Whoever came up with the maxim “when you snooze, you lose” may not have had in mind the business of selling and renting hospital beds and support surfaces, but—pun potential aside—the expression appears especially apropos for this category of HME. Indeed, finding success as a dealer or provider of these particular products rests first and foremost on the ability to hustle when an order comes in.

“If someone needs a hospital bed, they’ve got to have it right away,” says Tim Beckes, who handles sales and marketing in the specialty products division of Blackburn’s, a full-spectrum equipment resource in Tarentum, Pa, which started nearly 70 years ago as a corner drugstore.

Beckes (pronounced Beck-ISS) knows about meeting needs in the beds-and-support-surfaces arena only too well. These items represent about 50% of the volume generated by his division, or roughly 10% of the company’s total business.

Trick To Inventorying
At Blackburn’s (with outlets in Erie, Pa; Buffalo, NY; and Cleveland), beds and support surfaces are supplied to nursing homes and hospitals as well as to patient domiciles, often on a rental basis. As such, the company must maintain a sizable inventory of these products at all times, something that proves quite challenging. “In part, the difficulty with inventorying is that demand for beds and support surfaces can fluctuate enormously,” Beckes says. “Obviously, you want to avoid carrying too much inventory because then it just sits there, tying up capital and preventing you from using it for any other purpose. On the other hand, you can’t carry too little because one day you’ll be swamped with orders that you can’t fill because you don’t have the product in stock —then you risk losing business by causing customer dissatisfaction.”

It helps, he reveals, to be intimately familiar with your referral sources and their patterns of need so as to be able to anticipate demand. The Blackburn’s approach to obtaining those insights entails developing close relationships with referral-source decision-makers. Usually these are wound-care nurses, physical therapists, case managers, and discharge planners, says Beckes. “You can learn from them what kind of therapy they expect in certain circumstances, which can give you a feel for the kind of beds and support surfaces that will be most appropriate to have on hand,” he indicates.

The trick, however, is in getting a relationship going with those referrers in the first place. “Every other dealer has the same objective—developing a relationship with the referral-source decision-maker,” Beckes conveys. “To give us an edge, we provide the decision-makers with things that are unique and of value.”

The most unique and valuable offerings tend toward education. “We deliver some presentations that count toward fulfillment of the decision-maker’s CE credit requirements,” he explains. “Other presentations provide information about new findings pertaining to their field but related to use of beds and support surfaces.”

Test Drive First
A further challenge for Blackburn’s lies in figuring out which new beds and support surfaces to add to the mix. The selection process becomes a bit easier by bearing in mind that lowest in price does not always translate to best value, he confides. “You don’t want to keep having to go out to the patient’s home to replace a mattress that wears out too quickly or that can’t provide the performance that’s needed, yet making those extra trips is exactly what you’ll end up doing if you buy low-quality,” Beckes warns. “And in the acute or subacute environment, you don’t want to supply low-quality there either because that will lead to customer unhappiness.”

The typical quality bed survives for 3 years—5 if it is not subjected to a lot of abuse in the field and if you properly maintain it, he estimates. Blackburn’s customarily asks vendors to let it test newly introduced products before buying. The testing occurs most often in an actual user environment. “You ask a referral source if you can bring over this product to try out for a couple of weeks so they can give you an opinion about it afterward,” says Beckes. “They love being consulted on their expertise, and they’re usually happy to point out what’s good and bad about the product.”

When selecting beds and support surfaces, Beckes recommends buying from the lowest number of manufacturers possible. “It’s a hassle when you have to cherry-pick from various vendors to obtain the range of product you know you’re going to need,” he says. “Besides, the more purchasing you do in one place, the more influence you have to negotiate better terms.”

Strategies for Service
After putting beds and support surfaces into inventory, repairs become the next matter of concern. “We keep a good supply of parts here in order to be able to quickly deal with mechanical problems and keep products in good working order,” says Beckes.

There are two ways to structure the service operation, he contends. The first is to create a unit that is specific to beds and support surfaces. The other is to establish a generalized unit that works on everything under the sun. Blackburn’s has tried both approaches and discovered advantages and shortcomings in each. “If you have a specialized department just for these few products, it can take the technicians a long time to respond to service requests when things get busy,” Beckes shares. “The upside, though, is that you can provide customers with service delivered by technicians who have an incredibly high level of knowledge and skill.

“The reverse is true if you don’t have a specialized repair department. Technicians can respond faster because you have—at least in theory—more service personnel at your disposal to do the work when it becomes very hectic. Conversely, the level of knowledge and skills concerning beds and support surfaces is lower because the technicians’ expertise is more generalized—so, if the problem is complicated, it’s going to take them longer to solve it.”

For now, Blackburn’s has decided it likes the general service approach better. “It is working well for us because we have had a long period of no employee turnover,” Beckes says. “If you have generalist technicians who stay with you for a good while, they develop a level of expertise in the product that begins to rival that of a specialist’s.”

Another problem centers around the matter of obtaining monthly Medicare recertifications following the initial 3 months of equipment rental. “You have to each time obtain new measurements of the patient’s wounds and a new detailing of the wound-care requirements,” says Beckes. “But getting that information from a provider in the home can be difficult because there’s a certain amount of coordination that has to occur between your company and theirs. On top of that, you then have to get the patient’s physician to review the information and sign off on it. What’s tough is that the patient may not have been seen lately by the physician – so he might not be willing to act until the next office encounter. “No sign-off means no recert, which means having to pull from the home equipment that’s still helping the patient,” he continues. “Unfortunately, the patient remains at great risk for wound breakdown, so 4 to 6 weeks later you might end up taking the equipment right back out to that same patient when all of that could have been prevented by Medicare simply allowing the patient to stay on the equipment in the first place.”

Bedder Times Ahead
As Beckes sees it, beds and support surfaces make for reliable growth—only not by by leaps. “They’re a good, steady complement to an HME business,” he says. “If your business is built around respiratory, you’ll find that beds and support surfaces fit right in. The same is true if your business is rehab.”

A caveat though. Pressure sores—which support surfaces are intended to prevent—are stoppable in part through proper nutrition and regularly rotating in bed. “As patients become better educated about eating right and positional rotating, they’ll develop sores less often, which could put a damper on sales of support surfaces,” Beckes concedes.

Still, he’s confident that “bedder” times are coming. “The number of people who will need help addressing pressure sores will only increase as the years go by,” he forecasts. “The nutrition message wouild have to reach and be embraced by an overwhelming majority before we would notice any decrease in demand.”

Rich Smith is a contributing writer for Dealer/ Provider.