Features
Books for HME Providers
Direct-Mail Simplicity
The U.S. Postal Service created “Simple Formulas: The Easy Way to Grow Your Business with Mail” to help small businesses with mailing and marketing. The program publishes various free booklets, from Stirring Up Sales with a Simple Catalog and The Five Habits of Highly Effective Postcards to The Six Features of Graphic Design That Sell. Each is available at www.usps.gov/directmail. To access, click “Simple Formulas” on the right menu bar.
Talk the Talk
Len Serafino wrote Sales Talk to help home care professionals talk the talk. The book covers conveying passion in a pitch, using presentation tools, approaching a sales call, knowing when to listen, mastering public speaking and factoring in non-oral communication. The book tells how to assess communication skills, helps eliminate speech “nonessentials” — sort of, kind of, like, etc. — and analyzes how others communicate.
The author, currently vice president of purchasing and support services for American HomePatient, Brentwood, Tenn., has spent his career in health care, including 10 years selling provider-based home care services to payers and Internet-based products to hospitals and physicians.
The 190-page book, published by Adams Media, Avon, Mass., is available at bookstores nationwide and through www.adamsmedia.com.
HIPAA Basics
HIPAA 101: The Basics of HIPAA video, part of CMS' Administrative Simplification Video Program, provides a history of HIPAA and its benefits. It also describes how to tell if a business is a “covered entity” under HIPAA, what businesses need to do to be compliant with HIPAA's administrative simplification provisions and how the organization's rules and deadlines will be enforced. For more information, visit www.ntis.gov and type “HIPAA 101” in the search bar. Or, call 703/605-6000 and ask for product number AVA21211VNB1.
The Monster
Catherine Coghill of Santa Fe, N.M., is a 33-year-old who was sick for 30 years. She suffered one potentially lethal health problem after another. In the end, these problems were often solved in the most unlikely ways.
