Change agents

During an intro call in June, two speakers for this year’s HME News Business Summit said they preferred to have our prep call as close as possible to the event because the rate of change in health care right now is so fast. They said, there are things that will happen in the next few months that we can’t talk about now but that we’ll want to talk about at the event. So, we scheduled another call for early September.

When I look at the education program for this year’s Summit, which we’ll hold virtually Sept. 9-10, this anecdote perfectly sums it up. So much is changing, so fast.

The two speakers above, Gary Sheehan of AdaptHealth and Nathan Ray of West Monroe, will be dis-cussing, among other things, big players like Amazon, CVS Health and Best Buy driving change in health care. What these players do sends ripples – potentially tsunamis – throughout the entire space, including home care, and all eyes are on them.

Possibly even more so, all eyes are also on the changes driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has been a wake-up call for every facet of health care and, as a result, decision makers across the continuum of care are stepping on the gas on certain efforts. 

In one session, Medically Home’s Rami Karjian will discuss how health systems like Mayo Clinic and Kai-ser Permanente are stepping on the gas on hospitals-at-home, in the wake of the pandemic forcing so much care to take place there, and how he believes HME providers are at the leading edge of this movement with their presence in the community and their logistics expertise.

In another session, Polsinelli’s Jeanna Palmer Gunville will discuss how health care providers and insurers are stepping on the gas on strategic, value-based arrangements as a way to improve outcomes and control costs, in the wake of the pandemic exposing the vulnerability and unsustainability of fee-for-service.

This is all the change swirling all around HME providers. But what about HME providers themselves? How will they drive change in response?

That’s what the Summit is all about. Learning. Questioning. Then changing.

“See” you there.