How Supreme Medical is committed to servicing customers in the home care market.
Colton Mason’s official job title with Supreme Medical is senior vice president. But he prefers to use another term when describing his day-to-day responsibilities – sales leader.
“‘Don’t worry about the horse, load the wagon.’ That’s a quote I grew up hearing constantly from my hero – my father, Tony Mason,” he said. “My job is to keep loading the wagon every day. Working with our customers, our manufacturer reps, and our industry associations to keep Supreme Medical in front of everyone in the market for our products and services.”
As an independent distributor and IMCO member, Supreme Medical approaches the market in several unique ways. First, over 90% of their business is shipped to a front porch. Supreme’s business model is homed in on home care.
“The home is going to be the care setting of the future,” Mason said. “We decided a long time ago that we’d rather carve out a key focus and do one thing extremely well. We’re laser-focused on serving the home care market.”
In an in-depth interview with Repertoire Magazine, Mason shares how independent distributors can stand out in the marketplace, why home care will be front and center in the healthcare continuum of care, and why participating in advocacy efforts at the state and national level is so important.
Repertoire: Can you talk a little bit about your home care centric business model?
Mason: We do things much differently than a physician, nursing home or hospital distributor. Case in point – a huge percentage of our business is low unit of measure fulfillment where we’re shipping medical supplies to a patient’s home on behalf of a provider that’s billing their insurance.
For example, let’s take one of our top product categories, urologicals. Our best-selling catheter brand comes packaged from the manufacturer in cases of 300. The problem our customers face is that every patient requires a different quantity of catheters and ancillary items depending on their medical needs and insurance coverage. As you can imagine, the normal distribution model of shipping boxes or cases just doesn’t work when you get down to the individual patient level. That’s where our home delivery program comes in. We break every item down to the “EACH” and handle the pick, pack, and ship for the provider. This allows them to use our warehouse as their own and drop ship direct-to-patient in exact payor allowables. We even go a step further by customizing the packing slip with their company name and contact information so that when the box arrives on the patient’s doorstep, it’s as if the provider delivered the order. You can almost think of us as the Uber Eats for disposable medical supplies.
Another innovative program we offer is tailored towards wound care telehealth, which has become our fastest growing customer segment. The demand for telehealth ties into the huge nursing shortage occurring right now in our country. More and more health plans and providers are starting to rely on outsourced clinical expertise to help manage patients dealing with chronic wounds at home. The problem that telehealth providers faced was not getting the wound care supplies to the home – our home delivery program met that need – it was the issue of what happens once the order gets there. You have a patient or caregiver that opens a box and sees a bunch of wound care supplies that they have no idea what to do with. So, we did what is always the smartest thing to do when you’re in sales. We went to our largest telehealth customer and asked a whole bunch of questions and listened to their answers. We found out the huge need was the ability to put step-by-step guidelines inside the box that walked the caregiver through exactly what to do, how often to do it, and in what order to apply the products. They also stressed that all this needed to happen in real-time, as the patients their wound nurses were assessing in the morning needed orders to ship that afternoon. So, we took their wish list and went to work to develop a solution for connecting the dots between supply distribution and telehealth wound management. What came out of that is something that we’re super proud of and is a real differentiator to Supreme in the market.
Let’s say a patient is seen by a telehealth wound care certified nurse at 10 a.m.. That nurse looks at pictures of the wound bed and writes clinical care protocols (CCPs) that determine the supplies that are needed for optimal healing, and outlines directions for the caregiver on how to apply and change the dressings. Within the hour, that order has been picked and packed in our distribution center and heads down the shipping rollers. When the barcode on the pick ticket is scanned, our system prints the CCPs alongside the packing slip and shipping label. Now when the package arrives on the patient’s doorstep a day or two later, the caregiver has notes from the wound care nurse on exactly what to do.
Everyone talks about thinking outside the box. We think the bigger idea is to think inside the box. How can we make the experience better for the caregiver once that package arrives on the doorstep? That’s what we think will be the catalyst for our continued growth as more and more healthcare happens in the home.
Repertoire: Why do you believe home care is the care setting of the future?
