MD's as DME?

Yup, most DME providers accept Medicare, its their bread and butter. W/Medicare it is only if you have secondary insurance coverage that you would want to check w/your secondary for which DME providers they are contracted with.

Slinky wrote:Yup, most DME providers accept Medicare, its their bread and butter. W/Medicare it is only if you have secondary insurance coverage that you would want to check w/your secondary for which DME providers they are contracted with.

BCBS Federal is secondary. Around here BCBS is pretty much universally accepted so that's hardly an issue. There are 50 DME suppliers within 50 miles of my home, and this is in SW Idaho even!

The DME I use is co-located in the same hospital facility as the sleep lab and owned by the same company--so not really the doctor himself. What I found is that I had a much better experience than I hear about a lot on this forum about DMEs trying to maximize their profits. When I was diagnosed, I was given a list of local DMEs that included the co-located facility, but they were careful to tell me that I could choose any one I wanted. I went with the on-site DME... I was given a ResMed S8 AutoSet II (before the S9s came out), so already a fully data capable machine. It turns out they don't even stock non-data capable machines because they work closely with the sleep lab to have you come back to read your data and make adjustments if needed. I also referred a friend to this sleep lab and DME and they gave him an S9 Autoset even though he uses CPAP, not APAP--they do this in case they need to re-titrate after reading the data. So... even though it might seem to be a potential conflict of interest, I think a DME owned by the same company as the sleep lab is not necessarily a bad thing. In this case, the professionalism of the doctors and sleep lab has the patients best interests in mind and this is reflected in the practices of the DME.

jmelby wrote:.... So... even though it might seem to be a potential conflict of interest, I think a DME owned by the same company as the sleep lab is not necessarily a bad thing. In this case, the professionalism of the doctors and sleep lab has the patients best interests in mind and this is reflected in the practices of the DME.

Reminds me of the old expression: "Are you feeling lucky ????"

While I agree that having both sleep doctor and DME under one roof could be a good thing, I suspect that more often than not, it is not so good. And there's no way for you as patient to tell which. You may not even know that you've been ripped off after you've dealt with them. Even if the doctor is salaried, there are all sorts of pressures that can be brought to bear that could influence him/her to prescribe and send a patient to the in-house DME.

It's best to avoid it at all costs.

What I don't understand is why a physician would put himself in such a situation. Don't they teach them anything about ethics in med school?