home medical equipment

BOOTH 1645 - Decked out in their traditional red, white and blue, Waterloo, Iowa-based The VGM Group will be reflecting on a quarter-century of serving the HME industry at Booth 1645 during Medtrade 2011.

For years, John Allman worked with The Med Group to help members secure managed care contracts. Now Allman is an independent consultant helping HME providers break into managed care markets, and he'll share his best tips in his Medtrade session, "Navigating the Complex World of Managed Care." He gave HME News this preview.

"The industry is changing." We've been hearing it for years, but it's not getting any easier to stomach. Change can still be challenging and stressful. Speaker and consultant Denise Ryan specializes in encouraging healthy responses to change, and she gave us this preview of the tips she'll share in her Medtrade session, "Dealing with Change Without Going Up in Flames."

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - HME stakeholders here in August continued efforts to ensure that providers don't get left out when the state moves Medicaid beneficiaries into managed care.

When CMS on Aug. 19 announced the affected zip codes and product categories for Round 2 of competitive bidding, HME providers had a lot to digest. Here's what some of them said, straight from the horse's mouth.

Everybody's doing it...blogging, tweeting and Facebooking, that is. Or at least it seems so. Social media is all the rage these days. But is it important for businesses? How do you get started? And just as importantly, how do you keep it going?

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - The first few months have been busy for fledgling HME provider association AtHome Services, according to Executive Director James Herren.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Medi-Cal, California's Medicaid program, is less and less of a viable business for providers, they say.

If you want a good idea of what's on an HME provider's plate right now, just spend a few minutes on the phone with industry attorneys Jeff Baird and Neil Caesar. What you'll hear: A greatest hits of concerns about selling your company, signing bad contracts, surviving audits and tackling accountable care organizations (ACOs).

High turnover and low productivity among employees could signal deeper problems within an organization, say human resource experts. Ana McGary, president of PeopleFirst Enterprises, and Frank Margulis, owner of Margin Consultants, spoke to HME News TV recently about why it's important to keep employees happy.