Kevin Sayer
Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer at DexCom
Thank you, Sean, and thank you everyone for joining us. Today, we reported another great quarter for DexCom with first-quarter organic revenue growth of 25% compared to the first quarter of 2023. Demand for DexCom CGM remains very high as customers continue to recognize and value our leading product performance and differentiated user experience. While it has only been a year since the launch of G7 in the U.S. We have seen a significant shift in the landscape over that time.
We have attracted tens of thousands of new prescribers to our ecosystem, meaningfully improved our presence within primary care, and experienced growing demand from people with diabetes who are benefiting from significant expansions in coverage over the last year. Much of this momentum can be directly attributed to our product performance and innovative features. With the launch of G7, we extended our leadership in sensor accuracy and took a significant step forward in ease of use. We also introduced a new software ecosystem, which was designed to improve our user experience and drive high levels of customer engagement and retention.
Importantly, we have continued to enhance the G7 experience with ongoing improvements to both the hardware and software platforms. In fact, we have completed software updates almost monthly since the launch of G7, introducing new features, upgrading performance and connectivity, and most recently establishing the ability to integrate insulin data into our app. These are great examples of how our new software architecture enables much faster innovation. We are constantly working to advance the customer experience and reinforce DexCom as the technology leader in this space.
Along those lines, we were very excited to receive clearance by the FDA for our Direct-to-Watch feature for G7 in the first quarter. This approval will allow our customers to use their Apple Watch as a primary display rather than connecting through their mobile phone, providing even greater flexibility in how and where they interact with their glucose data. This added to our long list of industry-first as G7 is the first FDA-cleared CGM that can communicate directly from sensor to watch. To enable this, we built a robust connectivity infrastructure into the design of G7. With the ability to connect to three different Bluetooth devices at the same time, our customers can simultaneously connect to a phone, a pump or receiver, and a watch.
DexCom is the only CGM system that gives customers these options. We have received great feedback since we launched our Direct-to-Watch software in the UK and Ireland and look forward to extending it to additional markets shortly. Features like these add to our standing as the innovator in the CGM industry, strengthening our sensor platform as global access and awareness continue to expand. As a reminder, we recently crossed the one year mark since the landmark CMS decision to expand coverage for all people using insulin and certain non-insulin-using individuals that struggle with hypoglycemia.
This decision paved the way for greater commercial coverage for these populations, further strengthening our position as the most covered CGM in the U.S. It also served to broaden our conversations with payers. While payers have long recognized DexCom's ability to help titrate insulin, there is now a growing appreciation for our ability to drive better outcomes through behavior change and customer engagement. There is also a growing awareness of these benefits in the clinical community. With much broader coverage now available, many physicians have started incorporating DexCom CGM earlier into their customer care plans.
They recognize lifestyle management as a cornerstone of the diabetes care and metabolic health landscapes and see CGM as a core tool to drive behavior alongside new drug therapies like GLP-1s. To that point, in the second quarter we will be launching a medication logging module and activity integration tool within the G7 app to help those using DexCom CGM with these therapies. While this has helped us significantly expand our prescriber base over the past year, we are still only scratching the surface of this sizable opportunity.
There are over 200,000 primary-care physicians in the U.S., who treat tens of millions of people with diabetes. There remains a clear opportunity for us to deepen our presence within this channel as we work to drive even greater care for their patients. As a result, we announced an expansion of our sales force this past quarter. We were blown away by the level of interest and the quality of talent that we were able to attract for these roles. By the end of the first quarter, we had already completed our hiring and trained these new reps.
This team is excited to hit the ground running and we look forward to seeing them build momentum over the course of the year. As part of this initiative, beginning in the second quarter, we are also taking steps to optimize the structure of our sales team to be most effective with our call points across endocrinologists and primary care physicians as well as leading practitioners in maternal-fetal medicine. We expect our new team in this upgraded structure to help us better capitalize on the significant opportunities ahead.
Along those lines, we hit another significant milestone in our company's history with the FDA's clearance of our newest product, Stelo, the first glucose biosensor approved for use without a prescription in the U.S. Recognizing a significant unmet need for the 25 million people with type 2 diabetes who are not on insulin or at risk of severe hypoglycemia, we developed Stelo as a more tailored solution for this population and work closely with the FDA to simplify access to this product. By removing a burden of a prescription, we expect Stelo to draw broad interest from both the clinical community and directly from members of the diabetes community who want to better understand their blood sugar.
In our dialogue with the FDA, it became clear that iCGM accuracy remained critically important in establishing this new sensor category, both as a safety measure and to ensure that our customers are receiving reliable actionable information. Stelo will leverage the industry-leading accuracy of our G7 sensor hardware while providing a custom software experience to more directly meet the needs of those not taking insulin. We're on track to launch Stelo this summer as a 15-day cash-pay product and we'll continue to build our case with payers for broader coverage.
Stelo will be fulfilled initially via a brand new e-commerce website and available in one-time purchases or subscription models. We look forward to providing greater detail on Stelo features, including pricing immediately before launch. And we'll share further updates on our go-to-market strategy and ordering process at ADA and on our second-quarter earnings call. In our international business, we also advanced some key strategic initiatives this past quarter. In February, we officially launched Dexcom ONE+ into eight European markets, which is our first step in moving our entire Dexcom ONE product line into the G7 form factor.
This transition brings several of the G7 technological benefits to this customer base, such as the smaller form factor, shorter warm-up time, and improved accuracy and further simplifies the prescribing process for physicians. Moving to a shared hardware platform also benefits our cost structure over time as it allows us to drive greater volume through our G7 lines and more quickly reach scale. We also completed our transition to a direct sales model in Japan, enabling us to begin commercial operations at the start of the second quarter. As a reminder, this is one of the only markets in the world with coverage for all people using insulin, which represents over 1 million people.
Despite this, market penetration remains in its early stages and we see a significant opportunity to drive greater uptake in DexCom CGM share. As a result, we believe Japan can become a key growth driver for us over time as we strengthen our presence in this market in the coming quarters. This is an incredibly exciting time for us. There will be a lot to learn with the launch of Stelo and we are thrilled to once again pioneer the CGM industry with a new subset of users. We look forward to sharing more updates with you as we begin this journey. With that, I will turn it over to Jereme for a review of the first quarter financials. Jereme?