Breathing Easier

For Klingensmith HealthCare, the important factor in a patient's hospital-home equation is the DASH in between.

The Ford City, Pa.-based company is in the process of reinventing itself — and that DASH is a vital component. DASH stands for Discharge + Assessment & Summary @ Home, a program Klingensmith began in 2009 as a means of remaining viable in an increasingly difficult environment for home medical equipment providers.

"We no longer define ourselves as a [durable medical equipment company]," says Dan Easley, senior vice president of sales. "We are this chronic disease management company. We are well planted in the home. What we have to do is a better job of defining what we can do in the home. With all these chronic disease management patients coming down the pike here, you've got to rely on what you can do in the home."

In a perilous HME world fraught with tsunami-sized changes such as competitive bidding and threats such as audits and constant cuts in reimbursement, it is important for HME companies to be forward-thinking, says Klingensmith's Kim Wiles, BS, RRT, vice president of respiratory services.

"As a DME company, you are forced to look outside the box, to look at health care reform and position yourself to [adjust to] how that is going to look in the future," she explains.

How that future looked to Klingensmith was not like a traditional HME company.

"In the DME world, we are always worried about how we can get it there cheaper and faster," Wiles says. "But there are other payers out there who are looking for more than that. We really need to look at how we can bring value to them.

"The future of home care is beyond DME," she adds. "As an industry, we really need to look outside that box. Going down the road, it is really chronic disease management."

Taking a Breath

Klingensmith started out on this road two years ago. It wasn't an unusual path — with 150 employees and six locations serving the western portion of Pennsylvania as well as northern West Virginia and eastern Ohio, the company has made a name for itself through its endeavors.

Since its beginning as a pharmacy in the 1940s, the company has constantly reinvented itself. For 30 years, it has been a traditional full-service HME company, adding and subtracting equipment and services as needed. Both Wiles and Easley, founder of Inspired Technologies and developer of a conserving device, were initially brought on board to enhance the company's respiratory services sector.