Pointers from the Past

30 years ago

Today, home medical equipment companies worried about staying afloat could take a few pointers from the past — specifically from Fitzsimmons Surgical Supply, which was featured in HomeCare three decades ago.

Company founder Lou Fitzsimmons managed to turn his business from a small physicians’ supply house into the leading medical supply company in Chicago.

How did he do it?

A family-owned business, Fitzsimmons, run by Lou and his two sons, Tom and Jim, decided to focus two-thirds of its operations on retail sales, allowing the company the flexibility to change with the changing market.

“All marketing decisions are temporary,” Fitzsimmons told the magazine. “They’re for today.”

20 years ago

In October 1988, HomeCare examined the expanding role of distributors in the market. Where once the size of a provider’s warehouse was a source of pride, HME companies were beginning to see that both space and inventory dollars could be put to better use. Distributors and manufacturers were offering services and terms that could help make turning over home care inventory far easier, according to a six-page feature.

“Dating and a variety of other terms are being seen more frequently, freight discounts or specials are more commonplace, and fast turnaround on both line and part orders are becoming more the norm,” the article said. Some specific examples of new services noted by HomeCare‘s staff:

• Lumex offers a toll-free fax number providers can send orders through 24 hours a day.
• Mountain Medical’s Fast Parts Program has opened a warehouse that will deliver products via Federal Express “24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”

Harvey Diamond, then president of Diamond Diabetic Equipment in Jamaica, N.Y., advised readers: “Keep money in advertising and marketing. Don’t tie it up on some inventory in the back room.”

10 years ago

Lift chair sales were on the rise in October 1998.

“There was a lift chair heyday in the mid-1980s when Medicare paid full price for the lift chairs. During that time, about 125,000 lift chairs were sold. We have now surpassed that, even though the market is cash-based,” Dan Meuser, then vice president of sales and marketing for Pride Mobility Products, said of the continuing boom.

Reported in the issue’s cover story, however, the news was not so upbeat. Nancy-Ann Min DeParle, head of the Healthcare Financing Administration, was making fraud prevention a top priority. For HME providers, that translated into a proposal for nine additional supplier standards, including a surety bond requirement, and site visits.

While a final rule wasn’t published until 2000 (and the surety bond requirement wasn’t incorporated), the suggested standards would ban supplier telemarketing; require providers to have a physical office and a listed business telephone number; and apply criminal and civil sanctions for misrepresentations on supplier number applications.

A decade hence, in an 11-page draft rule published in the Federal Register in January this year, CMS has proposed clarification and expansion of the now-existing supplier standards along with the addition of others that all HME providers must meet to retain Medicare billing privileges.

“For many years, concern about easy entry into the Medicare program by unqualified or even fraudulent providers or suppliers has led us to increase our efforts to establish more stringent controls,” CMS said in explaining the new proposal. At this writing, providers are awaiting release of the final standards rule.