diagnostics as a category offers to, particularly a new practice. Oh, yeah. Can you touch upon that a little bit? Yeah, the, I've been around long enough now that I've seen initially it was vaccine and food and pharmacy. That's gone. I mean, pharmacy is not. I mean, you get it online. People want to, you know, price shop, and they get it. Food, you know, it's very important. I'm a big advocate for good food, but there's so much of that saturation now that it's not certainly a profitable part of the practice. Then, you know, pharmacy through the thing is in there, so you really are stuck. Vaccines or shot clinics, I do have several clients that they use me for the diagnostics and want me to look, and they go elsewhere for vaccine, which I think is silly because vaccine I could do anyway. I've had that happen several times where clients have gone down someplace and gotten a shot, but when they have a problem, they're calling me up, and they're coming in. Really what we are about is diagnostics. I mean, it's the core focus because it's what it's something that no one else can do, right? It creates this relationship that's long-term and ongoing. People feel committed to come in now for me twice a year for bloods and exam, and it just, it drives it. These other things become more secondary. Mm-hmm. to the profitability of the practice, as I think they're going to have to be as the world changes. Mm-hmm. These other, you know, I guess, competitions rise up. It's been a very important part for our practice. Providing a lot of value. I, I think your pricing strategy right out of the gate as, as a new clinic, sort of reflected the value you're providing. Maybe talk a little bit about... you know, where, where are you positioned in the community from a- Oh! Oh, yeah, we're the- brand pricing perspective. Oh, gosh. Yeah, no, we're the, we're the most expensive place around. The fact that we are offering solutions and, we set ourselves up as, I guess, one tier below, a, a specialty- Mm-hmm. -practice, I've priced it accordingly. I, I don't. I mean, there's no shopping around. We feel strongly, I feel strongly that there's great value in what we do, and people appreciate that, and they're willing to pay. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I have no sadness or doubt about it, 'cause I want my staff, too, to be paid well because I do demand a lot of them. I do also feel that, you know, the fact that we have the ability and technology to give these, get these answers, but also to give this peace of mind, it's proper that we pay properly for it. It gives value by charging. Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, that's great. Let's, let's sort of bring it up 30,000 feet. We talked a lot today about the opportunity, multi-decade opportunity globally. Pet owner demand- Yeah. continue to be very high. From your perspective, what is the best opportunity we can seize upon as an industry? Oh, wow! to ensure that we're driving the growth moving forward? I think you're doing well in that offering these, these, these insights, this, this foreknowledge regarding issues with the animals, particularly things like SDMA. It, it gives knowledge to the client, to the practicing veterinarian, things that they can do to keep the animal healthy and alive longer. I do feel, I see it even now, over the last two years, the longevity. I have 20-year-old cats, and it's amazing. They're doing great, and I'm shooting now for, you know, 23, 24. People are willing to invest in the diagnostics because they see the, they see the benefit occurring. I think from the industry, the opportunity to add more of those types of insights is gonna make a difference. The communication side of it is also extremely important because of the busy aspect of my practice and all. Having some way to express to the client, you know, maybe through those interfaces where you can email them or send them the blood. Yeah, I am old. I have them print a lot of my blood work, so I can look at it and anticipate, but I found what's great value is handing that to the client. They literally have a textural expression of what we did, and I might have even, during the course of it, highlighted or circled those things. I mean, I'm just having a way of doing that digitally on the phone and sending it to the client, is also going to be valuable, both in saving me time, but giving a perception of value to them. That's fantastic. Yeah. Thank you. Just a couple minutes left here. We could go on all day. Sure. What maybe as a new, relatively new practice owner- Yeah. What's next for you? Like, where do you want to take your practice? Where do you want to go from here? In the practice, obviously, I, I'm always looking to expand. I have to see if I can bump the chiropractor office next door, so I can bop through. It's hard. Capacity, I did not have an expectation of having this level of growth when I started. I didn't know whether we would be able to, you know, would I be reading magazines or would I be... I have not had a break from day one. We've been solid booked. Expansion, ultimately, maybe, you know, moving to a different site or, you know, getting a bigger area. I would, I'm, I'm very much into progressive medicine. Doing... We've already do stem cell, PRP, laser. I do think cancer therapy, too, some of these things. I, I'd like to, you know, start more integrated medicine and expansive. I think there's a lot of opportunities to give, quality older animals, specialized geriatrics. Yeah. I was always