Page 15 - HME Business, Jan/Feb 2019

SETTING A
SMART STRATEGY
for 2019
In our 12th annual Big 10 survey of trends impacting the HME industry, we see some ongoing issues and opportunities, as well as some larger developments that providers might not have been considering.
By David Kopf
In order to set a smart strategy, you need to know what you’re up against. However, that’s not always clear in the post-acute care space, and the HME industry in particular. We’re familiar with plenty of ongoing issues, such as competitive bidding or the push to diversify revenues, but there are also other factors — many of them outside our usually narrow focus on the HME market, in specific — that will begin to impact the industry in 2019.
That’s why we publish the Big 10 list every January. It’s a chance for us to sit up, survey
the horizon, and take stock of not only what’s happening in our immediate marketplace, but what’s developments are headed our way. In our 12th annual edition of the Big 10, we’ve isolated these 10 trends:
• Competitive bidding gap
• The rest of CMS’s final rule
• TPE audits
• e-Commerce
• e-Prescription
• Increasedcompetitionfromlargeonlinecompanies • Financing
• Remote patient monitoring
• Convergence of payers and providers
• Next-level retail products
As you’ll see, some of these items might not
fit the usual list of issues you’ll see in a typical roundup of industry trends. However, those external developments could have profound enough impact that they either become market opportunities or market disruptors, depending on how providers react. Let’s take a closer look at each, and see how they might impact your stra- tegic planning for 2019.
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