Books for HME Providers

Direct-Mail Simplicity

The U.S. Postal Service created “Simple Formulas: The Easy Way to Grow Your Business with Mail” to help small businesses with mailing and marketing. The program publishes various free booklets, from Stirring Up Sales with a Simple Catalog and The Five Habits of Highly Effective Postcards to The Six Features of Graphic Design That Sell. Each is available at www.usps.gov/directmail. To access, click “Simple Formulas” on the right menu bar.

Talk the Talk

Len Serafino wrote Sales Talk to help home care professionals talk the talk. The book covers conveying passion in a pitch, using presentation tools, approaching a sales call, knowing when to listen, mastering public speaking and factoring in non-oral communication. The book tells how to assess communication skills, helps eliminate speech “nonessentials” — sort of, kind of, like, etc. — and analyzes how others communicate.

The author, currently vice president of purchasing and support services for American HomePatient, Brentwood, Tenn., has spent his career in health care, including 10 years selling provider-based home care services to payers and Internet-based products to hospitals and physicians.

The 190-page book, published by Adams Media, Avon, Mass., is available at bookstores nationwide and through www.adamsmedia.com.

HIPAA Basics

HIPAA 101: The Basics of HIPAA video, part of CMS’ Administrative Simplification Video Program, provides a history of HIPAA and its benefits. It also describes how to tell if a business is a “covered entity” under HIPAA, what businesses need to do to be compliant with HIPAA’s administrative simplification provisions and how the organization’s rules and deadlines will be enforced. For more information, visit www.ntis.gov and type “HIPAA 101” in the search bar. Or, call 703/605-6000 and ask for product number AVA21211VNB1.

The Monster

Catherine Coghill of Santa Fe, N.M., is a 33-year-old who was sick for 30 years. She suffered one potentially lethal health problem after another. In the end, these problems were often solved in the most unlikely ways.

Through a plethora of interviews, journalist and editor Peter Kray turned Coghill’s story into The Monster, a “no-nonsense allegory for better health in America,” Coghill says. The book “was written to give people hope and help them take ownership over their individual health through rational thought” — in essence, if it’s not helping you, it’s not medicine.

Published by The Coghill Foundation, Santa Fe, N.M., the book is available at Amazon.com, www.bn.com and at bookstores nationwide.

Banking on Retail

Building on the advice he’s been offering HME providers for years, industry veteran Shelly Prial has published a manual for providers ready to cash in on cash sales. The book, Yes It Really Works — Building HME Retail Sales, features detailed instructions for retail merchandising, marketing and sales strategies. The book is being introduced at the Medtrade bookstore.

Writer First, Detective Second

Since second grade, Walter Dudley Itrich says he wanted to be a writer first, detective second. In We’re the People, Too, Itrich played both roles, profiling 16 people with disabilities from across the country. Each story examines the individual and his or her disability from social, economic, political and personal angles. Disabilities range from blindness to mental illness to impaired mobility.

The author knows impaired mobility first-hand. Itrich, who has multiple sclerosis, has required the use of a wheelchair since 1989.

“I found more people … asking me about disabilities other than the one [that] had landed me in the chair,” Itrich says in enableonline.com, an enabled online community. “I didn’t know as much as I could about HIV, spinal-cord injuries or the different kinds of blindness and deafness, not to mention the multitudinous forms of mental illness.

“From the sight-impaired legislative assistant to the retired, deaf schoolmarm in northern Montana … I found disabilities and lifestyles I wanted to know more about,” Itrich continues. “Wouldn’t, and shouldn’t, every John and Jane Q. Citizen want to know more?”

Along with discussion of disabilities, the book briefly reviews the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.

Published by Champion Press, Fox Point, Wis., the 148-page book is available at bookstores nationwide and through www.ChampionPress.com.

Customer Service Strategies

Many companies have one demographic to serve as the foundation for a customer service program. HME providers, however, serve multiple demographics, from an 82-year-old end-user to a referral source.

“Customers in this industry are so different; each requires a different focus,” says Louis Feuer of Dynamic Seminars & Consulting, Pembroke Pines, Fla.

In Customer Service Strategies for the Health Care Environment, Feuer explores key ingredients to keep customers satisfied.

“The intent is to generate thought, discussion and action,” he says. “Readers will find practical strategies, tools and exercises designed to increase their awareness of customer service issues affecting every department within an organization.”

The book also covers accreditation and what it means to health care. Published by the Health Insurance Association of America, the 250-page book is available at www.dynamicseminars.com and www.hiaa.org.