Many DME pharmacies side-step offering reimbursable wound care products, but an expert explains why wound care might be much more approachable than they think.

DME pharmacies often represent a lifeline provider of home medical products and services in their local communities, but sometimes they might miss an important healthcare category because of perceived roadblocks to entry. A classic example is wound care.

Why? Wound care offers a lot of opportunities for DME pharmacies to expand their range of care services within the communities they serve, along with their revenues. But there are a lot of reasons why those pharmacies might initially hesitate.

And hesitating is a bad move not only in terms of community service but from a dollars and cents point of view, as well. The global wound care market will expand at a compound annual growth rate of 4.3 percent from $33.9 billion in 2017 to $45.5 billion by 2024,according to research from data and analytics firm GlobalData. Also, recent data from market researchers Future Market Insights projects that the North American market for negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT), the lion’s share of which is in the United States, will grow to $3.2 billion by 2029, largely due to the growth of single-use disposable devices.

Furthermore, wound care is tied to a wide spectrum of product offerings that includes dressings, lotions, compression wraps and garments, pneumatic compression, negative pressure wound therapy, and therapeutic support services — all items that are ideal elements in a DME pharmacy’s or provider’s product lineup.

So why are some DME pharmacies and providers hanging back on wound care? Heather Trumm BSN, RN, CWON, the Director of Wound Care for industry member group VGM & Associates (vgm.com), has some insights on that and some very strong reasons why they need to take a closer look.

For starters, if a DME pharmacy thinks it might not be the right “type” of business, it’s taking the wrong approach. Trumm says there is no single wound care business model when it comes to DME. Rather, a wound care practice will be reflective of a pharmacy or DME provider’s marketplace, payer mix, referral partners and patient mix.

“There isn’t an ideal wound care DME dealer out there,” Trumm says. “They all look kind of different … no two providers are the same out there.

But there is one truism about wound care that is universal for DME pharmacies and providers: it is a largely untapped care and business opportunity. Furthermore, the opportunity goes ignored because there are some central misunderstandings about wound care’s complexity of product offerings and supplies, profitability, and documentation.

“Wound care is underserved,” Trumm says. “And I believe it’s underserved because — and I hear this from a lot of people — there’s a lot of product SKUs and there’s no money in it. … What they don’t understand is that you can make it more simple than it looks.”

Trumm explains that while there might be something like 10,000 SKUs for the dressings alone, VGM Wound Care guides DME pharmacies and providers through a step-by-step process to research the right dressings for their market and patients.

“So, yes, there are 10,000 SKUs out there for dressings, but what we teach them how to streamline, just focusing on roughly 10, 12 of them,” she says. “It’s a guided hand-holding process that we take them through.”

When it comes to profitability, Trumm says VGM Wound Care provides a wound care calculator on its portal that, while not a profitability calculator, does help them start to paint a financial picture for a potential wound care practice.

“They can actually visually see what the reimbursement, what the gross profit is going to be, and what the gross margins are going to be,” she says. “So they can use that to answer those questions right away.”

For people who might not necessarily have access to that calculator, the numbers side of wound care can start to paint a much more attractive picture than they might have initially had in mind. For instance, in the dressing market, Trumm says the gross margins can be anywhere from 15 percent to 25 percent (ish), which are pretty solid figures. Suffice it to say, there’s a viable business model for simple dressings and other reimbursable wound care products.

Another point of pushback on wound care is documentation because providers and pharmacies believe would care entails a high level of claims documentation.

“Some of the people I talk to will say, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s so much documentation,’” she says. “But if they if they’re already doing rehab, or they’re doing therapeutic support services, it’s no different; it’s just as much documentation. So I would say, when you really look at it, there isn’t any more documentation than some of the other categories that you deal with for DME.”

One last point of pushback about wound care is the nature of the care itself: taking care of wounds can be kind of, well, intimidating because we’re talking about wounds. However, Trumm says that even that trepidation is misplaced.

“They don’t have to physically touch the patient,” she says, adding that VGM Wound care offers education that helps them understand how to work with patients and referrals to provide the right items and instruction. “We help them understand it so that it’s not so scary.”

This article originally appeared in the DME Pharmacy December 2021 issue of HME Business.

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