Themoneynarrative’s interview with RHT.V’s Interim CEO, Chris Shields

On December 21, 2023, themoneynarrative had the opportunity to speak with Chris Shields, Interim CEO of Reliq Health Technologies (RHT.V).  The company has been in the news of late as a result of delayed financials and the resignation of former CEO Lisa Crossley owing to serious health issues.  The questions posed were not provided in advance.

themoneynarrative:  Tell us about your involvement with Reliq Health and where your focus is now.

Chris Shields:  I’ve been involved with Reliq since January of 2019.  I had previously worked with Lisa at Natrix Separations.  She had called me around that time and asked me if I’d be willing to join the company and help build out the US operation both from the sales side as well as any of the device acquisition, delivery to customers, and operational activities that might need to be done.  The software is delivered from our Canadian team at the start.  It was primarily sales and business development, and as we  grew in the US, having someone manage the US team.

themoneynarrative:  What are the biggest challenges faced by Reliq Health at present?

Chris Shields:  I think, as everyone knows, Dr. Crossley was  very successful in developing a product that the market needs.  We’ve been able to show by our clients that we’ve been signing that it really meets an unmet need.  The key challenge has been the relatively new market.  Most of our customers haven’t done virtual care in the past, so there can be slow moving at the start.  But then when it gets down to implementation, customers tend to be much, much slower than they expected coming out of the gate.  In healthcare, adopting a new technology and feeling comfortable that this is something that your patients will like and benefit from can be a slow process.  For some clients, it takes a couple of months, but for other clients it takes a year to 18 months before they can get their full patient roster on the program.

themoneynarrative:  Is there an expected timeline to find a permanent new CEO?

Chris Shields:  No.  Our goal is to have someone announced by June of 2024, but it’s not a hard date.  That’s our internal goal.  Adding to the US management team was already in the works because of our growth; I need to find a replacement or someone who can help to manage more of the US business first.  We’re looking at getting someone east coast and west coast now.  I think  we have big enough sales efforts that we can really get two regional business development, sales implementation people (whether they are director or VP level we’ll see based on their experience), but that’s where I’m looking to fill first, to take some of the pressure off what I’ve been doing, so that I can focus on some of these other tasks.  And then we’ll start really looking at the CEO position.

themoneynarrative:  Does the company have the staffing and expertise required to fulfill its goals?

Chris Shields:  If you look at our business model, delivering the software product and the work we do with customers on pre-authorizations, going through their patient lists and determining eligibility, that’s all done by software tools, and requires very little human resources.  There are human resources needed to upgrade and continually add new products and features to the software, but we have our internal team, as well as multiple external teams that we can grow as needed.  For instance, over the last year, year and a half, two years we’ve had a significant increase in our R&D expenses, because we’ve been adding the FHIR [Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources] standard to our software.  We’ve added quite a few resources externally and internally to help support that but, in general, on the implementation side, our software products require very little human resources.  For customer implementation and training, we have our own staff that manages those activities, and we’ve been adding to that staff as needed.  We’ve added people on the ground in Florida, especially for skilled nursing facilities and ALFs [Assisted Living Facilities].  As our recent raise indicated, we’re adding that same type of staffing in six or eight other states where we didn’t have that staffing before.  For our care management team, we rely on Cognizant to provide the majority of our staffing there, and that’s going to continue into the future.  They bring on people as needed, and we really rely on them to bring in teams, and then we train them and they continually add to the staff that’s needed so it puts less burden on us to bring in care managers as we’re growing.

themoneynarrative:  Is cash flow an issue?

Chris Shields:  I think for any small, rapidly-growing company cash flow is always something that needs to be actively managed.  Managing your incoming cash with what goes out is never a straight line.  So there’ll always be points of time in a month or months in general that there may be a mismatch and so it’s important for us to manage it as we’re growing, because we always want to make sure we have enough cash going forward to meet the growth needs of our large clients.

themoneynarrative:  Are the following objectives being met, and, if not, what is being done?

• patient onboarding
• support to achieve patient adherence
• payment to Reliq

Chris Shields:  I think we set pretty high goals for ourselves, so we’re never going to be satisfied with results because we want to move these things along as fast as possible and achieve the next milestone.  I think it’s important that we bring the best care to customers as our primary mission.  Obviously, bringing in revenue and showing the company has value so that shareholders benefit is right up there with providing patients with great care.  At the beginning of the year, we really focused on understanding and improving adherence and, where we have taken over adherence, we’ve really been able to show that we can get to that 70% adherence rate and, in some cases, it’s even higher.  We expect that to be the case across the board over time.  I’m not going to put a date on when I think we’ll get across the board 70% adherence.  We’ll give indications going forward of where we are in our progress.  For anyone who may not believe that’s achievable, I think over the next year we’ll be able to show the progress that we’ve made in calendar 2023 as revenue begins to align with patient onboarding numbers and adherence rates.  There is always going to be some time from implementation, to getting patient’s adherent, to billing, to collection.  So there may be some delays that people perceive, but we are on track for all of our plans.

themoneynarrative:  Investor communications are often problematic for early-stage issuers.  Do you have any thoughts on this topic?

Chris Shields:  I think we run into that.  Most companies at our stage are not publicly traded.  I’ve worked for a number of small, early-stage companies and the difficulties that Reliq has had over the past few years wouldn’t even be significant issues for a VC-backed company or a privately-held company because of the growth rate we’ve seen in adding new large US healthcare clients and adding new customers and adding new technology, but even long-standing companies complain about the quarter-to-quarter measurements and slight misses that really can impact them, and it’s magnified significantly for a company that’s not going to have straight-line growth.  There will be ups and downs.  Revenue collection may not be linear, as we are growing and building up staff.  If we look at where Reliq has been, our focus was, developing the technology, creating market pull, getting large US healthcare customers interested in the services – we hadn’t really focused until this year on adding dedicated staff for activities like dedicated collections, or as you can see from this year, and partially from last year, we had an accounting team, but we really didn’t have a team that was focused on preparing for the audit.  We just took people from their regular jobs and for three months they did double duty.  The biggest challenge for us as a small company: being able to build out all of those support services that aren’t directly related to our mission of building a company that has a great product, great customers, and really has dominated the market that we’re in.  And so we’ve seen that we’ve done a great job at those first three things and we really now need to spend time in the next year or two building out all the support services to make us a well-rounded, better-functioning company.

themoneynarrative:  Do you have any other thoughts you would like to share?

Chris Shields:  I know the ride so far and being an investor with Reliq has been challenging, but I think the fundamentals of the company remain the same.  Over the long term people will see that value.  It may not be quarter to quarter or even year to year, but if you look back at where we’ve been trending, we’re still on the same trajectory we’ve always forecasted, it’s just taken us longer to get there.  We expect to get to our  milestone of 100 million in revenue.  We’re still on that track.  It just may take us longer than we first anticipated to get there.