Page 21 - HME Business, July/August 2022

SANITIZER & DEODORIZER
was an instant hit with medical and clinical professionals, HME providers, and patients, explains Dr. Scott Martin, MD, the medical director of Telehealth Clinical Evals.
“... From a patient standpoint, patients adored the process,” he says. They didn’t have to leave the solace of their home that didn’t have COVID at the time. And it was simply a much more personal interaction.”
Additionally, the ability to conduct the evals via telehealth offers a literal window into patients’ lives that can benefit their care, Martin notes.
“It’s allowed us to interview a patient and the family in their own home and get a real concrete understanding for what that home dynamic is like, not just for the patient, but for the caregivers,” he explains. “Because patients are only going to do as well as the care they have at home, and the equipment that caregivers have to assist that loved one with at home.”
And that assessment of the home situation can go a long way into ensuring that the home environment is optimized for the patient’s care beyond just the wheelchair, for example. The patient might, in fact, need a whole lot more in terms of home medical equipment. Finally, being able to remotely connect has let the physicians and licensed clinical professionals on Telehealth Clinical Eval’s team see things they would never have seen before.
“We were seeing these patients for wheelchair evaluations because a lot of them were having acute events, and at the time we were doing these wheelchair evaluations, we saw massive needs,” Martin explains. “There were some people literally sleeping on mattresses on the floor, with horrible bed sores. They had no home medical equipment, none. They didn’t have shower chairs; they didn’t have hospital beds; they didn’t have low air loss mattresses. Some of them didn’t have simple transport chairs to be able to get in and out of the house.”
Naturally, those insights create all new abilities to get patients the HME items they need to ensure they get the full complement of care that they need.
An Expanding Universe
These are just three services using technology in new and interesting ways to offer new outsourcing and staffing options to HME businesses. As mentioned at the outset of this story, a whole range of outsourced billing services paved the way for outsourced workflows. (That’s no surprise given the immense complexity of DME/HME billing, as well as the various workflows and management layers attached to that aspect of running an HME business.)
Outsourced billing companies include companies such as Prochant (prochant.com), ACU-Serve (acuservecorp.com), Sunknowledge Services (sunknowledge.com), Medbill (medbill. net), and MedBillingExperts (medbillingexperts.com), to name a few. All of these services let providers outsource elements of their claims and billing processing, and some of them help providers outsource the management of their entire revenue cycle.
One thing is certain: outsourcing options for HME businesses are not going away. Whether it’s billing workflows or clinical evaluations and care, we can expect the range of options available to providers to expand so that they can maintain and prioritize their primary focus: the patient.
Management Solutions | Technology | Products
hme-business.com | Ju.y/August 2022 | HMEBusiness 19