thinking of other ways that we can help these animals to feel better and the technology from you guys, but also in the markets for different medications and things, have really helped. We can do that, and it locks us in, right? People must come to us to get this information. People must come to us to have these things done. It just creates a stronger bond. It's fantastic. You know, so just, I guess, in concluding, we, we talk a lot about corporate consolidation and larger enterprises, but it's, it's wonderful to see the, the, you know, the smaller one to two doc practices thriving, growing, in demand, and you provide such a special service to the, to the, you know, the pets we also love. Thank you. really, thank you for your time, everything that you do. Sure. How about a round of applause for Dr. Danielson? Thank you. Okay, so we're gonna take now a five-minute break-- 15-minute break, and we'll come back and hear from Brian McKeon, our CFO, on a financial review. Thank you. I think we're gonna get started back up again. Good morning, everyone. I'm Brian McKeon, IDEXX's CFO. It's great to see everybody in Maine again this year. This is a photo of a very important member of our family, our forever puppy, Daisy, who just celebrated her 12th birthday. We're very fortunate to have a healthy, happy Daisy as part of our lives. I'm pleased to take you through our financial review today. We'll be discussing how we're advancing a consistent strategy and financial approach that's building on the significant expansion of the business that we've seen in recent years. Today, we'll talk about our financial performance and our long-term financial framework. We'll revisit the building blocks of our long-term annual organic revenue growth potential that's the foundation for our ability to continue delivering strong financial performance. In terms of the key messages from today's review, you should take away, the first is that we're advancing a consistent growth strategy that's focused on long-term development of attractive core businesses, that combined with strong execution, is yielding outstanding financial results. This focus and execution is enabling us to continue expanding our business and deliver strong financial results as we work through a dynamic macro environment. We'll talk a bit more about that today. Second key message is that we continue to see a significant long-term growth opportunity for our companion animal businesses, the foundation for our consistent 10% plus annual organic revenue growth potential. As I mentioned, we'll go through the building blocks of that outlook today, with a focus on the drivers of our CAG Diagnostic recurring revenue growth across our U.S. and international regions. A global growth in our CAG Diagnostic recurring revenues, plus increasing benefits that we're seeing from expanding our software business, we think position us very well to continue delivering solid operating margin gains, strong comparable EPS growth, and high return on invested capital. Let's start with a review of our financial performance. IDEXX has delivered very strong financial performance over time through a consistent focus on developing attractive core businesses. The largest of these businesses are Companion Animal Group that represents about 90% of our revenues. All of our businesses have significant, durable, recurring revenue streams that generate high incremental returns as we grow, and that enables us to reinvest towards long-term annuity growth as we deliver strong profit gains and high returns on invested capital in businesses that we know very well. I think you can see that in our financial results over the last 6 years. This is a format we'll show a couple times today. We tried to group our financial performance for the 3 years heading into the pandemic, the more recent three years, and in this case, we're comparing it to our long-term financial framework goals. What you can see here is consistently strong financial results. Our, our organic revenue growth was 11% heading into the pandemic, actually accelerated to 12% over the last three years. We've had consistently strong operating margin gains as we benefit from our business focus, and that supported comparable EPS growth at the high end of our long-term goals. All this combined with our, our, our disciplined capital allocation approach, supports a very high return on invested capital. It It was 44% in our, our last fiscal year. A key driver of our long-term financial results is expansion of our CAG Diagnostics recurring revenues. This is the financial engine of our business, represents about 80% of our overall revenues. Again, we've done a very good job consistently growing these revenues over time. 13% compounded growth heading into the pandemic, 14% over the last 3 years, that reflects solid gains across our U.S. and international regions at the high end of our long-term framework goals. We've benefited in the last few years from a significant step-up in demand that we saw during the pandemic. In 2020 and 2021 combined, we actually saw a 35% increase on our, our CAG Diagnostic recurring revenues, and this benefited from several factors. We saw an acceleration in diagnostics frequency and utilization. Consistently over time in our business, we've seen growth in frequency and utilization. A metric that was referenced several times in the presentations was the percentage of clinical visits that have blood work. That's historically grown at about 50 basis points in our U.S. business. As