Probletunity

• By David Kopf
• Mar 05, 2008

What do Chinese sayings and the HME industry have to do with each other?
It never fails. Whenever some difficulty enters your life, there’s a very good chance that you will vent your fears, frustrations and doubts to your peers, and at least one of them will perk up and advise, “Hey, don’t forget that the word for crisis in Chinese is also the same word in Chinese for opportunity.”

That well-worn platitude is essentially the more highfalutin version of “turn that frown upside down,” or “make lemons into lemonade” and gets equally high mileage as trite remarks go. Yet somehow this simplistic cliché has found its way into books, blogs, videos and talk show patter so perniciously that it has become a truism — which is mind boggling, because it simply isn’t true.

At best, the crisis/opportunity advice proffered by countless pundits and multitudes of authors of new-agey business management tomes is a complete etymological misunderstanding. Proponents of the phrase will knowingly explain that the Chinese word for crisis is composed of two characters that signify danger and opportunity.

But that is altogether wrong, according to Victor Mair, professor of Chinese Language and Literature for the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. The word for crisis, weiji, does convey danger, but the syllable ji does not confer opportunity at all. In fact, ji conveys the crucial moment at which a crisis occurs. So, it’s not “opportunity” the Chinese word is trying to convey, but rather the point at which things go completely sideways. Some opportunity!

Even if it were true, there’s certainly no word in English to denote a mixed message conveying danger and opportunity, because, let’s face it, it doesn't exactly make sense. Even if we did have such a word, I’m not sure how we’d spell it. “Probletunity,” perhaps? Too clunky for me.

That said, as much as the problem/opportunity axiom vexes me to no end, I have to man-up and admit that it’s a pretty apt description of the accreditation dilemma that HME providers face.

Accreditation represents a challenging and costly undertaking for HME?providers that can consume literally months, and without it, a provider cannot bill CMS. No wonder some are a bit intimidated by the process and have not yet begun it. In fact, during the Feb. 20 CMS Open Door Forum call it was noted that, so far, only a small percentage of providers were accredited.

Also, many providers do not have the staff expertise, or bandwidth to tackle it without help, and will need contract the assistance of consultants, as well as purchasing manuals and paying the costs of the actual accreditation — no small expense.

But now is the time to get started with accreditation. While the Sept. 30, 2009 deadline still might seem a long way down the road, there are multiple factors that will speed up the clock. For instance, CMS has already announced the next 70 MSAs for round two of its competitive bidding program. Providers in those MSAs will need to get accredited much, much faster. Also, HME providers will soon have to compete for the attention of the 10 accrediting bodies, as the Medicare Modernization Act ushers in a glut of other healthcare providers seeking to get CMS accreditation.

However, this upheaval has an upside: At the end of the process, providers will have adopted procedures and policies that not only will let them continue billing CMS, but help them better serve customers, discover and leverage new business opportunities, and gain an edge over their competitors. Read this month’s cover story, “Accreditation: Time Is Running Out” to learn more.

And if there is one other Chinese saying that more suitably describes the HME industry — and has better etymological pedigree papers where the Chinese language is concerned — it might be this proverb, which became popular with Americans when Robert F. Kennedy used it during a 1966 address in Cape Town, South Africa: “May you live in interesting times."

This article originally appeared in the March 2008 issue of HME Business.