For HME outfits struggling with decreasing reimbursement levels and increasing costs, goods with plenty of built-in profit potential, such as patient lifts, can be very attractive. “Patient lifts are a small part of our business—we sell only about two a month—but they really help get our numbers up on the bottom line,” says Rick Roenicke, sales specialist with Saginaw Medical Service Inc in Saginaw, Mich.

Prices for basic, manually operated lifts start at around $1,000 and top out near $6,000 for state-of-the-art, powered specialty jobs. However, the economic benefits of offering patient lifts do not come about automatically.

“There are quite a few challenges involved in patient lifts, and these have to be adequately addressed in order to achieve success with these particular products,” says Mark D. Berra, ATP, chief of operations for Adapt-Ability Inc in St Louis. Here is what a few leading patient lift providers advise:

1. Offer a choice of lift types. “One thing we discovered right away is that patients and their caregivers want options and choices,” Berra says.

There are manual models as well as motorized versions running on either or both battery power and household electric current. Some cradle the patient in simple slings, some in sophisticated (and safer) body-support devices. According to Roenicke, the most appealing lifts are those of the ceiling- and wall-mounted variety, in part for the reason that they store out of the way and thus do not add clutter to a room already crowded with equipment.

2. Carry only the most reliable lifts. Lifts that are poorly engineered or constructed of inferior materials will require vastly more servicing than those that are well made. And each service call you are forced to make eats into your profits. But knowing which products are quality-built can require some detective work. “It’s a trial and error process,” Roenicke says. “In the last 5 years, we have tried out products by at least six different manufacturers before finding the one that met our criteria for reliability and minimal servicing. So far, with this particular vendor, we haven’t had so much as a single service issue come up that can be traced back to a deficiency in manufacturer engineering, craftsmanship, or materials.”

Jeff Lavoie, president of All-Ways Accessible in Concord, NH, hastens to add that networking with other HME providers and asking them about their own experiences with patient lifts can be a good way to shorten your search for the most reliable makes and models.

3. Market to the right prospects. Patient lifts are most easily and successfully promoted to existing customers because you already have a relationship of trust with them, Roenicke says. This means that they are more inclined than strangers to hear you out and accept your proposal to improve the quality of their lives.

Other viable groups of prospects are medical professionals and decision-makers at long-term care facilities. Patient lifts are particularly attractive to them owing to the ergonomic benefits they deliver. “It takes a big toll on the back, shoulder, and neck muscles of the staff who have to manually transfer patients in and out of beds and wheelchairs and bathtubs all day, every day,” Berra says. “They like the idea of being able to use lifts to minimize that effort.”

Lifts also reduce the risk of musculoskeletal injuries among staff and patients, which is a message facility administrators are particularly receptive to, Berra adds.

4. Employ effective inexpensive marketing. A believer in the principle that showing is better than telling when you want to deliver a powerful message, Roenicke frequently plays a videotape to demonstrate the various (and sometimes quite remarkable) applications of patient lifts. The video, which is narrated by a patient-lift user, is almost invariably an eye-opener for skeptical potential clients, and it did not cost Roenicke a dime because he obtained it from a patient-lift vendor. “The vendor has a marketing kit that includes brochures and other helpful materials,” he says. “We requested the kit and it was given to us at no charge.”

5. Install demonstrators in your wheelchair seating-and-positioning shop. This will cost you a pretty penny, but will be worth the investment, Roenicke says. He has an expensive, state-of-the-art lift set up where his wheelchair clients have their seats and positioning systems fitted or adjusted. The clients are transferred into the lift when the work requires an unoccupied wheelchair, and that affords them an opportunity to “test drive” the lift. The number of patients who, as a result of the “test drive,” fall in love with the lift and begin wishing they owned one is amazing, Roenicke says.

6. Conduct a thorough assessment. Before recommending a lift, assess the patient’s condition, activities of daily living, and home (or workplace) environment. “Certain lift types and designs and features will be more appropriate than others for a given patient’s needs,” Berra says.

7. Develop one or more of your employees as a specialist in patient lifts. “To be successful in patient lifts, you need a salesperson dedicated to this market, someone who will be focused on it,” Lavoie says. “Patient lifts are a specialty item that requires not only a knowledge of the product’s operation, but also a knowledge of human anatomy and physiology as well as a knowledge of home remodeling and construction, because those are all elements involved in providing this particular product.”

It can take 6 months to properly train a person to be expert enough with patient lifts to make a difference for your enterprise so choose that employee carefully. Often the best person is someone with assistive technology practitioner (ATP) credentials, Berra says. “An ATP is trained in taking the holistic approach, doing full evaluations, total assessments, in order to best match products to patient needs,” he says.

8. Obtain training in patient handling. It is easy to injure a patient in your showroom (or at home) when attempting to transfer him or her into a lift demonstrator unless you are practiced in the proper techniques. Roenicke gained his training in patient handling from the vendor. “The company offered a 1-week course that went into the correct ways of moving patients from their wheelchair or bed into the lift,” he says. “In fact, they wouldn’t let us sell their product until we completed the training.”

Keeping the prospective purchaser safe is not the only reason to possess patient-handling skills. “Knowing the right ways to maneuver a person’s body with these systems gives you more confidence in your interaction with the patient, which makes it more likely you are going to get the sale,” Roenicke says. “Many HME people shy away from selling patient lifts at all because they lack confidence in their ability to physically handle patients.”

9. Make sure the funding is there before providing the equipment. Medicare and most states’ Medicaid programs will pay for the product, but only the hydraulically hand-pumped kind that rolls around on the floor. “That’s not where the market is,” Roenicke says. “It is increasingly going toward powered, overhead lifts.”

Attitudes toward patient lifts among managed care and other private, third-party insurers are not much more enlightened, although they sometimes can be brought around to your way of thinking, Berra says. “They’ll try to tell you that a ceiling-track lift isn’t medically necessary, that an old-fashioned manual floor unit is sufficient,” he says. “But a lift that has to be pushed around by hand doesn’t get the patient from the bed to the bathtub—and as far as I can tell, bathing is medically necessary, not to mention medically advantageous, for these patients.”

If a patient has his heart set on a lift type that is not covered by government or private insurance, Berra says you should attempt to help him or her obtain a charitable grant from a foundation or community service organization. “There also are a handful of federal- and state-funded entities you can apply to, such as the US Department of Education Office of Elementary and Secondary Education’s vocational rehabilitation program, which is for anyone who plans to go back to school or work,” he says. “Here in Missouri, our Department of Mental Health also has funding for people with developmental disabilities, provided they are diagnosed before the age of 22.”

If you are unable to obtain funding from a third party, you can always suggest that the patient pay for the lift out of pocket. Lavoie notes that lifts—properly explained and demonstrated—usually become such a must-have item in the eyes of patients that most are willing to pay for them with their own money.

10. Emphasize the financial benefits of state-of-the-art lifts. Like insurers, long-term care facilities dislike shelling out the big bucks necessary to buy more advanced patient lifts. However, you can change their minds if you show them how much money they will save on staff salary and insurance premiums. “A facility needs fewer employees on the floor to transfer patients in and out of beds or chairs if lifts are involved” Lavoie says. “Fewer staff engaged in lifting also means fewer work-related injuries.”

11. Resist the temptation to throw in the towel if the product line does not immediately take off. “You need perseverance with patient lifts,” Lavoie says. “It takes a real commitment to getting this category up and running. Be prepared to knock on a lot of doors before you see much of anything happen. Mainly, a lot of time is going to be spent educating the public about specialty patient lifts and why they’ll make life better for them.”

Rich Smith is a contributing writer for Dealer/Provider.