Business Operations Basics: Tips for Your DME – Part 1

The challenges to an established DME/HME business looking to scale up can be multiple: planning and pursuing a well-defined path to new business, expansion of products and services, and the need for increased investment in resources, including trained staff. The first challenge for this growth is often the most basic: streamlining your existing DME administration and operations and building efficiencies to enable future growth.

A Trends Market Research report says that home care and individual care aids are anticipated to increase by roughly 13 million before the end of 2026. This constitutes a rise of 70% since 2010. The report also notes that a rising number of new product launches, mergers, and acquisitions are recent trends in the home medical equipment market. Established organizations in the home medical equipment market are focused on strategic initiatives like collaborations, regional expansion, and even service range expansion. There are no magic tips for successful DME operations, but judicious planning can go a long way in positioning your business for growth and success.

• Planning for long-term growth

Tapping into current DME/HME trends of expansion and collaboration requires a reliable foundation that can ably support new initiatives. Building efficiencies into your operations is important if you are looking at growing your existing business. Administrative workload reduction or streamlining can be a first step, followed by better and more efficient management of paperwork. Methodically organized paper records and documents, in the form of patient records, are easily accessible and are often the backbone of DME/HME businesses. These records help accelerate claim applications and processes as well, which eventually brings in income. The larger your business, the higher the chance that it operates on multiple information systems with increased paperwork.

Partnering with professional, HIPAA-compliant medical billing services can help ease the workload of a fast-growing business. With proven processes already in place, a professional DME partner can take on manual and time-consuming work such as data and document management. This empowers the business to take on strategic activities such as expansion planning, business development, collaborations, partnerships, and mergers & acquisitions.

• Building profitability into the business ethos

Focusing on building profitability into operations and business ethos needs to underpin all activities for the DME/HME. This can happen once the business has a strong handle on the operations and documentation management.

Understanding how financial management works and affects business operations can help you leverage assistance and augment existing processes. This can help to boost efficiencies in financial records management, bookkeeping, accounting, and revenue cycle management. These individual efficiencies allow the business to build profitability across different functions, and eventually, across overall operations.

Where does professional assistance feature in all of this?

Profitability is key to business sustainability. A professional DME partnership makes unnecessary the need to invest in-house, hiring and training staff to deal with increased documentation and paperwork. With this vital need taken care of, you can focus on building and working on long-term goals and activities for your DME/HME. Check out more DME business operation tips.

Next Steps

• A DME partnership can provide the right assistance and expertise to reliably manage DME/HME billing requirements, including data management, so that the business can continue to focus on providing quality healthcare.
• Email us at sales@analytix.com or call 781.503.9002 for a free session.
• Engage with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.