ACU-Serve zeroes in on strategy

AKRON, Ohio – ACU-Serve’s recent acquisition of Professional Medical Administrators better positions the company to “help grow and support” smaller HME providers amid another wave of consolidation in the HME industry, says CEO Jim Knight. 

Knight says ACU-Serve has lost “some of our bigger customers” due to consolidation, including Aerocare, which was acquired by AdaptHealth, and now, with Pro-Med, it is better positioned to offer leading-edge technology, processes and resources to providers of any size trying to grow in today’s market. 

“We believe the best strategy going forward is to expand our service to smaller providers,” he said. “We’ve been in the industry a long time, and this is the third time we’ve seen it consolidate like this and every time it happens, it leaves a void with referral sources, where a smaller provider can thrive. We see the opportunity to help grow and support them.” 

Pro-Med, based in Boca Raton, Fla., was founded in 1996 by Sylvia Toscano, who will join ACU-Serve as vice president of client services, along with 60 U.S.-based employees. This will increase ACU-Serve’s number of U.S. based employees to more than 200.  

The “blending” of ACU-Serve and Pro-Med is “very natural,” Toscano says, with ACU-Serve having the expertise in front-end operations, including intake, documentation retrieval and authorizations, and Pro-Med continuing to focus primarily on back-end operations, including collections.

“Our clients were inquiring more about front-end support, so they can focus on the things they have to wrangle every day – sales, inventory management, supply chain, accreditation, compliance,” she said. “Now, they have all the tools at their disposal to do true revenue cycle management.” 

Those tools include a proprietary platform that gives ACU-Serve and Pro-Med and by extension their provider customers the ability to, among other things, mine, track and trend data, Knight and Toscano say. 

“With what they’re able to do with our technology, we can tell them, ‘Here’s the intake person causing the most preventable denials,’” Knight said. “They can use that and apply it to their accounts. We can help them improve areas and if they don’t improve, we can take those areas over.”