Page 33 - HME Business, April 2019

Plugging In
Interoperability isn’t just for hospitals and clinics any longer; HME providers’ referral partners want and need to connect with them. Are you ready?
By Holly Wagner
Management Solutions | Technology | Products
While you go through your day helping customers and managing your business, an army of data crunchers and programmers are working like an electronic beehive to connect all the information doctors, hospitals, clinicians and pharmacists feed into the healthcare system.
Add to that what patients are feeding into their CPAPs, inhalers, cardiac monitors, glucose meters and pretty much everything else that can be measured electronically, and you have the makings of a seamless, end-to-end connected care system — or a confusing, vulnerable health- care disaster.
Actually, you have both. Technology is bringing previously unimagined capabilities to medicine — especially remote monitoring and caregiving — but the pace of digital technology advancements also carries the risk of system failures or breaches and data security.
“The future of healthcare is connected. Whether it’s connectivity inside a hospital, between health systems, or from the hospital to the home — connected care is transforming care delivery and improving patient outcomes and clinician efficiencies,” says Tim Murphy, business leader of new business solutions at Philips Sleep and Respiratory Care.
You may feel removed from all those bytes of heart rates and sleep disruptions flying around cyberspace, but if you’ve ever filled an e-scrip, you are dabbling in connected care. Some of the devices you provide are likely subject to remote monitoring, and the more information home medical devices capture and transmit, the more opportunities there are for DMEs, especially in an era of bundled care, to shine.
Pressure to integrate and streamline medical care and records is coming from many direc- tions: payers, government, hospitals and care- givers are all on the list. To the extent that patients have adapted to the digital age, they also expect the benefits of those technologies to be part of their healthcare. That pressure creates opportunities for DMEs to add value.
“If you are an accountable care organization and you are at risk for covering the lives you treat on a day-to-day basis, your interaction with those patients on a face-to-face is a very tiny portion of your time with them. So anything HMEs can do to leverage the power of automa- tion and data collection to monitor how those patients are doing with their therapy, that’s tremendously powerful to referral sources,” says Nick Knowlton, vice president of business development for Brightree LLC. “Once the referral sources understand that they can get this kind of data on these patients from HME
hme-business.com | April 2019 | HMEBusiness 19