Blogs

Fall, for me, is a time of new beginnings. Maybe it’s because for so long, it was the start of a new school year. Maybe it’s because the New England air finally sheds its muggy curtain and I can breathe again. Feeling a sense of renewal and looking to make a fresh start at home, I hired a housecleaner to come in and do a deep clean. They scrubbed the markings off my stove dials and tried to overcharge me, but hey, my kitchen sink looks brand new. For the HME industry, fall...

We recently loaded the HME Databank (www.hmedatabank.com) with 2021 data, something I’ve been keen to look at to see the impact of current dynamics in the industry, including the COVID-19 pandemic and a major CPAP recall. Let’s start with the pandemic. While we were putting together this issue, Invacare released its second quarter financial results and company officials said they expected to see reduced COVID-related demand for respiratory products in the next several quarters,...

Three hundred and twenty-nine years. That’s how long it took for Elizabeth Johnson Jr.’s name to be cleared after being convicted of witchcraft in Salem, Mass., in 1693.  According to the Boston Globe, state lawmakers agreed to reconsider her case – she was the last accused witch to be cleared – at the behest of an eighth-grade civics class. There followed a bill, an attachment vehicle in the form of a budget bill and, finally, approval.  Sound familiar? That’s...

If there’s anything keeping HME providers, especially those that own their own businesses, awake at night, it’s the ongoing mystery of the empty labor pool. “For six months, we ran ads on all the job boards and got three applications,” Craig Rae, a provider in North Carolina, told me. “I ran ads again yesterday and have my fingers crossed.” Laurie Bachorek, a provider in Texas, has been searching and searching for help, but she says it’s difficult to...

One of the main themes of the education at this year’s HME News Business Summit, Sept. 18-20 in Nashville, Tenn., will be the increasing interest in the home – the products and services provided there – by larger players in health care and investors.  Scan the stories in the July issue and you’ll see why.  Take this story, “AmerisourceBergen “de-risks” home infusion (see page 12).” Here we have AmerisourceBergen, a global health...

I’m having one of those weeks where I feel like I started in last place and just can’t catch up.  And that was before SCOTUS sent us back 50 years in time.  I was out of the office last week attending VGM’s Heartland Conference, an event I enjoy and usually enjoy blogging about from the actual heartland. Got behind on that, too. But, while it’s tempting to just move forward, I didn’t want to forge ahead without sharing a few quick highlights of...

Am I the only one getting CPAP shortage vibes from the baby formula shortage?  I’m not going to lie. The formula shortage wasn’t fully on my radar until recently. With a seven-year-old, my days of buying formula are long over. But seven years ago, it would have been a different story, as my daughter was 100% formula fed. (My breastfeeding story, by the way, is not uncommon. Difficulty with latching. Supply issues with pumping. There is no shame here.)  I can’t imagine...

Rising costs. Inflation. Never-ending pandemic. Never-ending supply chain challenges.  Or, as AAHomecare’s Jay Witter so succinctly summed it: It’s "rough" out there.  He’s not wrong, of course, and I occasionally look at our headlines and think, “Yikes.”  However, as I am reminded every day, week and month, HME providers are a resilient bunch, as evidenced by a quick perusal of headlines in this issue.  There are stories about growth,...

I occasionally miss the hum of working in a busy newsroom – not the clackety-clack of keyboards or the smell of microwaved fish – but that buzz of sounds that melds into a mélange of forward momentum and accomplishments, that sense of Things Are Happening Here.  Such was the case at Medtrade West in April, where attendees flung off two years’ worth of Zoom fatigue and hit the show floor.  It was music to Show Director York Schwab’s ears.  “As...

The most read stories of the first quarter of 2022 point to a lot of changes in the HME industry right now.  Our No. 1 most read story, “Owens & Minor buys Apria, reaches deeper into home care,” points to an accelerating trend in the larger health care industry where vertical silos are disintegrating. Here, we see a global distributor and logistics company buy an HME provider (this follows its previous acquisition of Byram Healthcare). These kinds of deals have happened before,...