Page 8 - HME Business, April 2019

Editor’s Note
Learning to Love Change
Change — even massive change — surely can be disruptive, but there are some upsides, too.
Volume 26 Number 3 April 2019
When I look back on my
career, I have witnessed a head-spinning amount of professional change over the last roughly 30 years. Honestly, it’s been a wild ride, and I think there can be some parallels between my editorial work and the current state of the industry. Let me explain:
When I first started working on my journalism degree, personal computer ownership was still the exception, rather than the rule, and the acronym “PC” was something IBM was trying to trying to forge into the consumer consciousness.
Most of my initial story writing was scribbled into those long reporter’s notepads and then banged out on electric typewriters. We’d do most of our editing in red ink on those type-written pages. In fact, the phrases “cut” and “paste” come from editorial lexicon. If we needed to rearrange paragraphs, we would cut out the paragraphs into strips and then paste them on a new sheet of paper.
When we finished editing stories, we would hand that copy to the phototypesetter, who would re-key the stories into the phototypesetting machine, which would then spit out the column inches that we would then dip into liquefied wax and then affix to boards printed in non-reproduc- tive blue gridlines to help us lay everything out. (We used wax so that if we screwed up, we could easily remove and re-apply the item.)
We’d do the same for display type, such as headlines, lines to separate stories, spot graphics, and photos that we had turned into half-tones (i.e., the photos were reproduced into hundreds of tiny dots using a half-tone machine). Then we’d take all those boards to a company that would turn them into sheets of film that we would then take to the printer, who would print our publication.
By the time I had finished my degree, the entire process had moved to computers, and we were using desktop publishing software such as Aldus PageMaker, to produce our publications. Instead of turning file folders full of typed pages, photos and story notes, we were handing the copy desk a floppy disk.
That marked a massive workflow transition, but no one batted an eye. Why? Because it was a better process that gave us more control and more time to
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
Executive Editor Associate Editor
Art Director Production Coordinator
Director of Online Product Development
Group Publisher
Integrated Media Consultant
David Kopf
(949) 265-1561 Leila McNeill
Dale Chinn Charles Johnson
Marlin Mowatt Karen Cavallo
(760) 610-0800 Caroline Stover (323) 605-4398
focus on the core job of putting together a quality publication.
And that was just the beginning of the change. Within a year of hiring on with my first full-time magazine job, some other young editors and I installed a simple, peer-to-peer network between all our computers so that we could electronically share files rather than having the carry around floppy disks.
Within two years, another editor and I were pitching AOL and CompuServe to see if they’d
give us a small corner where we could put our magazines’ content on their services. Less than a year after that, we tabled the online service idea, because we had started teaching ourselves HTML and were looking into setting up a web server at the company. A couple of years later and we were learning a language called Cold Fusion and dipping our feet into SQL databases so that we could do dynamic content on an outsourced server.
Fast forward to today, and much of my job occurs online, rather than in print. HMEB has operated an exciting and rewarding webinar business; e-Source our enewsletter is going strong; we interact with
the industry on social media, including our special event social media programs, such as Live from Medtrade; and we just launched the HMEB Podcast (see page 9), which I’m really excited about.
I guess what I’m saying is that change can be head-spinning and scary, but it can also create whole new opportunities. Good examples would be outsourcing through distributors (page 12) or new revenue sources such as managed care (page 30). They key is to focus on your core value. In my case, that’s understanding readers and giving them what they need. In your case, that’s understanding patients and referrals and helping them achieve outcomes. If we stick to those core missions, we can handle any change.
David Kopf Executive Editor HME Business
Steve Ackerman
President Spectrum Medical
Jeffrey S. Baird, Esq.
Chairman of the Health Care Group of Brown & Fortunato, P.C.
Cara Bachenheimer
Lobbyist/Government Af- fairs for Brown & Fortunato, P.C.
Rob Baumhover
Director of Retail Services for VGM Retail Services
Ty Bello, RCC
President and Founder Team@Work
Georgie Blackburn
Vice President, Government Relations and Legislative Affairs BLACKBURN’S
Rob Boyeye
Executive Vice President of HME Brightree LLC
Sandra Canally
President
The Compliance Team Inc.
George Coppola
Director of Marketing CAIRE Medical
John Letizia
President of Laurel Medical Supplies Inc.
Joe Lewarski
Vice President of Global Respiratory and Sleep Drive Devilbiss
Ron Resnick
President Blue Chip Medical Products Inc.
Tom Ryan
President and CEO AAHomecare
Wayne Slavitt
Founder and CEO Mobül: The Mobility Store
Wayne van Halem
President and Founder The van Halem Group LLC
INFRASTRUCTURE SOLUTIONS GROUP
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REACHING THE STAFF
Kevin O’Grady Karen Cavallo Irene Fincher Susan May Sydny Shephard
Rajeev Kapur Janet Brown Erik A. Lindgren
Michael J. Valenti Jeffrey S. Klein
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