HQAA Blog

HQAA’s Equipment List is the vehicle organizations use to disclose what products and supplies they provide to their customers. It looks a lot like a Medicare form (the 855-S), which serves a similar role for companies providing care to Medicare recipients and it's very important that the information on the 855-S matches up with HQAA’s equipment list. The list is three pages long, and broken up into categories. One of the categories is respiratory equipment, which includes oxygen, ventilators, and CPAP, along with some other less common therapy modalities that utilize pressure to treat various respiratory disorders.

HQAA’s standard for care plans:

For those of us that live in parts of the country with cold, rainy, snowy, and overcast winter seasons, spring is a great time and maybe the most beautiful part of the year. It is a time of rebirth as the grass becomes green again and leaves on trees reappear and flowers and budding plants begin to bloom. I don’t know why spring became associated with “spring cleaning”, but every year as the weather improves, many of us do a deep and thorough annual cleaning along with a reorganization and thinning out of our “stuff”.

Employees, managers, and owners of DME organizations accredited by HQAA may have noticed a familiar question that usually pops up during the survey: “What is your organization (or “this location”) proud of? It is almost de rigueur for the surveyors to ask that question at some point during the survey process. Asked that question by a surveyor, the tendency is to consider how it relates to a standard and it’s only natural to think “Gee, how do I answer that” or “What’s the ‘right’ answer here”. Truth is there’s no right or wrong answer. The surveyor is trying to paint a picture of the organization to enhance and supplement their own understanding of your company.

Imagine you are either sitting down to hear a debriefing after your accreditation survey or opening up the report from your accreditation survey. In either/both cases, the surveyor or the accreditation agency will most likely be breaking down any areas of deficiency into issues requiring on site follow up or issues requiring written follow up. Different accrediting bodies call these categories by different names, but in all cases, they are essentially issues that you need another visit to clear or issues that can be cleared through some type of written follow up report.

A “contract” is defined as “an agreement between two parties that creates an obligation to perform or not perform a particular duty”. Organizations are sometimes taken aback when a surveyor asks them to see any contracts they have in place during the survey. Accreditation agencies are certainly not law firms nor are surveyors lawyers, but the contracts a DME organization has in place have relevance to the survey process and the quality standards.

When the ball dropped at the stroke of midnight January 1 this year, did you make any resolutions? Most people do—sometimes a new diet, an exercise program (January 1^st is traditionally the busiest day in a gym!), a more responsible financial plan, or some version of “be a better person” by saying something nice to a new person every day or trying to bestow a compliment on a stranger.

I imagine it’s the same in other industries—December in DME can be a hectic, scatterbrained race to the finish. (“The finish” in this case being the end of the year). Financially speaking, it’s a time to try to maximize earnings and pad the bottom line, wrapping up billing cycles and completing tasks to prepare financially for the new year. Patient/customers that have met their deductible are anxious trying to consume healthcare before a new deductible cycle begins. December 31^st is the end of a quarter, the end of a month, and the end of the year and there’s two major holidays –Christmas and New Year to work around. Staff wants to spend time with their families. And of course, company holiday parties abound.

One of my funniest memories from surveying was many years ago at a small DME company in the Midwest. The staff was pleasant and accommodating and had been well prepared for the survey. But for some reason (probably related to a co-worker’s retelling of a “bad” survey that she’d gone through), the staff was pretty nervous about the accreditation visit. I pride myself on NOT presenting an intimidating attitude, but the staff at this place thought I was the police, the IRS, and the guy in charge of the Inquisition rolled into one. I tried my best to put the staff at ease. At one point, I asked a customer service representative about how they conveyed information on the patient’s rights and responsibilities to new customers. She fumbled through a pretty good answer. I asked her if she could name one of the responsibilities and she answered that they need to inform the company if they move or if their insurance changes (a good answer). I asked her if she could name a right and she froze up. Finally, she took a deep breath and blurted out: “The right to remain silent”.

DME owners and managers often cite quality improvement (QI) and/or performance improvement (PI) as one of the most difficult concepts to understand and one of the most difficult programs to implement within their businesses. And industry consultants and surveyors find the so-called QI Standards some of the most frequently cited standards for deficiencies and recommendations, and one of the areas in which they spend the most consultative time educating companies.