Where There's Rehab, There's Hope

From Kathleen Weir Vale's vantage point as CEO of a Texas home medical equipment company, the HME business isn't just one of continuing drama, declining reimbursement and more downs than ups. It's also an industry of possibilities.

Vale's HME company, Hope Medical Supply in San Antonio and Corpus Christi, recently opened a state-of-the-art rehabilitation equipment showroom in its San Antonio location.

Sounds a bit dicey, doesn't it? After all, rehab is included in the competitive bidding project that goes into effect in 10 areas across the country in July. Its Medicare reimbursement has already been sliced and diced, and requirements for even getting what reimbursement there is are on shifting sands.

But Hope Medical, which has done a solid, if simple, rehab business for a long time — it was, in fact, the exclusive Everest & Jennings wheelchair dealer in the area in the days when that company was the hallmark of HME's mobility segment — saw an opportunity and seized it.

“It's a matter of survival, as I see it,” Vale says. “We must broaden our customer base and our lines of business and penetrate more deeply into the market. And I know we are swimming upstream here, but that's kind of the way we operate. You just kind of have to have nerves of steel and go forward and work hard and trust you are doing the right thing. It is all a throw of the dice.”

In the Genes

Seizing opportunities seems to be in Hope Medical's genes. The company dates to 1941, when it started as an ambulance company. Within a decade, it expanded to offer what were then called “sickroom supplies.” The company also supplied products to hospitals and doctors' offices.

“We are arguably the longest-standing DME company in Texas,” Vale says. “The boys [riding the ambulance] would give people a card that said, ‘If you need a wheelchair, call Hope.’”

Soon, the company was supplying not only wheelchairs but medical gases, high-tech equipment and instrumentation. In 1974, the company sold Hope Ambulance to concentrate solely on HME, and in 1976, it opened a location in Corpus Christi, which allowed it to service all of south Texas. In 1996, it took the then-bold step of becoming accredited through the Joint Commission.

All of those moves included an element of risk, and so did establishing a rehab showroom. But for Hope Medical, it seemed like the right, and the best, thing to do.