an example, that grew 100 basis points in 2020. We also saw benefits from the expanded pet population. The pet population has typically grown about 1% net annually. We saw a 5% average annual growth over the pandemic period, and even faster growth in clinical visit levels during that time. As well as we saw favorable changes in pet owner demographics, increasing adoption of pets by younger pet owners that are more interested and more willing to spend on pet healthcare. Basically, all of that provided a significant uplift in sector demand that we're going off of, and it created some near-term dynamics in terms of influencing growth drivers in our sector, both, both in terms of how clinics have adapted, you know, to initially to serve all this incremental demand, and more recently, to reset to have a more sustainable basis to support their clinic growth going forward, and in our business in terms of varying some of the growth drivers that have, that have supported our performance. We've been able to deliver consistently strong results through a focus on execution. This is the chart that shows for our U.S. CAG Diagnostics recurring revenues, growth contribution that comes from what we call IDEXX execution drivers, that add to expansion of clinical visit growth over time. What you can see here is that we've consistently driven a high level of benefit from a combination of volume drivers that include new, new customer acquisition, as well as expansion of utilization of diagnostics supported by our innovations, as well as net price realization, net price realization aligned with our strategy as a, a differentiated, innovative company. That has historically been on top of what, what has been steady expansion of pet clinical visit growth trends over time. Now, as we've worked through some of the transition with the reset on the clinical visit levels, this increase, this focus on execution has enabled us to sustain strong performance that's resulted in this, in an expansion of our growth premium. We, we had a growth premium above clinical visits of nearly 1,400 basis points in the first half, that included benefits from relatively higher net price realization in the current inflationary environment. We'll talk more about this, but as we move forward, we're very confident in our ability to continue to drive a continued strong IDEXX growth premium through our focus on execution, and that will benefit from this next wave of innovation, including the, the, the launch of the new platforms that we're expecting in the coming years. We believe this is going to build on, offers the opportunity to build on, what we expect to be a return to positive clinical visit growth over time, supported by the underserved demand that we see for pet healthcare in our sector. Now, our focus on execution extends to our international regions as well. As we'll discuss when we go through the long-term financial framework, a big part of our international expansion plans involve growing our premium instrument install base in our international regions over time. We've had excellent progress on this front in recent years. This is evidenced by record premium instrument placements in both 2022 and the first half of 2023, despite some of the macro headwinds that we've been highlighting in our business. When you combine this with the very high levels of customer retention that we're able to achieve in clinic, this has supported a 60 basis-- 60% increase in our international premium instrument install base over just the last three and a half years. That progress is very much aligned with the long-term financial framework that we've been advancing. It supports high growth in consumable gains, which have been at, at solid double-digit rates, again, supporting the executional focus that's enabled us to deliver continued strong growth in these regions as we move forward. I think this is reflective of the benefits that we get from advancing a global strategy in our business. We have common platforms that we sell across regions, U.S. and internationally, best-in-class instrument platforms, menu, and we get multiplier benefits from new platform introductions, like ProCyte One, which are actually specifically designed to benefit a practice, newer practices or emerging practices in terms of expanding their hematology offerings, which is very important internationally. We've also benefited from a global approach in terms of our, our commercial engagement. We, we, we leverage our capabilities that and model that we've deployed so successfully in the U.S. over time, including our VDC customer engagement model and programs like IDEXX 360, increasingly to support the very strong execution that we've seen in our international business. Now, our execution drivers also include the success that we're having expanding our software business, which Michael, Michael shared in his presentation earlier. This is a chart that shows for our segment revenues include the veterinary software business and our digital imaging business. We've had solid growth in that business overall. What this shows is, for comparison, these are first half numbers, how that business has grown over time in terms of recurring versus non-recurring revenues. It reinforces that we're, we're generating very high growth in terms of recurring revenues as an additional element of our growth strategy. This benefits from the, the very successful ezyVet acquisition that we, we incorporated in 2021, and that acquisition, along with advancement of