Home medical equipment (HME) companies are starting to test artificial intelligence to automate intake, streamline billing and help patients with adherence.
Looking ahead, industry leaders believe the next barrier won’t be code or algorithms, it will be culture, they predict.
“How do you create a conversation to drive organizational change?” AJ Kiefer, chief customer officer at Tennr, a New York–based software company that builds customizable workflow automation for post-acute providers, said at HME Business’s FUTURE conference. “You have to find anchors that translate KPIs into real-world impact to the end user, and how all of that culminates in delivering the best possible patient care.”
The FUTURE conference took place this past September in Dallas. The event features dozens of industry leaders, many of whom spoke on the topic of AI – a powerful force in health care, with HME being no exception.
On its end, Tennr’s technology is designed to fit each HME company’s existing structure, Kiefer explained. That’s because there are numerous unique factors to each business, including which payers an HME provider contracts with or what equipment they’re actually offering.
“All of these things – the way they built their business, their payer mix, their product mix, the regions they’re in – change the workflow,” Kiefer said.
Tennr’s platform, he added, “is almost infinitely customizable.”
“We can structure workflows to the actual problems we’re trying to solve,” he continued.
AI anxiety
Panelists at the HME Business FUTURE Conference agreed that fear remains one of the biggest obstacles to adopting AI.
Erica Thomson, director of operations for Commonwealth Home Health in Danville, Virginia, echoed this idea during a recent HME Business webinar. Thomson discussed how Commonwealth Home Health was introducing a new AI tool to improve the provider’s daily workflows, giving everyone a morale boost.
Initially, it had the opposite effect for some, however.
“I thought it was going to be easy, fantastic for everyone involved,” Thomson said. “But once you bring those different technologies in – for example, with our CPAP compliance program and the different mask-fitting programs out there, our therapist’s first thought is, ‘You’re replacing me.’ And you have to explain to them, ‘No, we’re not.’”
In some ways, the messaging around AI and job stability needs to be “learn and adapt.”
“Generally speaking, I’m of the belief that AI won’t take your job,” Wayne Hudson of NikoHealth said at FUTURE. “But somebody who knows how to use AI may take your job. It’s not a tool for layoffs. It’s a tool for growth.”
NikoHealth is a software firm specializing in cloud-based HME management systems. Hudson – an HME Business Future Leader for the 2025 cohort – currently serves as the firm’s director of growth.
That message, other speakers said at FUTURE, needs to come from the top.
As Valere Health CEO Dewey Roof put it, “If you haven’t embraced it, you probably have been left behind.”
These and other AI discussions suggest that the divide between HME organizations will increasingly hinge on how they integrate AI into everyday workflows. Companies with standardized processes and strong leadership buy-in will accelerate faster; those without risk lagging behind.
“The long-term vision,” Roof said, “is for every data point to be digitized and automated. Whether you’re reading a document or have a referral coming in, it’s being digitized and therefore can be captured. It’s going to allow HMEs to run better care companies.”
Macro-level AI trends
Looking at the overall U.S. economy and labor market, AI’s impact is undeniable.
And the influence on job openings is seemingly profound.
Since October 2022, or the month that ChatGPT’s debut jump-started an accelerated investment boom in AI, total job postings have declined by about one-third. At the same time, the S&P 500 – a measure of how well the U.S. economy is doing – has increased by 75%.
Writer, podcaster and author Derek Thompson highlighted this trend in an article published Oct. 23.
“For the last few decades, job openings have mostly tracked the rise and fall of the stock market,” Thompson wrote. “Nothing like the current divergence between equity returns and job openings has ever occurred in the history of the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), which was first released in 2002.”
