Invacare has entered the HME provider software arena by offering HME management software systems and services from Bonafide Management Systems.

Through a partnership with Bonafide, Invacare will offer Bonafide’s web-based system for managing provider businesses. Using a standard computer with an Internet connection and Web browser, providers can use the HME-specific system to manage various aspects of their provider business, such as billing; filing claims with Medicare and other payors; inventory management; customer service and data entry/management.

“Bonafide is a business management system that is tailored for the HME industry,” says David Kazan, Vice President, Sales and Marketing for Invacare’s Service Business Group. “It covers all of a providers’ activities from the moment the phone rings and the customer service rep answers and pulls up a patient’s record. They can place an order, it automatically fills out the claim form, it generates the delivery ticket and manages the deliver of that item.”

The reason Invacare is offering the system is that as competitive bidding and other regulatory changes continue to tighten margins for HME providers, Invacare felt the need to provide its customers with a tool that can help it increase efficiencies and cut costs, Kazan says.

“The industry has been turned upside down,” he says. “How are you supposed to survive if you are a provider? In the past it’s been ‘buy the equipment for less,’ but you can only take that so far…. There are a full set of costs that affect the bottom line that a system like Bonafide really addresses.”

In terms of security, Kazan says providers’ data belongs solely to them and cannot be viewed by anyone else on the system, and resides on a set of double-redundant secire servers at Bonafide with a second set of servers in the Southwest U.S. to protect against disaster.

The price for the Bonafide system includes initial set-up and training fees, and then depends on the number of users and the number of locations, according to Kazan.