Mobility

ARLINGTON, Va. – RESNA is taking advantage of RehabWeek’s return to North America to co-locate its own conference at the event.  RehabWeek will take place May 12-16 in Chicago, drawing about 2,000 attendees. The RESNA conference will take place May 13-15.  “It’s an international conference that moves around the world,” said Andrea Van Hook, executive director of RESNA. “In 2023, it was in Singapore. RESNA participated in a similar way in 2019, when...

TUCKER, Ga. – In a move to better serve Georgia’s coastal communities, Friends of Disabled Adults and Children (FODAC) has opened a second facility in Savannah with the help of congressionally directed funding and in partnership with a regional Goodwill.  A $478,000 grant from the Department of Health and Human Services made it possible to renovate the facility in Savannah facility, add three trucks for equipment collection, put up new signage and place seven 40-foot...

WASHINGTON – Complex rehab stakeholders converged on Capitol Hill last week to boost support for legislation that would improve access to titanium or carbon fiber wheelchairs.  The group met with legislators and staff from 49 Congressional offices Sept. 9-10 to move H.R. 5371 forward and seek support for a Senate companion bill that is expected to be introduced soon.  “Our CRT leaders made a strong impression across The Hill that included reaching a high proportion of...

BUFFALO, N.Y. – One of Jim Lenker’s main goals in his two-year tenure as president of RESNA is to “approach, recruit and teach” younger people to the field of assistive technology.  Here’s what Lenker, PhD, OTR/L, RESNA Fellow, who is an associate professor within the Department of Rehabilitation Science at the University of Buffalo in Buffalo, N.Y., had to say about why it's important to expand the organization’s community to include early career or...

WASHINGTON – NCART is using the Medicare Electronic Application Request Information System (MEARIS) as a tool to secure another meeting with CMS officials to discuss lower-than-expected reimbursement for power seat elevation systems.  The organization submitted an application through the system in July, shortly after CMS announced that it would increase the reimbursement for these systems but only by $13.62 to $2,013.96.  “We talked to our members, and they asked us, ‘Is...

RICHFIELD, Ohio – MobilityWorks entered four new states in 2024, a “pretty ambitious” move that was instrumental in the company hitting 100 locations this year, says CEO Bryan Everett.   The company, which debuted in Akron, Ohio, in 1997, opened locations in Washington state, Oregon, Utah and Oklahoma through strategic acquisitions.  “It’s been a historic year for the company,” he said. “We’ve been really focused on our mission...

PHOENIX – United Seating and Mobility, d/b/a Numotion, has agreed to pay $13.5 million to resolve allegations that the company violated the federal False Claims Act.  The settlement resolves allegations by the United States that Numotion submitted false claims to Medicare and other federal health care programs for custom wheelchairs and wheelchair parts.  According to the allegations, the claims were false because they were based on patient evaluations that were unlawfully authored,...

KANSAS CITY – VGM Live at Home's Building Opportunities Summit in November will help take the home accessibility market to the next level with presentations and breakout sessions on how to leverage the latest in technology, says Jim Greatorex.  Among those technologies: a physician-owned company with a mobile application that brings a clinical aspect to home assessments, says Jim Greatorex, vice president of VGM Live at Home, who was in the process of finalizing a partnership with...

PITTSBURGH – Clinical investigators from the University of Pittsburgh and the Medical University of South Carolina recently published a study that shows different types of mobility devices and certain characteristics of people with limited mobility are associated with reported falls.  The study, published in the journal Disability & Rehabilitation: Assistive Technology, and based on an analysis of more than 11,000 deidentified cases from the Functional Mobility Assessment and Uniform...

ATLANTA – SageHome’s new CEO, Joe Gorman, believes his accomplishments as COO have laid the groundwork for propelling the company into a period of accelerated growth.  Gorman spent much of his three years as COO building an infrastructure for SageHome that included applying “big company best practices” that he learned while helping Home Depot build its at-home services business.  “Stepping into the CEO role now, I have a big advantage in that I really...