Accreditation is sometimes perceived solely as a regulatory requirement for Medicare reimbursement, but its true value extends far beyond billing. It serves as a powerful differentiator in the competitive home medical equipment (HME) marketplace, signaling a commitment to quality, compliance and patient-centered care. Accreditation promotes operational excellence, boosts credibility and establishes a framework for continuous improvement.
As an HME or durable medical equipment (DME) provider or business, you can leverage accreditation to explore new business avenues, refine and expand your expertise to better meet your patients’ unique needs, and establish trust with both patients and referral sources. By meeting rigorous industry standards to earn accreditation, your business demonstrates its ability to deliver safe, effective and high-quality patient care, setting yourself apart in the health care landscape. This strategic advantage is particularly evident in the implementation of patient-centered care, a core principle that accreditation supports and strengthens.
Embracing Patient-Centered Care
Patient-centered care is a holistic approach that prioritizes the needs, preferences and values of individuals throughout their healthcare journey. This approach applies to both clinical settings as well as HME and DME businesses. In a traditional clinical setting, it involves a team-based approach, where primary care providers assume the role of quarterback to coordinate care. HME providers play two roles: providing medical equipment and supplies and coordinating the individualized support and resources patients may need. HME providers often have a unique understanding of the patient’s needs because they make home visits.
A patient-centered HME provider:
- Offers personalized care plans tailored to specific patient needs
- Focuses on wellness, disease prevention and ongoing education
- Ensures convenient access to products and services that enhance quality of life
- Continuously seeks performance improvements to optimize patient outcomes
- Collaborates with other healthcare providers to facilitate seamless, coordinated care
Accreditation reinforces these principles by establishing standards that drive quality assurance, operational consistency and continuous improvement. By aligning your patient care models with accreditation requirements, you can foster stronger relationships with both patients and referral sources, leading to increased trust, loyalty and business success. Accreditation also provides a pathway for strategic expansion, allowing you to identify and meet emerging healthcare needs within your communities.
Strategically Expanding Your Impact in the Community
A key component of strategic expansion is understanding the unique health care needs of the communities you serve. Accreditation plays a vital role in this process by ensuring that you have the operational structure and compliance measures necessary to support growth effectively.
Tools from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), such as the Map for Medicare Disparities by Population, can help identify prevalent disease state trends, allowing HME providers to align their business offerings with the needs of their communities.
Common chronic conditions affecting patient populations across the U.S. include:
- Asthma and COPD
- Diabetes and kidney disease
- Hypertension and Hyperlipidemia
- Arthritis, osteoporosis, amputee care
- Atrial fibrillation, heart failure, ischemic heart disease
- Cancer
- Stroke
By incorporating disease-specific equipment and supplies into your business plan, you can better serve your communities.
Examples of product categories that align with these disease states include:
- DM01: Automatic external defibrillators (AEDs) and supplies (cardiovascular)
- DM02: Commodes, urinals, and bedpans (musculoskeletal)
- DM03: Continuous passive motion (CPM) devices and supplies (musculoskeletal)
- DM04: Contracture treatment devices (dynamic splint) (stroke, arthritis)
- DM05: Blood glucose monitors and supplies (diabetes, cardiovascular)
Strategically expanding product offerings based on community health data allows you to better meet patient needs while positioning yourself as an indispensable health care partner. The three-year accreditation cycle gives providers the opportunity to evaluate their product categories. A strong accreditation organization (AO) should be able to assist you in strategizing the appropriate product offerings while adhering to best practices and quality standards, helping you maintain regulatory compliance while enhancing patient care.
Certification Builds Trust
Certifications are an ideal complement to accreditation and serve as a valuable tool for both businesses and individual professionals, enhancing credibility and trust within the health care ecosystem.
For businesses, certification:
- Differentiates your organization from its competitors
- Helps manage risk
- Provides assurance for referral services
- Increases patient satisfaction
- Limits fraud, waste and abuse
- Provides criteria for evaluating potential employees
- Supports compliance with Medicare Quality Standards, particularly human resource management standards
For individual professionals, certification:
- Differentiates you as a professional
- Demonstrates that you are up to date within your field
- Is portable, allowing career flexibility and growth opportunities
By integrating certification into your staffing plans, you can help demonstrate a commitment to a high standard of care, leading to stronger business relationships and improved patient outcomes. Paired with accreditation, certification helps reinforce a business’s commitment to quality. This integration is particularly effective when accreditation is viewed as a dynamic component of strategic planning.
Strategic Planning & Accreditation
Accreditation should not be viewed as a static requirement but as an active tool in your ongoing strategic planning process. Leveraging accreditation for growth and improvement involves several key steps:
- Evaluate product categories and utilization. Assess current product offerings and their alignment with your community’s needs.
- Dive into contracting, payers and accountable care organizations (ACOs). Explore opportunities to expand payer contracts and collaborate with ACOs to enhance service delivery.
- Identify unmet patient needs. Use accreditation as a tool to assess underserved populations and address their medical equipment requirements.
- Partner with physician groups. Strengthen relationships with physicians and specialists in your communities to establish a reliable referral network.
- Assess AO offerings. Consider factors such as staff responsiveness and customer service, available resources and overall guidance when working with an AO.
By making accreditation a cornerstone of strategic planning, you can proactively adapt to industry changes, improve service quality and expand your market presence.
You can unlock new opportunities, strengthen relationships and deliver high-quality, patient-centered care by embracing accreditation. It is not just about compliance—it’s also about building a strong foundation for long-term success in the ever-evolving healthcare landscape. I encourage you to rely on your AO, current or future, to help you understand what is best for your business and its potential growth.