Company: TEM
Filing Date: 2025-02-24
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000950170-25-025603
Chunk: 84

Company: Tempus AI, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-24
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 84
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 to lower the list price of our tests and impact our operating margins and our ability to achieve and maintain profitability. Payers may compare our products to our competitors and utilize them as precedents, which may impact our coverage and reimbursement. In addition, technological innovations that result in the creation of enhanced diagnostic tools that are more effective than ours may enable other clinical laboratories, hospitals, medical personnel or medical providers to provide specialized diagnostic tests similar to ours in a more patient-friendly, efficient or cost-effective manner than is currently possible. 

In the United States, many significant decisions about reimbursement for new diagnostics are made by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, which makes a national coverage determination, or NCD, as to whether and to what extent a new diagnostic will be covered and reimbursed under Medicare, although it frequently delegates this authority to local Medicare Administrative Contractors, or MACs, which may make a local coverage determination, or LCD, with respect to coverage and reimbursement. Private payers tend to follow Medicare to a substantial degree. During the year ended December 31, 2024, Medicare claims represented 26% of our clinical testing volume. Given we operate laboratories in multiple MACs and run both LDTs and an FDA-approved assay, the applicable reimbursement determination varies based on the assay being run and the locations where it is being processed. The rules and standards that CMS uses to determine reimbursement rates for our tests are frequently changing and subject to revision, which could have a material impact on our results. 

For example, Medicare’s NCD for NGS first established in 2018 and subsequently updated in 2020, states that NGS oncology tests (such as our Tempus|xT and Tempus|xF tests), would be covered by Medicare nationally if and when: (1) performed in a Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments, or CLIA, certified laboratory, (2) ordered by a treating physician, (3) the patient meets certain clinical and treatment criteria, including having recurrent, relapsed, refractory, metastatic, or advanced stages III or IV cancer, (4) the test is approved or cleared by the FDA as a companion in vitro diagnostic for an FDA approved or cleared indication for use in that patient’s cancer, and (5) results are provided to the treating physician for management of the patient using a report template to specify treatment options. We believe that our xT CDX assay, which received FDA approval in April 2023, will meet the criteria for reimbursement under the NCD. In addition,