On the Editor's Desk

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,...

Being the recipient of Google Alerts for “oxygen concentrator” is a scary and sad place to be right now.  I have these alerts set up for a number of key terms in the HME industry – think “sleep therapy” and “home infusion” and “AdaptHealth” and “Invacare.” They’re delivered to my email inbox every afternoon.  Recent alerts for “oxygen concentrator” have been almost exclusively related to...

It seems all any of us in the HME industry can talk about these days is in-person events (We are, after all, at the time of this writing, still waiting for the DMEPOS final rule; otherwise, that might be the dominant talking point). Will in-person events happen? Will people go to them? Certainly by July, the time of the industry’s first planned in-person event – Medtrade West, July 12-14 at the Phoenix Convention Center – all those who want to be vaccinated will be vaccinated,...

The cartoons that appear on these pages come easier some months than others. This wasn’t one of those months. Managing Editor Theresa Flaherty and I were nearly pulling out our hair after about two days of tossing around ideas, none of them sticking to our satisfaction. (Among those that fell on the cutting room floor: My idea to have an HME provider in a home setting up a patient on, say, an oxygen concentrator and other health care providers trying to get into the home any which...

In the past few months:  A global pandemic has severely stressed the supply of oxygen concentrators, revealing cracks in an HME industry that has been slowly chipped away at by Medicare’s competitive bidding program for 10 years.  CMS has decided not to move forward with the majority of Round 2021 of that program, because the agency didn’t “achieve expected savings,” and therefore – wait for it – the current reduced rates continue to apply.  The...

Shelly Prial will be remembered for a number of things, including being the “show ambassador” for Medtrade. I’ll remember him for the bow ties – and his passion for telehealth. When he was still with us, I fielded calls from Prial, sometimes weekly, about how teleahealth was the wave of the future and how HME providers needed to carve out a niche for themselves in this new market. This is from a Q&A we did with Prial way back in 2006: HME News: Where can HME providers...

The big news story right now is the election and the herculean efforts by various states to count the unprecedented number of absentee and mail-in ballots, a task that stretched out well beyond the Nov. 3 vote. The chants - count the votes by some, and stop the count by others - got me to thinking about CMS's recent decision to drop 13 product categories from Round 2021 of competitive bidding. When the news broke, there was a first wave of relief - the industry had been lobbying CMS to pause Round...

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...

Earlier this month, Managing Editor Theresa Flaherty and I were trying to piece together the latest developments in reimbursement relief and we were both getting pretty frustrated. AAHomecare announced recently that the industry's champions in the House of Representatives had introduced H.R. 8158, a bill that would eliminate the budget neutrality requirement for home oxygen therapy. The association says the House Energy and Commerce Committee requested that the provision be peeled away from the other...

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...