Take a Bow, Shelly

More than a half-century ago, a young entrepreneurial pharmacist experienced an “aha!” moment while looking at the label on an oxygen canister.

“To be dispensed by or on the prescription of a physician,” it read.

To the pharmacist looking to grow his business, it was an invitation to expand into another arena: oxygen supplies and durable medical equipment. Shelly Prial accepted that invitation, and he's never looked back.

Indeed, if anything, Prial has since established himself in the home medical equipment industry as a person of “uncanny vision,” as Schuyler Hoss, president and principal consultant for Vancouver, Wash.-based Northwest Healthcare Management, says.

Prial's vantage point has been varied: pharmacist, HME provider, industry consultant, founder of the Homecare Providers Co-op, director of government relations for Graham-Field Health Products, HomeCare magazine columnist. But his viewpoint has always been the same: There is a future for this industry, both for large and small providers. How that future looks, though, is dependent on the provider's willingness to be stronger, do better, get involved.

Now, after years of championing, cajoling and challenging HME providers to do just that, Prial is retiring. He and his wife of some 58 years, Thelma, are leaving the HME arena in better shape than they found it.

When the Prials got into HME in the early 1950s, the vast majority of providers were small mom-and-pops with big hearts but little business acumen. Prial saw in them enormous potential to assist people and build strong businesses as well.

He soon became a champion of the industry. He got involved in pharmacy and HME associations, both state and national. As a consultant, he helped numerous providers expand their operations. Then, in 1986, he and Thelma, herself always a force for good in the industry, founded HPC, which was based in Melbourne, Fla.

“That proved to be the most exciting period of my career,” Prial says about the buying group for small, independent providers.

HPC was all about helping those providers build their business skills so they could compete in the strongly competitive HME market. HPC became part of the Waterloo, Iowa-based VGM Group in 1999. Prial expanded his consulting business, added his current lobbying title and became even more involved in industry advocacy.