our other solutions in the software space, supported a 50% increase in our worldwide install base for PIMS since 2017. This is adding an additional vector of growth to our business. We, we historically talk about CAG diagnostic recurring revenue growth as the, the annuity driver for our business. If we added these revenues in the first half, which grew over 20% organically, to the CAG diagnostic recurring revenue growth, it would've added an additional% to our overall annuity revenue growth. Now, as we continue to expand our annuity revenue base, this is aiding confidence in our long-term financial strategy to continue improving gross margins. As we grow CAG diagnostic recurring revenues, accretive margin, the incremental margin that we generate from that growth is accretive to our overall CAG gross margins. In addition to the base that we, we've continued to develop in terms of our diagnostic offerings, software now is an additional element of incremental growth benefit that we're recognizing from the very attractive returns that, that come from growing our cloud business. This is reinforcing, as I'll discuss in our long-term financial framework, our confidence in continuing to expand gross margins as a key point, part of our strategy to deliver solid, comparable operating margin improvement. Returning to our long-term growth potential, we see a consistent potential for 10%+ overall organic revenue growth for our business over time. The foundation of this growth is expansion of CAG diagnostic recurring revenues at double-digit rates in both our U.S. and international regions, reflected in the combined global growth potential of 11%-14% growth annually. We see the potential to add 15%+ organic growth annually in our recurring software revenues. We also plan to continue expanding our premium install base globally, contributing positively to revenue growth as we focus on new and competitive placement expansion growth across our Catalyst ProCyte and SediVue platforms, also benefit from new platform introductions. We're continuing to target high single-digit growth in our very profitable and durable Water business, and mid-single-digit gains on our synergistic Livestock business. Now, the largest absolute driver of our long-term growth potential is expansion of CAG Diagnostics recurring revenues in the U.S. This is a breakdown of the building blocks for our potential for 10%-13% organic growth on this front over time. Now, a foundational element of this growth is an expectation for 3% gains in clinical pet visit growth levels. This is consistent with historical trends in terms of expansion of same-store growth levels, and as well as an assumption that we'll see about 1% growth benefit from new practice formation over time. We're targeting 4%-5% of organic growth benefit from expansion of utilization of diagnostics, including benefits from our new innovations. Underlying this assumption is an expectation of a continued addition of about 50 basis points annually in improvement in inclusion of, of blood work in terms of clinical visits. It also incorporates benefits that we expect to gain from, from the introduction of our new platforms. We project about 1% of annual growth benefit from net customer additions. This is consistent with our progress in continuing to expand our loyal customer base, our long-term model assumes 2%-4% benefit from net price improvement. Again, consistent with what we've been able to achieve historically. This is a long-term assumption. We obviously adapt these, these the, the assumptions on this front as we work through dynamics like the inflationary dynamics that we've, we've worked through this year. Now, in terms of clinical visit growth, you've heard throughout our presentations today, the benefits that we see from tailwinds for demand in our sector, from expanding pet population that's living longer, favorable demographics, and the increased importance of diagnostic services in terms of clinical visit growth. This is just revisiting a chart that we shared last year, where we took the average levels of clinical visits over time in the U.S. and compared that to what you would expect to see happen over time, given the 12% growth in the pet population. There are kind of two key takeaways here. One is that clinical visits have continued to expand over time. This is, as Tina mentioned earlier, this is an average 3% expansion in average clinical visit levels. It also points to what we think is a significant and growing level of underserved demand in the, in the sector. Our long-term framework assumes that clinics adapt to address this demand, and we do expect that we will return to positive fit clinical visit growth over time, and that we can be a part of that solution in, in helping to achieve that outcome through our productivity solutions. Turning to our international growth model, we see the potential for 13%-16% organic growth in our international regions over time. In terms of building blocks, we have similar assumptions for clinical pet visit growth and net price realization in our international regions. As I mentioned earlier, a bigger part of our growth equation internationally is expansion of our premium instrument platforms. We expect that to contribute 5%-6% of growth potential over time. That includes expansion across our platforms and the benefit of new, new platform introductions. As we grow, we expect to get about 3% of annual growth benefit from expansion of utilization, as, as our customers adopt our, our