When it comes to doing business, making friends with the competition can be a good thing. Throughout the 1990s, Peter Falkson and Joe Sheehan competed for customers in the home medical equipment market, concentrating on respiratory and sleep products. As the economy began to decline, the two commiserated on the changes that were taking place — particularly in Massachusetts.

“Around December 2000, we started talking about the industry,” Falkson says. “Regional players had been sold. Consumers were getting more involved in their care.” For example, he notes, drug companies and a national HME provider were advertising directly to patients.

Falkson and Sheehan asked themselves how their businesses were going to evolve to meet new consumer expectations. They relied on their combined 40-plus years of home health industry experience and conversations with respiratory therapists. Throughout the process, “we asked ourselves, ‘How are we going to be different … get the customers involved in the quality of their [lives]?’” Falkson says.

The answer, as it turns out, was for the former competitors to join forces and provide chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients with a little TLC. Canton, Mass.-based Trusted Life Care — TLC — began providing patients with oxygen and continuous positive airway pressure devices in September 2001. Only eight months later, Falkson and Sheehan decided to expand their services to serve COPD patients.

The easiest way to get customers more involved in their care is “to decrease the physician visits and let the customers understand and control the disease themselves,” Falkson says. So TLC developed a six-week home COPD management program, which is included in the cost of qualified patients' oxygen services.

The self-management program, called Breathe Easy, includes a six-part curriculum that encompasses patient and family education, relaxation techniques, exercise, nutrition, infection control and, smoking cessation, if necessary.

Housed in TLC's 6,000-square-foot facility that includes a CPAP fitting center, as well as conference, office and warehouse space, “the program is taught one-on-one and offered to any COPD oxygen patients that qualify,” Falkson says. Patients meet with their clinician or staff therapist once a week. Family and caregivers also are invited to the sessions.

“[Patients] learn about diagnosis, how the lungs work, breathing exercises, medications and oxygen,” Falkson says. They must demonstrate they have a complete understanding of each lesson before they can move onto the next step. “So the first week could take two weeks,” he says.

TLC works with Medicare, Medicaid and insurers such as Blue Cross to provide Breathe Easy services free of charge to COPD oxygen patients. A managed care organization also provides patient referrals.

Of the approximately 16 million COPD patients in the United States, Falkson says, “a lot of [them] wind up in the hospital. If we can keep them out of the hospital and in the home, we're convinced we can make up the cost of the program.”

The program's popularity has sparked company growth. TLC is adding new CPAP centers in Westborough, Woburn and Hyannis, Mass. “We need to cover the entire state because we need to have coverage where [managed care] constituents are,” Falkson explains. “We're noticing that 60 percent of our patients are choosing to come here rather than be taught at home.” And of the patients that come into the office for training, “less and less have follow-up problems with their mask not fitting correctly,” he says.