Some people truly find their niche in home medical equipment, and one of them is Georgie Blackburn. As Vice President of Government Relations & Legislative Affairs for Blackburn’s Pharmacy, Blackburn has built a reputation as not only someone who understands the HME business inside and out, but as a tireless advocate on behalf of her industry.
After initially planning to return to nursing school, Blackburn joined the Pennsylvania provider in 1978 after a friend employed there knew she was available for summer work. At that time, the provider, which was originally launched in 1936 as a pharmacy and expanded into medical and surgical supplies in 1960, had six employees.
“I was raised in the insurance business; so was my father,” says Blackburn, who worked in her father’s office during summers. “I had a good feel for coverage and that type of thing. … Chuck Blackburn asked me to come in and help out for three months, and by the end of three months, they asked me to consider staying on, and using my interest in patient care instead of nursing to help build their firm. So that’s what I did.”
In addition to her insurance knowledge, Blackburn also applied her knowledge and education in marketing, business management and accounting to the job. Once on board, she also starting learning more about the business, products and various patient care aspects. This helped her start to identify special patient and service segments that Blackburn’s could serve. Case in point: rehab and seating and positioning.
“In the early 1980s, they put me in charge of rehab,” she says. “I came back one day and said, ‘You know in Pittsburgh there is a real need for people who do seating for wheelchairs. Unless you do positioning how are you going to impact digestion and respiration?’ And that’s how our rehab department came about.”
That experience was emblematic of the kind of organic growth that contributed a great deal to the business’s growth and success, according to Blackburn.
“Our growth in the ’80s and ’90s, came from a combination of having the right people coming on board and having the latitude to take ideas and build them into a business path,” she explains. “We were real fortunate.”
Then, in June 1999, the HHS Office of Inspector General issued a suggestion about compliance for Medicare suppliers.
“I had gone from managing the rehab department for 18 years,” she recounts, “and in 1999, I felt kind of saturated by that … I said, ‘I think we need to have a formal compliance plan; not just what we think we’re doing.’”
Already planning to take that summer off, Blackburn wrote the company’s compliance plan, “fully thinking I’d be going to Pitt [the University of Pittsburg],” she says. Instead she came back for three years as Blackburn’s compliance director, and discovered her next role in HME.
“I actually found the more I put it together, it was of real interest to me,” she recalls. “I felt that if you really know the policies, then you can really use that as marketing tool to protect your referral sources.”
After eight years of compliance, she grew into her next role: working with the people who shape public policy for healthcare. In this role she’s not only worked in her Government Relations & Legislative Affairs capacity for Blackburn’s, but also has served as the President of the Pennsylvania Association of Medical Suppliers (PAMS). And, working for a Round One provider, Blackburn has been at the center of the fight to stop competitive bidding.
Where the industry is sitting at now in that fight, H.R. 6490, the bill that would have replaced competitive bidding with the industry’s market pricing program (MPP), was not passed in the 112th Congress. Now the industry must launch new legislation as Round Two approaches implementation in summer. Blackburn says that as long as the MPP can pay for any shortcoming by temporarily adopting competitive bidding prices, the industry has a good shot.
“I don’t think anyone in Congress thinks competitive bidding is a good idea,” she explains. “ … It’s just that they can’t pull back without a way to pay for it. So if we can, through the CBO score, say we’ll do it for one year and then move forward … I think it’s a win-win for everybody.”