The Demand for DME: How Innovative DME Solutions Are Improving Care, Driving Efficiency, And Reducing Costs

Approximately 76% of hospital readmissions are potentially avoidable and associated with $12 billion in Medicare expenditures. Ensuring that patients have access to the right type of equipment in a timely manner is critical to prevent adverse events that lead to hospital readmissions such as those related to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and bronchiectasis. The timeliness factor also ensures that nurses can complete risk assessments, review care plans, ensure medication adherence, and educate patients about follow-up care.

Yet without streamlined solutions, clinicians lack transparency of the status of a delivery and may not be made aware of a problem until the patient is back in the hospital. Plus, the lag time in getting the right equipment can affect the patient experience, leaving patients and their families feeling uncared for, anxious, and stressed.

Up to $265 billion worth of care for Medicare Fee-For-Service and Medicare Advantage beneficiaries could shift from traditional facilities to the home by 2025 without a reduction in quality or access. Post-acute care, long-term care, dialysis, and infusion therapy, in particular, are also expected to come together in a more comprehensive way.

With more care moving to the home, healthcare organizations must prepare now with a DME strategy and clinical models and identify partnerships with vendors that can provide flexible solutions and allow organizations to scale.

While some healthcare organizations have attempted to build their own DME management systems, the complexities, and significant time and financial investments involved are often too challenging to undertake on their own.

New solutions provide organizations with a single, streamlined DME process and automated workflows that eliminate inefficiencies, prevent errors, improve outcomes, and reduce administration burden—allowing nurses to spend more time caring for their patients and reducing financial pressures.

With a single, app-based platform, clinicians order and track equipment and supplies from multiple third-party vendors and locations, log inquiries, route requests for approvals, and place service orders. Using evidence-based clinical criteria and an interactive questionnaire, nurses assess patient needs and automatically see a curated set of equipment as well as an ordering cadence for certain types of supplemental equipment. By taking the guesswork out of ordering, these solutions eliminate ambiguity that could lead to errors and enable data-driven decision-making, accuracy, and timely care. Full EHR integration ensures clinicians across the organization have full transparency into clinical notes, care plans, and real-time data about orders and maintenance status.

These innovation solutions are also customizable and allow organizations to build the platform according to their business models, workflows and operations, and scale the solution as they grow and transition to home health or add more service lines. By automating and streamlining complex processes, DME management systems better leverage— or reallocate— existing staff, reduce costs, and increase revenue and long-term profitability. Plus, improved communication between providers and patients about the availability and use of DME fosters trust, confidence, and an optimal patient experience.

Increased demand for DME brings significant technological innovation in the way of streamlined systems that improve outcomes, drive efficiency, and allow nurses to focus on their patients. With the continued shift to value-based care and home health, these systems will become even more important to ensure quality care and optimal reimbursement. For organizations to stay competitive, they must lay the foundation now by identifying partners that offer flexibility, customization, and the ability to develop solutions that scale with their organizations.