Avera Home Medical puts customers first

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. – Avera Home Medical Equipment understands the importance of location, so much so that when the provider got feedback that customers found its location in busy downtown Sioux Falls “intimidating,” it upped sticks for a more accessible location in the city. 

“A lot of our clientele felt it was difficult to get there due to traffic, or found it intimidating,” said Mitch Butler, vice president of Avera Home Medical Equipment, part of Avera@Home. “So, we partnered with another one of Avera’s arms, North Central Heart, in a location in between a location right off the interstate that’s easier to find and safer for people to get to, and it’s located between two main (health) campuses.” 

The new location has an updated showroom with a “warmer” feel, compared to the more warehouse-like atmosphere in the previous location, and features half-a-dozen patient rooms that offer privacy and setup space. It also positions customer service representatives closer to the front, rather than tucked away in the back, for closer contact during visits. 

Avera Home Medical Equipment, which has 17 locations and services 72,000 square miles, covering half of South Dakota and reaching into Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota, offers a broad portfolio of HME that includes everything from CPAP devices to mastectomy products to power wheelchairs. It also has a living-at-home division that offers assessments and installations for threshold ramps, stairlifts and other accessibility products. 

“It would be so much easier to narrow it down to five product lines and focus on respiratory or rehab,” Butler said. “But it’s been a focus of Avera’s from the beginning to be the premiere provider in a rural health care setting so that people could come to us and we could take care of it all.” 

It can be tough to make it all work – Avera struggles with the same low reimbursement, high costs and labor force challenges other providers face – but the provider “finds a way,” says Butler, with the help of its 153 employees. 

“Our patients want to stay at home and that’s the piece we’re hopefully allowing them to do,” he said. “Our employees are everything about the success of our company.”