technologies, and this is supported by our customer engagement through the VDC model and 360 programs, which benefits growth across our modalities. Now, as we grow, we're gonna continue to target solid annual operating margin improvement. This is an area that we have a very strong track record over time, benefiting from our business focus. In fact, we've added approximately 1,000 basis points of comparable operating margin improvement over the last seven years. We continue to target our annual operating margin gains in the 50 to 100 basis point range. This is reinforced by the opportunity that we continue to see in expanding our gross margins from accretive growth, from our CAG Diagnostics recurring revenues, from the incremental benefits that we'll be getting from cloud-based software expansion, from our ongoing focus on lab productivity that Mike Lane highlighted in his presentation, as well as benefits from solid net price realization. We also have the ability to get OpEx leverage as we grow, particularly in areas like G&A, as we reinvest back towards annuity growth in our commercial capabilities in our innovation agenda. Now, we're often asked how high can operating margins go, and we tend to look at that through the lens of our own unique business model. We thought we'd share some analysis that our team did here, just comparing some profit metrics for IDEXX to healthcare benchmarks. There's two dimensions here. There's a gross margin element and then a ratio of SG&A to COGS. I think it reinforces to us that there's plenty of room for a runway for continuing to enhance gross margins aligned with being an innovative healthcare company, which is at the core of our strategy. We think it also reinforces that we've got an efficient cost structure, and for us, that which is very much aligned with driving commercial engagement in our innovation agenda. As we grow, our long-term framework assumes that we will continue to generate strong, keep free cash flow. We benefit as a business from our business focus. We've historically had a very high net income to free cash flow conversion ratio of 80%-90%. That's consistent with our long-term outlook. As mentioned, we benefit from our business model, which also has a relatively low level of capital intensity. Our CapEx spending has ranged about 4%-5% of revenue over time, mostly focused on growth capital investments. That's consistent with our longer-term outlook and consistent with our outlook for this year, following a period of investment that flowed from dealing with the big step-up in growth coming out of the pandemic and ensuring that we had supply chain continuity. In terms of our balance sheet, we're in very good shape. We have a business that is very predictable and has a recurring revenue stream that allows us to use leverage as part of an efficient capital structure. We've used leverage effectively over time. We've been in a more conservative position in recent years. One part of this was just dealing with the pandemic, a combination of being conservative and having growth above the, what we anticipated. More recently, we felt comfortable being in a more conservative posture, just given the macro dynamic and some of the increases in interest rates. We're comfortable maintaining that posture in this context. We think we're very well positioned to support our growth strategies, as well as gives us plenty of capacity to support capital allocation priorities. In terms of capital allocation, our priorities start with support of our organic growth strategy. It also includes corporate development activity that's very much related to advancing our core business agenda. Historically, this has involved things like closing acquisitions of reference labs, as we expanded our lab network globally. More recently, we've had an increased emphasis on expanding our software capability, as evidenced by the acquisition of ezyVet in 2021. It also includes activity investments related to advancing our R&D agenda, and including partnerships with innovative companies that are looking to apply their technologies in the veterinary healthcare space. We have a very strong track record on this front. We're a natural partner for companies that are looking to apply their insights and innovations in pet healthcare, both given our innovation capability, ability to translate that technology into what's relevant for veterinarians, as well as in terms of our commercial footprint and ability to turn that into a growth opportunity for the business. This is consistent with the investments that we made last year in the in-licensing of technology related to the new platform advancements, which given our track record and our understanding of the space, have an excellent potential for very high returns for our business over time. Now, the high returns that we earn on corporate development activity related to our business are evidenced by the ezyVet acquisition. Whenever we do an acquisition, we're gonna look at the direct investment return benefits we're gonna get from that, that acquisition. ezyVet has been a great addition to the family and is very much on track towards our growth and financial goals in terms of direct contribution. We're, we're projecting mid-teen ROIC from the, from the acquisition in the next few years. These returns do not include the incremental benefits that we get from adding these types of capabilities to our business model, engaging with customers, and seeing their overall businesses grow faster, including growth in