The Right HME Stuff

Ever hear the one about the home medical equipment deliveryman who simply left the oxygen concentrator on the end-user's front porch and drove off?

How about the tale of the temp who picked up the phone but, unable to answer any of the caller's questions, finally told the customer to call back in three days?

Then there was the customer service representative who responded to a caller asking if the manager was in by saying only, “No.”

These are just a few of the horror stories of the HME business, tales from the trenches of staffing and training gone wrong. Such incidents, say industry consultants and providers, can slice into profits by undermining your reputation, increasing the number of after-hours and emergency calls and driving up turnover because you've hired the wrong person for the job.

According to the experts, proper staffing and training of employees, not to mention retention, are critical components of a successful HME business. But perhaps because of the urgency simply to get the job done, they often are low priorities.

“You want the service to be as if it were for your own grandmother,” says Mike Kuller, chief executive officer of Concord, Calif.-based Allstar Oxygen. “But it's not often that you see it practiced that way.”

How can you change that?

“You need to have a commitment to make [proper staffing] an issue,” says Louis Feuer of Dynamic Seminars & Consulting, Pembroke Pines, Fla. “Because if not for the service, what is the difference? The only difference [between providers] is the people. Everyone has the same wheelchairs and oxygen concentrators.”

The Right Staff

Success starts with staffing. That means finding the best person for the job — a task that may not be easy but one that is vital to business success. The wrong person in any job can result in problems, including damaged relations with customers and/or referral sources, weakened employee morale, high turnover and late or lost reimbursement.

To hire the right employees and thus guard against such problems, you first must know all the elements of the position you are seeking to fill, says Lisa Thomas-Payne of Albuquerque-based Medical Reimbursement Systems.

Many providers, Payne says, “don't take the time to draw up a really good job description. They may have [the job descriptions] for a clinical position or a few other positions, but it is not uncommon for the provider to slide by the seat of their pants and not have a job description for a customer service person or a biller.”