Care Motion seeks Amazon status

CLEVELAND - Provider Aaron Cavano recently launched a virtual shopping assistant to make buying HME easier for his customers and streamlining the process for his business.

“I was looking to automate—I felt like I was on the same call every day,” said Cavano, president of Care Motion, which accepts no Medicare or commercial insurance. “There's a pattern to these products and the questions people are asking. Now they get a greater sense of certainty that they are buying the right equipment and it helps us cut down on returns.”

Customers are asked to enter basic health information, like height and weight, and how they plan to use the equipment. The tool makes equipment recommendations and streamlines the ordering process for everyone.

Care Motion currently offers scooters, wheelchairs, vehicle and patient lifts, oxygen concentrators, walkers and mobility aids, and plans to add home modification services in the future, says Cavano.

“We want to be a one-stop shop—the amazon.com for HME,” he said. “We want to continue to research and find the best equipment out there.”

With the competitive bidding program making it more difficult to access DME, and more patients being asked to wait longer or shoulder more of the cost burden, paying cash has become more accepted, says Cavano. Unfortunately, there is still a large percentage of people who can't afford to pay out of pocket for HME, he says. To that end, Care Motion recently set up third-party financing, and partnered with GoFundMe to help people create crowdfunding campaigns to purchase equipment.

“We are advocates for living at home comfortably and affordably and to provide the best ways to do that,” he said. “Whether it be through technology tools or for those who can't afford it offering things like a GoFundMe, I think we are going to see a growing demand for more of that in the future.”

Care Motion launched in 2016 and did only about $2,600 in sales in its first month. Fast forward a year-and-a-half and the provider now has nine full-time employees and has a target of a quarter of a million in sales each month—not bad for someone whose background is in software engineering.

”We have a good handle on the market and we've done a good job hiring people with backgrounds in mobility and HME, especially on the sales team,” said Cavano.