New Beginning

It’s a little unusual lately to hear that someone is starting a new HME business. In fact, said Phil Stone, when some people hear that “they think I’ve just been let out of the asylum. Maybe I am crazy, but there’s a lot of emotion in this, too.”

Stone is a pharmacist and former OptionCare franchise owner whose location was sold to Air Products Healthcare in 2003. I met Phil that year in Washington when we were both lobbying our Georgia legislators at an AAHomecare fly-in.

Since then, he’s been under a non-compete, “but that’s over,” Phil said, and when Air Products opted out of the HME business last year, he and his son Cham began working to get back in it.

“I just felt like there was a gap in the community when Air Products closed up,” Phil said. “I know it’s much more difficult now than when I started — you didn’t have to be too smart — and it’s probably the absolute worst time to get back in. But now is when I think there’s a need in the community.”

Is he worried about competitive bidding? Yes. Is he worried about the endless list of new regulations and audits? Yes. Is he worried he might not make it? No.

“I know it’s going to be tough and we’re going to have to work a different way,” said Phil. “But there’s always going to be a need for what we do, and if we can figure out a way to do it and make a margin, we’ll weather the storm. I still think there’s a need, and I still think there’s a way to do it.”

Why is Phil so sure? Because, he said, “we don’t even have our doors open yet and we’ve already had people coming in and calling us for weeks.”

I talked with Phil and his sales manager Kathy Hope on the day they were putting out the new signs for Peoples Home Medical in Covington, Ga. “It’s exciting that we’re going to be doing something people are asking for,” Kathy said.

Explained Phil, “We’ve got people telling us they don’t feel comfortable using an oxygen provider in Atlanta — and we’re only 30 miles away.”

Here’s where the emotion comes in. “I’ve been on both sides,” he continued. “Big companies don’t always look at what smaller companies do as being a part of the community, but we’re all about being a community-based provider. We want to be the company that’s taking care of the needs of the people who live here.”

You might not make a profit on some things, Phil said, but you provide those items because your customer needs them, and when you do, the reward is usually the rest of their business. Companies that don’t do business that way, that don’t view their patients in a whole perspective, that can’t give that fast response time, he said, “just have a different slant.”

It seems legislators do, too, and Phil Stone, who is “starting over from scratch,” said he’ll soon be lobbying again to help protect his small HME. “Home care is a local thing,” he said. “This is a Covington, Ga., story, but it happens everywhere.”

And the only scary thing about that, according to Phil, is that down the road if legislators and regulators have their way, “I don’t think there’s going to be too many of me out there.”