diagnostics. As we move forward, you should expect us to have a consistent capital allocation strategy focused on organic business development and close-in corporate development activity. We also expect to continue to allocate excess capital to share repurchases. This is something that we've done very effectively over time with a, a varied investment pace. We've had a moderated pace more recently, consistent with the discussion we had on our, our leverage structure, just given a, a relatively higher interest rate environment and some of the macro uncertainty. You should expect us to, to manage this area thoughtfully over time with a focus on, on leveraging share repurchases to enhance per-share returns and support our return on invested capital. Now, as we move forward, we're really optimistic about the long-term potential for our business and feel that our space and our business is well positioned to be resilient through times of, of macro uncertainty. Jay spoke about this earlier, but you can, you can see in the, the consistent solid levels of growth that we've, we've delivered over time, IDEXX and our... in, in the pet healthcare space in general, has been quite resilient, in terms of working through times of, of macro cycle changes. We think that the resilience in our sector and our business has only grown over time, reflective of the deepening pet owner bond, as well as the expansion of our capabilities in terms of our commercial presence and the strength of the solutions that we provide. As we move forward, we think our business model and our financial approach, position us very well to del- continue delivering solid organic revenue growth and strong financial results as we work through macro cycles. In terms of organic growth drivers, we're going to continue to be focused on driving great execution. That involves commercial engagement and supports a high IDEXX growth premium. We see additional benefits from the new innovation and that we're bringing to the sector, as well as innovation that we've brought in recent years. We see significant sector tailwinds in terms of pet population growth, increased pet owner engagement, and importantly, the increasing importance of diagnostics as part of the veterinary clinic's business model, growth model, and we see that as an area that's building momentum over time and will be supportive of our growth outlook. As we grow, we'll adapt our financial approach, as we have in recent years, to make sure we deliver really strong financial results. We benefit from a business model that, that as we grow, we get high incremental returns. We know this business really well. We can prioritize what we're focusing our investments on and make sure we're advancing our long-term agenda, while delivering solid operating margin gains and, and strong product as well, and high, high ROIC. We're confident we can build on that track record. In summary, we're, we're very optimistic about our long-term business potential. We're very confident in our ability to manage our business effectively, keep advancing our long-term growth strategy, while delivering strong financial performance. That's reflect, reflected in consistent long-term goals for 15%-20% comparable EPS growth, supported by potential over 10%+ annual organic revenue growth, continued operating margin gains, and benefits from capital allocation leverage. That concludes our financial review. I'll now invite Jay to join me on stage, and we'll have the management team available as well to answer your questions. Thank you. Hi, great. Thanks, Chris Schott at JP Morgan. I appreciate all the, the detail and color today. just, just two questions for me. maybe just touch a bit on, on visit growth. I know in the long-term algorithm, you're talking about this 3% rate. I know it's been kind of bumping along the bottom as we, we go through this year. Just as we think about 2024, just your view, is, is that kind of a year we can think about normalized clinic growth, or are we gonna - is this gonna be kind of a multi-year process to get back to that? Maybe the second question I had was on, on, on pet growth. we had 2% growth in 2022 after these very strong kind of pandemic trends. Is this kind of a new norm that we're gonna be seeing, maybe growth above that historic 1% from your perspective? I just need any color on, on that piece of it. Yes, I'll take, I'll take those. Thanks for the question, Chris. You know, in terms of the pet growth, it, it was, I think, very nice to see that that huge step up we saw during the pandemic sustained itself. You know, the, the survey work that we've done, what pet owners are saying is that they want the second dog or they want, you know, a cat in addition to the dog. You know, there's a, there's a lot of, I think, momentum behind pet ownership, you know, and, and as we said, this isn't really just a U.S. phenomenon. We've seen this across our major, you know, markets in, in terms of just the role that pets are playing. You know, some of the things that we identified that may be driving that, younger demographic as pet household. You know, owners think about that before children. There's a, you know, there's a sequencing dimension to this that I think is important. Without predicting what 2023 is gonna end up or 2024, I think that's a that's a, that's a trend that has some, some legs, and we'll see how that plays out over time. From a clinical visit standpoint, the way we're thinking about that is we're increasingly... If - what we're saying, our