Mason: I think for three main reasons, which I like to call the trifecta of home care. The biggest of which is it’s where the patients want to be. If you’ve ever had to be in the hospital for a few days, everybody’s commonality is the thought of, “I just want to get home. I want to be in my own bed.” That’s where people want to receive care. Nobody wants to die in a facility. They want to be surrounded by their loved ones, their things, their pets. They want to be at home.
The second factor is infection rates. The home is the care setting with the lowest rate of infection, because you’re not in a room with a bunch of other sick people. Compare that to the waiting room of an urgent care clinic, or the dining hall of a nursing home, and common sense tells you that you’re at a much lower risk of being exposed to a virus or bacteria by receiving healthcare in your home. We’ve known that for years, COVID of course only reinforced this principle. That’s why you’re seeing an explosion of nursing home at-home and hospital-at-home programs becoming so big right now, because controlling infection and the spread of illness is such a hot topic in the industry.
And finally, the home is the lowest cost to the payors. On average it costs about $50 a day to take care of a patient at home. In comparison, a nursing home is 15 times more expensive ($750) and a hospital is 70 times more ($3,500) per day. We like to use those numbers to stress to policy makers that they should invest more in home care to spend less on health care.
Repertoire: What are keys to success for independent distributors in today’s marketplace?
Mason: It’s important to find a focus for your company. Some people will call that a niche, something you do extremely well that solves a problem or offers a better solution than what is currently available.
You should be able to sit down with your customers and say, “Out of all the other choices in the market, this is what makes us better. This is what makes us unique. This is what makes us different. This is why you should choose to work with us instead of our competition.”
For us as an independent distributor, we see a big opportunity in B2B e-commerce. As much as we talk about technology in healthcare, there is a huge gap right now as it relates to delivering a frictionless buying experience to a healthcare provider. Simply put, it should not be harder to order from a medical supply distributor than from Amazon.
The individuals that are now responsible for making purchasing decisions don’t understand why they have to pick up the phone and call a sales rep or a customer service department to make a return, or to find out if there’s a quantity discount available, or to get an account set up for their business. They don’t understand because they come from the generation of being able to pull an iPhone out of their pocket and access information with the tap of a finger.
That’s what customers want today. They want the same buying experience they enjoy in their personal lives. They want a platform that’s easy to do product research on, easy to order from, and hassle-free with zero friction. They expect you to pick up the phone when they have a problem, but that’s not where they want to start. We’re really focused on getting that right. We see a ton of opportunity to capture market share by delivering a better online experience to healthcare providers. Healthcare is complicated enough; buying shouldn’t be.
Repertoire: You served as a HIDA chairman and then as an advisory board member to IMCO. Why have those industry commitments been important for you?
Mason: I’ve met some of my best friends from industry events over the years. That’s where you build up your networks of folks that are always in your corner. I wouldn’t have that without groups like HIDA or IMCO.
Specifically for HIDA, Matt Rowan and Kelly Taft stopped me at an event, probably six or seven years ago. They told me HIDA was interested in home care because they were getting so many requests from their members about that market. They didn’t have any resources for home care built out yet, and asked if I would help them. So, alongside my mentor – Doug Harper – we founded a Home Care Advisory Council for HIDA that I chaired for four and a half years. We built that from zero to what has become their largest council, in kind of a unique situation. It was the first advisory council where they had manufacturers and distributors working together. That concept worked so well that it has now been implemented for all HIDA markets.
We quickly started bringing in provider customers too, so we had all three of us at the table. We could talk through issues, what was working, what wasn’t, and what everybody needed help with.
Those sessions were always packed, because you’ve got all these manufacturers in legacy markets like acute care that see the writing on the wall that they have to get their products to follow the patient home from the hospital.
Founding the HIDA Home Care Advisory Council was one of the highlights of my career so far. Brent Poythress (Vice President, HME Corporate Accounts McKesson Medical-Surgical) and Matt Boarman (Homecare and Managed Care, Team Leader First Quality Products) have taken up the torch as the new co-chairs and are doing some great work coalescing distributors and manufacturers around the concept of using value-based care to help providers have meaningful conversations with payors.
As it relates to IMCO, as your manufacturer audience knows, IMCO does not have its own warehouse. They’re not placing purchase orders with manufacturers. It’s a direct relationship buying group that connects independent distributors with manufacturer contracts. They rely on their advisory boards to give them feedback on what new vendors and new programs are needed for the membership in each market segment. We have a Power Meeting every January in Daytona Beach and spend three days meeting with IMCO leadership and key manufacturer partners to outline a plan for success in the coming year.
