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VieMed CEO Casey Hoyt, left, and President Mike Moore are pictured Tuesday, February 25, 2025, at the VieMed offices in Lafayette, La. STAFF PHOTO BY LESLIE WESTBROOK VieMed CEO Casey Hoyt, left, and President Mike Moore are pictured Tuesday, February 25, 2025, at the VieMed offices in Lafayette, La. STAFF PHOTO BY LESLIE WESTBROOK VieMed CEO Casey Hoyt, left, and President Mike Moore are pictured Tuesday, February 25, 2025, at the VieMed offices in Lafayette, La.
STAFF PHOTO BY LESLIE WESTBROOK Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Copy article link Save In 2006, businessman Casey Hoyt and his longtime friend Mike Moore, a respiratory therapist, launched a health care startup focused on offering respiratory care in the home, which was not widely available at the time in the Lafayette region. In the nearly two decades since, VieMed Health Care has grown into a 1,500-employee, publicly traded company that is changing the way in-home respiratory therapy is delivered to patients with diseases like COPD, ALS and sleep apnea by using new technology and non-invasive ventilation devices. It has thousands of patients in all 50 states, and recently reported annual net revenues of more than $224.
3 million, up 23% from 2023. VieMed is one of several health care firms in Lafayette that are helping to diversify an economy traditionally dominated by the oil and gas industry. As if to underscore that changing dynamic, the company's corporate headquarters is located in the former Stone Energy office building downtown.
“We are very much a small town that punches above our weight in terms of being a health care incubator,” said Hoyt, VieMed’s CEO. “We're recruiting health care talent from New Orleans. We've got a group of entrepreneurs here locally that have changed that narrative from oil and gas into health care.
” In this week’s Talking Business, Hoyt and Moore, now the company president, talk about what’s behind VieMed’s revenue growth, how much the company has grown and its latest efforts to help patients with sleep apnea. This interview has been edited for clarity. How do you all do it? What’s your specialty to grow your customer base? Hoyt: Our patient is typically a COPD patient or an ALS patient, somebody who's very sick and at the end of life.
Their lungs are failing and they are in and out of the hospital on a regular basis. We treat them by putting a respiratory therapist in the home with them to hold their hand and offer a next level of care. Our competitors are delivering wheelchairs, walkers, commodes, CPAPs and ventilators, but they're more of a logistical, drop-off company.
We're very clinically focused and usually working inside of the hospital with the pulmonologist and then becoming an extension of case management to effectively discharge that patient into the home. So it's a continuum of care, from the hospital to the home. Your revenue continues to be significantly up each quarter.
Can you give me a rundown of what’s happening? Hoyt: What’s driving the revenue is really the complex respiratory side of the business. Sleep is growing at a nice clip. All of our businesses are growing right now, but the demand for these services — our market penetration is at 6% across the country.
That's all of our competitors combined. So 94% of the folks who need our care are not getting it right now. They are not aware that it's available.
But therein lies the opportunity for our business to grow. It's lots of demand, lots of patients in need and, hence, you see our revenue growing at record numbers from quarter to quarter, year over year. How much has your patient count grown in recent years.
Do you have patients and therapists across the country now? Hoyt: We have patients in all 50 states and really good coverage in 38 of the 50. We have to have respiratory therapists in all 50 to support them. We have a big geographical gap to hit.
We started in Louisiana and probably have 80% of the market share here but still have some work to do, just in Louisiana. Texas has recently become our number one state for (number of) patients, but there’s still a ton of work to do in Texas. Can you break down your patients by treatment? Moore: We treat almost 3,000 patients a month for sleep apnea.
With COPD, which most people associate that with smoking and lung disease, we’re onboarding about 1,500 oxygen therapy patients per month. For ventilators, close to 1,000 per month coming on board. We've touched several hundred thousand patients going back to our inception.
Most of these patients don’t live long, but some do. We have a large range of patients with different diseases. But when we get in that home, it's intense treatment.
It's emotional. The family is involved. It's always a sad story.
Sleep apnea seems to be one of those conditions that is more common than people think. Your company has done some interesting things in that space. What kind of results are you seeing? Hoyt: Probably 80% of people with sleep apnea are untreated.
The big thing that’s driving our sleep business is the prescribing of the GLP-1 drug, the weight-loss drug. A lot of folks are treating their weight loss, and it’s driving more patients into internal medicine and family practice offices. As a result, they're uncovering more needs for treating sleep apnea because, typically, folks who struggle with being overweight usually are struggling with some form of sleep apnea.
They tend to order a CPAP or a home sleep study with the GLP-1 drug. VieMed is still expanding and you’re looking at other acquisitions in the future. How do you market yourselves to expand in the future? Hoyt: Our patients are the frequent flyers to the hospital and the doctor’s office.
Once we’ve built up these patient success stories, that’s what we need to run with to tell the next town over what we’ve done here. Today we’ve got three published studies. We have a 16% reduction in mortality with this patient base.
For every five and a half patients we put on therapy, we save a life. We also save money if we get them on therapy. In the first 30 days, we can save $5,400 per patient per year by preventing them from going into the hospital.
So the payer is incentivized to embrace our programs..
