Earnings season

It's a busy week for those of us who cover the few public companies that do business in the home medical equipment market.

This week both Invacare and ResMed report financial results for the first quarter and third quarter of 2016, respectively. A little farther out, on May 9, Inogen will report financial results for its first quarter.

The conference calls hosted in conjunction with these financial results are always interesting, but I expect this round of calls to be especially interesting.

From Invacare's last call, for its fourth quarter and year-end 2015 results, we know that an independent auditor has issued a certification report for the third phase of the company's consent decree with the Food and Drug Administration.

Enquiring minds want to know: Has Invacare submitted its own report to the FDA yet? Has the FDA accepted both reports? Has the FDA made plans to conduct a re-inspection?

On a side note, Invacare has been pretty vocal in previous calls about its efforts to retrain its sales force to be less generalist and more specialists. The company is also hiring sales reps who better fit this mold—you might have seen a number of its postings on the RESNA job board. I talked to Lara Mahoney, Invacare's senior director of investor relations & corporate communications, about that for a story for our June issue.

For ResMed, this week's call will be the first since the company bought Brightree. While ResMed hosted a specific conference call in the wake of that news, I expect investors and analysts still have questions about what the short-term and long-term plays are for a combined ResMed-Brightree.

Additionally, from ResMed's last call, we learned about the company's plans for a previous acquisition, Inova Labs, a manufacturer of integrated stationary and POC system.

In general, with two big deals announced within about a month of each other, I expect investors and analysts to be tuning in even more closely to ResMed's financial results.

Check our HME Newswire on Monday for all the details.