Page 12 - HME Business, April 2018

Exploring the
IT Options
How should DME pharmacies approach their technology options when it comes to integrating billing and management systems for the DME side of their businesses?
By Holly J. Wagner
Over the past decade, providers of durable and home medical equipment have witnessed an explosion of new software systems designed to optimize not only their billing, but just about every aspect of their businesses. For pharmacies that also specialize in DME solutions, integrating some of those cost-cutting IT ef ciencies can be a tantalizing prospect.
However, adding DME/HME software to an existing retail pharmacy involves some challenges. To begin with, most HME software providers have built their products around that side of the business, with phar- macy software as an add-on module. That doesn’t mean the pharmacy module is any lower quality, but it does mean the DME software might not be immediately compatible with what you are using now.
“You would need to have something that was able to be integrated. If you are running a legacy pharmacy software system, I am not aware of any that would integrate right out of the box,” says Steve
Rx 4 April 2018 | DME Pharmacy
Rogers, vice president of product management at HME software company Brightree LLC. (Brightree is rolling out a pharmacy module for Infusion pharmacies, but no broad offering for retail is planned.)
That leaves a small retail pharmacy with several options to manage DME, from good, old-fashioned manual management, to operating parallel systems, to getting a DME software provider to work with your pharmacy software provider to create a DME module for you,
to a ground-up software transition to a new system that more easily accommodates both lines of business.
Each of those options has attendant costs and bene ts to weigh. The business owner has to ask: Where are my business and my software in their life cycles? Do I have the client base to make this worthwhile? Can I grow the base for DME with broader offerings or marketing? How much will upgrading disrupt my business?
“Whatever integration that you choose needs to offer you exibility
hme-business.com