Page 28 - HME Business, November/December 2020

HMEB: How are patients and referral part- ners responding to the new models?
Gary: I think we will have remote care as an operating service model now, and I think a lot of patients prefer that. I frankly would probably be one of those patients myself. However, I don’t think we’re going to be 95 percent remote setups post-pandemic. I don’t know what it will be, but certainly we want to meet patients and serve patients how they want to be served.
And I think there’s just going to be an open- ness to this as a service model in a way that there probably wasn’t nine months ago. I think our referral partners would have been concerned if we were shipping to this degree pre-pandemic, because it just wasn’t the way the business was normally done. I think now that we’ve got good data on patient outcomes, and patient experi- ence, it’s certainly going to be something that we will offer, and I don’t think we will be as resis- tant. We’ll still have locations and capabilities
to serve patients in the community face-to-face, but I do think a lot of patients are still going to relate to having that remote setup,
HMEB: Do you expect a second wave? If so, what do you think is going to happen and what are you advising providers to do in that regard?
Gary: We have a fairly bearish view on the outlook for the United States in terms of COVID and how we’ve responded as a country, as
a government, and how we might respond
over the ensuing kind of six months. I think
the winter’s going to be a little bit ugly. I think people are fed up with it, but that doesn’t
mean that it’s gone. I think we’re seeing rising rates in most areas where we operate. It’s very concerning. And then you co-mingle, the antici- pation of flu symptoms, and we’re fully expecting things to slow down or shut down at some point in the next 90 days again.
However, we haven’t really taken aggressive steps to go back to doing things the way they were before. So, a second wave is going to be minimally disruptive for us. We still primarily work home. If we have to stand down some of the locations that we’ve opened up, we can do that, but that’s not going to be that disruptive. We’re only able to see sort of five patients per
RT per day, because we’re allocating all this cleaning time between visits.
Sonal: My only advice is let’s embrace tech- nology in every facet of what we do. Let’s raise the use of technology at the provider end to run the business more efficiently every day, across every spectrum of what you do. Do what you do best and outsource the rest. And also with the patient. Let’s give them tools like DreamMapper and introduce them to therapy, give them the right patient engagement and education so that they understand what they need to do and better engage with their therapies.
If we have a second wave tomorrow, or we have a wave after two years, or a different outbreak after two years, let’s have a clear protocol and procedures documented. I think that is a very big piece. So we know what we can do next, or at that stage, if it happens.
We cannot forget this experience because what has taught us is that, we can use tech- nology better and still take care of our patients.
I don’t want that ethos to go away. Ultimately, the way we manage our patients today should be what are doing tomorrow. n
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