About this episode
Price Wooding, who runs DME for Me Consulting out of Denver and has spent roughly 15 years in durable medical equipment since taking an operations manager job off Craigslist straight out of high school, tells NEMT owners the way in is subaccreditation rather than a full DME license. That route accredits only the delivery mechanism, so an existing fleet moves equipment from a supplier's warehouse to the patient without the intake, storage, billing and product expertise a standalone DME carries. It has to be a separate entity under a different name, with shared drivers structured by an attorney.
Key takeaways
- Subaccreditation puts an NEMT through inspection on the delivery process alone, skipping the full accreditation and insurance enrollment a standalone supplier needs. The NEMT never bills insurers for the equipment.
- The two businesses cannot share a name or entity. Same driver and same van can run passenger trips and equipment deliveries in one day only if the employment agreements cover both.
- The sales target is suppliers that direct ship glucose monitors and routine supplies by FedEx, UPS or USPS. Wooding says most do not know they are allowed to contract delivery out.
- The timing argument is broker saturation. Wooding says brokers in some regions take a long time to admit new providers, and fleet insurance costs keep climbing while the vans wait.
- A full standalone DME brings physical location, signage and staffing requirements. Wooding points to the brace fraud investigations, where tiny equipment cost against large reimbursement drew bad operators in.
Chapters
- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:59 Overview of DME
- 2:40 Overlap between NEMT and DME
- 5:30 Examples of business doing DME and NEMT
- 7:50 How to do both DME and NEMT
- 10:43 Why should NEMT diversify into DME?
- 15:15 How to find DME work
- 18:30 Stories of doing both NEMT and DME
- 24:30 Scaling your NEMT business with DME
- 26:00 Diversifying your business with DME
- 27:20 Regulations around DME
- 28:59 Price's background
