Tag: HME News Business Summit

During an intro call in June, two speakers for this year’s HME News Business Summit said they preferred to have our prep call as close as possible to the event because the rate of change in health care right now is so fast. They said, there are things that will happen in the next few months that we can’t talk about now but that we’ll want to talk about at the event. So, we scheduled another call for early September. When I look at the education program for this year’s Summit,...

YARMOUTH, Maine - There's “an explosion” in remote patient monitoring and HME providers need to have a firm grasp of the market if they want to benefit from the trend, says Dr. Richard Popiel. “I would encourage you to understand the market and what people are trying to do with the treatment plan,” said Popiel, senior advisor at McKinsey & Company and a member of CareCentrix's strategic advisory board.?“How do you monitor that? If you are delivering care at home and...

YARMOUTH, Maine - The COVID-19 pandemic has unlocked telehealth, creating new opportunities for home-based care and DME, particularly in rural America, says Dr. Jacob Warren. Under the public health emergency, CMS has expanded the use of telehealth and, while it's too soon to know whether these changes will be permanent, it's unlikely that the agency will be able to put that genie back in the bottle, said Warren, a behavioral epidemiologist in the Mercer University School of Medicine during “Rural...

It wasn't intentional, but nearly every session at the virtual HME News Business Summit in September stressed the importance of providers leveraging technology to not only improve care but also make their businesses more efficient and profitable. Sure, technology creeps up at the Summit every year and it's often the focus of a session or two, but never has it so dominated our entire event. There were sessions at the Summit that I knew would focus on technology, like the keynote by Dr. Jacob Warren...

YARMOUTH, Maine - The COVID-19 pandemic has hit home that providers need to go from being HMEs to HMAs—home medical advisors, said Invacare's Matthew Monaghan during last week's HME News Business Summit. “It's less of a focus on E for equipment and more on service and trust,” said Monaghan, chairman, president, CEO of Invacare. “For the next 18 months, it's really about going beyond equipment and being that trusted care advisor.” Monaghan, a panelist for the session...

There has arguably never been a more chaotic time in the HME industry. The industry already had Round 2021 of national competitive bidding on the docket for this year, in terms of CMS announcing single payment amounts this summer and contract suppliers this fall. But it's been the external pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic that have turned even our own little sector of health care upside down. The two together have made the industry spin. Will CMS pause the bid program? Even if it does pause the...

We made the decision to transition the HME News Business Summit in September to a virtual event pretty early on during the coronavirus pandemic. In addition to the uncertainty that faces us in the fall, we knew that if we didn't have a face-to-face event, we wanted to give ourselves enough time to plan a virtual event that wasn't just an afterthought. With the gracious approval of our sponsors (thank you Brightree, Fischer & Paykel, Allegiance Group, TIMS Software, Sunset Healthcare Solutions, Prochant...

I already wrote a story overviewing the HME News Business Summit, but here are some snapshots that, while they landed on the cutting room floor for that story, are still too important not too share. The return of TPAs AAHomecare's Laura Williard hinted at the Summit that we'd be seeing a resurgence of managed care organizations using third party administrators—and not just in Florida. And voila, just a few weeks later, Sleep Solutions in Michigan sent out an alert to its customers who are BCBS...

CLEVELAND - The buzzword at the HME News Business Summit last week was service: How providers must use it as a competitive advantage and how they must modernize their definition of it.Healthcare economist J.B. Silvers set the stage during a “fireside chat” on Monday morning with Medical Service Company's Josh Marx, saying providers need to a better job selling their service. It's one thing to sell equipment and another to sell your ability to reduce re-admission rates, he told attendees.“There...

The title of my blog is “On the editor's desk” and, this time of year, what's on the editor's desk is…a lot. Sure, there's the usual detritus of coffee cups, water bottles, hand lotion, gum, desk planner, ear buds and post-it notes. But there's also more specific detritus related to a number of big projects, specifically the HME News Business Summit, the 2019 HME Financial Benchmarking Survey and the HME Excellence Awards. Let's start with the Summit. I'm in the throes of putting together...