On the Editor's Desk

Back in the day, when Theresa Flaherty and I were working under Jim Sullivan and Mike Moran, they had a saying, “What’s in it for Mario?”  This is something they’d encourage us to keep in the back of our minds as we were reporting on and writing stories. The Mario in question was Mario LaCute, a now retired business exec who used to head up Seely Medical in Ohio. The point being, when news happens, always ask yourself, what’s the impact on the HME provider?  When...

AAHomecare will hold its first full-scale, in-person lobbying day in six years on May 12-13.  IMHO, the timing couldn’t be better.  The industry’s annual lobbying day shifted to a virtual format during the COVID-19 pandemic and stayed that way for several years. It returned to in-person last year but only on a limited scale.  While stakeholders from AAHomecare, VGM and other groups have worked valiantly to get reimbursement relief passed before and after...

While putting together the March issue, I spent a good amount of time updating stories (and updating them again) to keep up with President Donald Trump’s plans on tariffs.  Even before the inauguration, I started working on a story about the possibility of tariffs on imports from China, Mexico and Canada, and the impact that would have on the HME industry. It seemed like a good bet they would happen, based on Trump’s first term as president and his stump speeches during the election.  That...

It’s a tradition for me to use my editorial in the upcoming January issue to discuss the most read stories in the HME industry for the previous year.  Here is what the list looks like for 2024:  ResMed on mask recall, big tech and demand gen  Oxygen bill introduced in House  Catheter proposal is huge step forward  Owens & Minor to buy Rotech  Philips exit: ‘Nothing fazes us anymore’  Change Healthcare outage has scary impact on HME industry  Providers:...

Artificial intelligence were two words often mentioned at the recent HME News Business Summit. At one point, Dexter Braff, founder and president of The Braff Group, who moderated a panel of investors and bankers, even said: “It’s a rule of this conference that I have to mention AI at least once.” (Insert laughs and eyerolls.) While borderline annoying, AI being a hot topic at the Summit is not surprising. I don’t think you can go to a health care conference today...

In the time we reported on the November issue (roughly three weeks), not one but two major hurricanes hit the Southeast. Both made landfall in Florida, but one, Hurricane Helene also had an impact as far north as Tennessee and western North Carolina. After Hurricane Helene, provider Brian Wilson told us his delivery techs described the Asheville, N.C., area like this: “It’s like an atomic bomb went off.” When storms like these strike, HME providers are particularly impacted. The...

Just as we were putting the final touches on the October issue, Apple announced that its new smartwatch would include a sleep apnea feature.  We were expecting this. Earlier this year, Samsung Electronics announced that the sleep apnea feature on the Samsung Health Monitor app had received de novo authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and everyone expected that Apple and Google were not far behind.  Following Samsung’s announcement, a consistent topic of...

HME stakeholders have been fighting Medicare Advantage for some time, particularly when it comes to these plans not following Medicare policy and coverage for complex rehab technology and non-invasive ventilators, two product categories for patients with the greatest needs.  At the Heartland Conference in June, there was even a panel discussion titled “Dealing with Medicare DISadvantage Plans - Are You Ready, Martha?” Stakeholders continue to take it up a notch.  AAHomecare...

I had a conversation recently with someone who has been in the HME industry for quite some time – as a vendor and as a provider – and he said something to the effect of: The industry needs to give up on reimbursement getting better and lean into technology to make what little reimbursement there is more profitable.  That’s not a hard line I would draw – and, of course, neither would AAHomecare and other industry stakeholders.  In fact, stakeholders headed to Capitol...

When Change Healthcare acknowledged that it had been hacked by a “threat actor” named “BlackCat” and subsequently had to disconnect its systems, we were fairly certain it would be the subject of the cartoon and HME Newspoll for the April issue.  There were other ideas, of course – Theresa and I are nothing but a font of content, are we not? – including a poll on the impact on the HME industry of Dexcom’s plans to offer a continuous glucose monitoring...