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providers: Physical Therapists (PTs) and Occupational Therapists (OTs), for instance. Plus, many providers, such as oxygen providers, readily adopted telehealth practices in their efforts to help hospitals discharge Covid-19 patients to the home setting where they where the received
hospital-in-the-home care.
And when it comes to referral partners,
similar policy changes have made it much easier for physicians to confer and consult with their patients via telehealth, rather than in person, to minimize contact. And their patients like it too, since they don’t have to drive to the doctor’s office for a simple consult.
With patients and referrals often prefer- ring telehealth, HME providers can assume it isn’t going anywhere in 2022. This means they must not only adopt it, but learn to use it strategically. And to that end, there are a variety of services popping up, such as rtNOW and TeleHealth Clinical Evals, which provide outsourced clinical staff to provide telehealth consults for sleep and complex rehab evaluations, respectively.
3. THE SUPPLY CHAIN
As we all know, the supply chain issues
caused by the Covid-19 pandemic have resulted in huge burdens for healthcare as a whole and HME providers in particular. The Health Industry Distributors Associa- tion recently summarized transportation issues impacting medical products noting some key bottlenecks for HME providers:
• Shipping times are 2.5 times longer, with
two- to three-week backlogs at Asian ports and shipping containers costing four times higher.
• Once ships arrive on U.S. shores, they are anchored eight to 11 days while waiting for dock space, and worker shortages mean offloading takes three times longer.
• The 62 percent increase in ecommerce during the pandemic has created driver shortages, with driver availability at its lowest point in three years.
Plus, HME manufacturers are seeing compo- nent equipment costs skyrocket due to short supplies. For instance, the cost of foam used in medical devices has gone up 240 percent.
And the real kicker is that the HME industry essentially absorbs the resulting increased costs because reimbursement remains the same. Yes, programs such as the CARES Act and CMS’s recent 5 percent
CPI-U increase helped, but the underpin- ning reimbursement rates for DMEPOS suppliers are still based on rates from 2016 and don’t compensate at all for the consid- erable cost increases that HME providers have experienced due to these supply chain programs. And, of course, Medicaid programs and private payers base their reimbursement largely on Medicare rates. So the industry is working to secure better reimbursement (see page 24).
4. THE MICROCHIP SHORTAGE
Narrowing our focus on supply chain is- sues impacting HME, there is one specific shortage that is having a profound effect
on some of the most-needed equipment in homecare: the dearth of semiconductors and microchips used in many medical de- vices, such as oxygen concentrators, CPAPs and ventilators. Without those chips, the devices can’t get produced. Plus, given that other industries and products ranging from automobiles to consumer electronics use the same chips, the demand and supply is completely out of balance.
How bad is the shortage? Researchers AutoForecast Solutions estimated the world
Management Solutions | Technology | Products hme-business.com | January/February 2021 | HMEBusiness 23 Untitled-1 1 8/23/21 2:14 PM