To give you one big win we had recently, last year, Supreme and IMCO did a pilot program with Nestle Nutrition where it was specifically built around home care. The issue we were running into with Nestle is it’s historically a hospital and nursing home-driven product line. So, it’s got these huge minimums of 350 cases of formula per PO. Which makes sense for those other markets, as the distributors that supply acute care and long-term care are delivering bulk pallets and hundreds of cases at a time to their customers.
We explained the big difference with home care customers is that we’re not delivering truckloads of products to a facility. We’re shipping 3 cases to a patient’s home on behalf of a pharmacy. We’re also doing a lot of specialized pediatric nutrition, peptide-based and organic plant-based formula for kids at home that’s covered by Medicaid. This is a growing new category, but with anything that’s new it’s hard to anticipate stock levels. We would order 350 cases and the next day be backordered on something because an order for a child with a specific medical need came through. We knew there must be a better way, so we asked IMCO for help.
They worked with Nestle to reduce our minimum order requirement to 125 cases for a year to help us build up our volume and understand what products in these new emerging categories were going to be the most utilized. We committed to 20% growth for them annually and shook hands. That program just ended in July, and I’m proud to say we achieved 111% growth and increased our purchases by over $250,000 with Nestle.
That’s just one example of where a buying group, a distributor and a manufacturer can sit down together and say, “We need this from you, what can we do for you?” and make it where it’s a win-win-win.
Repertoire: Going back to the home care market, what are some of the main challenges for providers?
Mason: The biggest one for providers that bill insurance is stagnant reimbursement rates. They’ve experienced cost-of-goods increases several times in the last few years, but their reimbursement rates are not being lifted enough to offset any of that.
You’ll always have people on Medicare and Medicaid who need those services, but I am a firm believer that the largest payor in healthcare in the coming decade will be adult children taking care of mom and dad with their credit cards. We’re getting past the generation that came up with the mentality of “my insurance should cover that”. People in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, are used to saying, “What do mom and dad need?” and then pulling out their phone and placing an order. Boom, easy. They don’t want to deal with insurance paperwork, high co-pays, or waiting on hold to speak to a representative. They want a self-checkout line for medical supplies and equipment.
So, we’re investing a ton of time and resources into making sure Supreme Medical is there to service this new customer in the way they want to do business. This year, we met with our 20 largest manufacturer partners and took a deep dive into developing a curated formulary of medical supplies and home medical equipment for seniors, caregivers, disabled individuals, and those managing chronic conditions or recovering from surgery or an injury in the comfort of their homes. Our website has been enhanced to display beautifully on a mobile device and now features consumer buying options such as Subscribe & Save and Buy Now, Pay Later which allows you to schedule automatic deliveries to your home, or take advantage of payment plans where you can take up to 12 months to pay off a purchase.
These are not options you see offered by the nationals. We want to take full advantage of the fact that we can turn-on-a-dime and be the distributor that helps our manufacturer partners tap into this emerging customer base. As we enter our 27th year in business, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that we’re very excited about the future and the opportunities that lie ahead of us.
Repertoire: What motivates you to get better as a leader?
Mason: I come from a small family business. I started working at Supreme part-time as a teenager during high school. My first job was breaking down boxes with a pocketknife in the warehouse (because my Dad didn’t trust me with a box cutter yet). I’ve counted inventory, driven a van to deliver orders to customers, and carried a bag in the field.
The folks here are what drive me to make sure that I’m making the best decisions that move us forward. I think and keep them in mind all the time; Jeff Powell, our GM; Shawn Griffin, our warehouse leader; Tanya Pasquill, our customer service leader – all three have been here over 20 years. Countless others over 10 years. That motivates me to not get complacent, and to always be working on the next big idea, because a lot of families depend on this company for their livelihood.
I think the other driving force behind me are the two most important people in my life. I’m a son who just wants to make his mom and dad proud. I would not be where I am today without my parents. I want to make sure that what they broke their backs to build, I do a good job with and that it only gets better as we go. I love you Mom and Dad, thank you for everything.