Grassroots Group Aims to Mobilize Patients

Riverside, Calif.

As the industry makes its last push to gather support for home care legislation before Congress wraps up this year’s session, a grassroots group is taking a new approach to get patients involved.

Competingbid.com, an online forum for providers, released a “patient awareness kit” in the form of a brochure on competitive bidding last month that could reach more than 2,000 patients each day, according to site founder Chris Rice.

“We’ve seen people try to get patients involved in the past but the message is too complicated,” said Rice, director of marketing for Diamond Respiratory Care, Riverside, Calif. “We thought if we made it as simple as we possibly could and gave them some simple steps to follow, it would be a big help.”

“Congress just cut your Medicare benefits, and I’ll bet you didn’t even know,” states the brochure, which explains to patients how the competitive bidding program could negatively affect their care and urges them to contact their members of Congress.

To illustrate the point, the brochure includes a cartoon that depicts an elderly man who is delivered a pogo stick instead of a walker and an elderly woman who receives one oxygen tank from “Low Bid Inc.”

The illustration was drawn by political cartoonist Mark Hill, who has been featured in national publications such as Time and The Chicago Tribune. Hill is currently working on cartoons about the home oxygen rental cap and power mobility reimbursement cuts to be used in future campaigns, Rice said.

According to Rice, the idea is to educate those who have daily contact with patients — drivers, technicians, customer service representatives, etc. — on the issues and have them deliver and explain the brochures to patients.

Most providers see an average of more than 30 patients per day, according to a recent poll on competingbid.com, so if the site’s more than 80 registered members participated, Rice estimates that more than 2,000 patients could be reached daily.

“Industry-wise, we don’t have a voice in Congress because we don’t have a strong lobby. But imagine hundreds of thousands of people getting the message,” he said.