practices have stabilized, and I think a number of the presenters this morning have, have indicated as such. They've hired folks, and we've seen that in employment data, and as, as Tina mentioned, you know, we don't know necessarily whether or not those are both working, staff working 40 hours a week at practices or 25, but the, the, the basis of staff and receptionists and technicians is building. That's a very positive thing. We, we've seen investment and appetite for technology, and we know not just premium instruments and reference lab, but software, and we know that that's a positive supporting force. Then you layer on top of that the fact that there's just underserved demand. If, you know, pet owners... It's not like pet owners, you know, woke up last year or, or over the last quarters and said, "We no longer want to provide the very best care we can provide on behalf of, you know, this, this member of our, our family." They, they haven't. There is, I think, some capacity constraints. We consistently see that in surveys. We consistently see that through forward-booking data. Our, our expectation is, without putting an exact date on it, is it's working through the system, and some practices have worked it through the system, and I think they're in a really good place, and others are in the process of still doing it. We do expect over time, that demand and supply equation to balance out. Great. Thanks, Jon Block with Stifel. Guys, maybe I'll just break up the two questions. The first one for the new point-of-care system at VMX in 2024, everyone's obviously excited about that. Does that mean it's, it's right to think about the other system that you previously alluded to, more likely a 2025 event? Brian, if I think back to SediVue, which you sort of alluded to, could be a good analog. I think SediVue was introduced at VMX. I think the systems went out, you know, around April in the U.S., and then international was more of a back-half launch. Is that the right cadence when we start thinking about the intro versus when the rev rec or the shipments might start to occur? Yeah. In terms of the, in terms of the new point of care platform, the, the second one you referenced, John, we'll, we'll talk about that as we get closer to launch. We're not specifying whether, at what point that gets, that gets launched. From a SediVue standpoint, what, what I would remind you is that that was primarily our focus, was primarily in the U.S., initially in North America, and then 2, 3 years later, we, we focused on the, on our international region. It was a little bit, I think that was a little bit unique to SediVue in terms of how we thought about it. Part of the rationale behind that is we saw a, you know, really nice opportunity internationally to continue to still place chemistry, which is a, you know, key driver with hematology of our business and urinalysis second. Now, that's changed, and I think what you're seeing is a fairly, you know, nice step up in, in SediVue sales outside the U.S. Okay, let me just ask the second question. Sort of based on that growth algorithm for 2024, where we get a lot of questions, I know we're not gonna get specific guidance, Brian, today, you know, maybe a little bit of a different approach. We've broken it down for you guys on visits plus price, plus what we call sort of the IDEXX premium. I think it was similar to slide 123 that you guys put up there. Just at a high level, do we think about visits for 2024 sort of an up arrow price. This is relative to 2023, I'm sorry, an up arrow. Price, a down arrow, but not reverting all the way back to the historic 2%-3%, and then call it that IDEXX premium, maybe with an up arrow, partially due to the, the new system that you talked about at VMX in, in January 2024. Thanks. Yeah, I, I think our, you know, the longer-term trends, we do think that there will be benefit with the clinical visits from the, the, the demand dynamic. I, I think we, we do feel we, we've worked through the reset aspect of this. I think the question is, you know, how, how, how quickly do we rebound given some of the macro backdrop in terms of the, in terms of the growth? I think that that is something we're not calling as a, you know, when that happens, but I think that is a positive driver. Yeah, I, I, I think in terms of price, price increases over time, as I mentioned, our long-term framework is, is, you know, 2%-4%. I think we're still working through a dynamic inflation environment. We'll sort that out between now and the beginning of the year. you know, don't, don't have anything specific to share on that front over time. I do think that we're, you know, the benefits of new innovations are really an important part of what supports that volume growth premium that we've continued to drive in terms of utilization gains and benefits from adoption and innovation. That builds over time. As you know, when we do things like new platforms, you know, early on, it's getting I, I think we had a build to the revenues from the instrument placements from SediVue and how that translated to recurring revenue gains over time. The nice thing is it isn't one, one thing that we're introducing, right? We've got ProCyte One building, we've got, you know, we've got new menu that's been added, and so I think we really have a healthy equation that we're confident those executional dimensions can add to the return to positive clinical, clinical visit growth over time and support the continued strong long-term growth that we see in the business. