2004 Salary Survey

As anyone in the home medical equipment business soon learns, while the equipment is a critical part of the HME package, it has a companion. The industry also delivers service that requires both specialized skills and a customer-oriented culture at all levels of the work force, from billing and delivery to therapy and pharmacy.

People are the heart of the business — and, fittingly, the biggest item on the budget.

“With all due respect to product, physical plant, technology and other capital investments,” says author and consultant Vince Crew, “without a highly dependable, well-trained and courteous staff, nothing else would be possible. Every function — unloading the truck, answering the phones, repairing equipment, managing the referral network, delivering the product — goes directly to sales, cash flow and profitability.”

With so much of a company's performance riding on even the lower-paid workers, the best employees can be worth every penny they're paid. But how many pennies are enough to hire and retain them? How much is too much?

Every year, HomeCare helps readers answer such questions with its salary survey, a provider poll that gauges the HME industry's pay and benefit practices. If a business owner wants to know what peers are paying customer service reps, billing clerks, pharmacists and other employees, the survey has the numbers, based this year on data from more than 300 home care firms.

The 2004 survey offers mixed news for employees. Pay in the industry appears to be rising at least as fast as wages in the overall economy. Benefits, however, show signs of eroding among smaller HME companies. From the employer's perspective, the survey suggests that cost pressures remain strong in both pay and benefits, especially in health coverage. In some categories, however, salaries are up more than the average — a sign that the supply of qualified people may be falling short of demand.

Following are the key trends that show up in this year's survey.

As in 2003, nearly all firms responding to the HomeCare survey are giving raises to at least some of their employees. At 42 percent of the companies, pay hikes apply staff-wide. Another 12 percent of the firms say they are giving raises to at least 90 percent of their employees; another 9 percent said they're giving raises to at least 75 percent.