NEED A NEW WEBSITE? A new life

One local group’s revolutionary approach to cutting medical costs while easing patients’ suffering

Story by Christina Hughes Babb | Photos by Danny Fulgencio

Recovering from hip surgery, a patient occupies a bed in a Parkland Hospital room. He is healthy enough to go home, with one exception. He needs expensive special equipment — a wheelchair and a tub transfer bench — in order to function on his own. So he remains hospitalized, at a cost of $2,000 per day, a bill footed in large part by Dallas taxpayers.

Another, diagnosed with inoperable stage-4 breast cancer, wants nothing more than to spend her last days at home with those who love her. But unless she can put a hospital bed in her room at home, her physician cannot release her.

As a doctor and chief of utilization management at Parkland, Dallas County’s public hospital, Stan Pomarantz saw such cases daily.

He recalls a patient who underwent an amputation.

“He needed a mobility device in order to be medically cleared. He wound up lying there for a week, taking up a bed in an overcrowded hospital, when he could have gone home if we could get him this device he needed.”

In that situation, the patient’s caseworker came to Pomarantz at a loss. He racked his brain for answers as he pulled into his driveway that night.

“I got home, bone-tired after this long day, I pull into the garage and there’s a wheelchair. It had been my mother’s. I’d forgotten it was there,” he says.

It was the solution he’d been seeking.

He approached the hospital board of directors with the idea of refurbishing dis- carded Durable Medical Equipment, what’s called DME in the business, for hospitals and patients in need.

“We went around the [boardroom] table — turned out every hospital executive sitting there said they had some piece of medical equipment, from wheelchairs to crutches, at home gathering dust.”

That was the genesis of DME Exchange of Dallas. Pomarantz says some 25,000 to 50,000 people a year in Dallas suffer because they cannot afford DME.

DME Exchange is the only organization in Texas responding in a significant way to this problem.