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, Ryan Daniels from William Blair. Thanks for the question and the presentation. Curious if you could go into a bit more detail about some of the investments you've made in ezyVet and the cloud-based systems. It was pretty fascinating, you know, hearing how the organic growth opportunities are going to be more important for corporate partners, and you can provide them with things like benchmarking and analytics and decision support. My question is really, how do you then use that longer term to serve as a pseudo-owner for all the unaffiliated practices? Meaning, kind of using data that you can help them improve their protocols, maybe arm your sales force with information on a real-time basis to get to those clients and kind of push all the clients toward that upper decile. It seems like that's a huge opportunity for IDEXX. Yeah. We're, we're, we're doing that today. Let me just set up the response, and then, Michael, I'll invite you to also join us. You know, the insight behind our software solutions is really the fact that if you look at these practices as independent practices as a part of corporate groups, they, they operate as, you know, small businesses at one level, and then at the corporate suite, there's interest in harmonization and standardization across their processes. I would say that that's maybe more of a recent trend. I think they were all growing through acquisition and, to some extent, arbitrage, that that wasn't a big, that wasn't a big priority, you know, for these, for these folks. When you, you shift from a mindset standpoint, whether it's independent practice, how do I get capacity? How do I run my practice better? Corporate groups, how do I take some of the variability out of what we're doing? You know, I think everybody looks at software as a solution. You know, and it's interesting because we have data that helps them do that. You were, you were mentioning, you know, the, the insights in the analytics space. We're able to show them what they're actually doing, and it's usually a bit of a surprise relative to what they think they're doing. So that becomes the starting point of, "Okay, now what do I need to do to change? How do I get the productivity? How do I get workflow optimization? How do I get a better standardized approach to, to care?" Michael, I would ask you to also chime in. One more question. We have the first topic, too. Okay. Do you want to cut that off into... Yeah. Okay. Sorry, Michael. Sorry about that. All right. I'll be, I'll be really quick. Michael Ryskin, Bank of America. And I'm going to ask one quick one, just a follow-up to Jon's earlier. The, the new POC platform next year, you talked about, you know, announcing it at VMX, launching later in the year. Is there... You know, why, why not launch immediately? Is there a training? Is there an education stuff with this, or does it have to do more with manufacturing capacity and getting your internal sales force ramped up? Yeah, no, it all, you know, it all comes to. The, the plan is really around readiness, and we, we launch when the, you know, our, our products have the right performance and, and quality. We're able to train our sales organization and, and do it appropriately. You know, one, one of the great things about our organization and its capability is we move quickly, and we build installed base, and we build customer interest and receptivity quickly because of this infrastructure we have and the size of our, our footprint. We also. Customers expect a lot of us from a performance and quality and integration standpoint. We also want to make sure that when we launch, we're ready, and it supports the customer, and it doesn't disrupt their operations. It's, it's really making sure that, you know, the work gets done. Just really quick on Brian, on price elasticity. Obviously, you took the unusual practice of taking a second price increase last year. You talked about the long-term algorithm of 2-4 still in play. Any warnings in terms of pushback from vet clinics or their ability to pass that price on to their customer? Realize it's an unusual inflationary environment, but just sort of like, what are the warnings on price elasticity and how far, how much willingness there is with that weather? I, I think we've consistently found that if we, we work with clinics effectively and help them understand the value that we're delivering and the context for the price increases, that we're able to work with them. We, we obviously don't control how, how they price to pet owners, but I think the value that they've been delivering, supported by solutions we bring, have enabled them to, to be able to get good price realization, good value for, for their services, and we, we look to build upon that. I, I, I think it's it really comes back to the pet owner seeing value in what they're, they're paying for, and I think our strategies are aligned to, to support that. I think we're confident on that as a growth lever over time, that we will manage in the context of a long-term business algorithm that's about strong, high retention and strong long-term relationships that are really the underlying value of IDEXX as a business. Thank you so much for joining us this morning. It's been just a great session. Thank you for joining us last night. Appreciate the time you took out of your, your day, and please, safe travels back. If those of you who are staying in Maine, enjoy the beautiful summer weather. Thank you again.