Most physicians only have episodic experience evaluating patients who may need power mobility. Even among their elderly patients, only a handful, perhaps three or four patients a year, need power mobility support. The treating physician frequently must balance whether the patient is at risk of self injury or relative immobility without this device, or the best strategy is to encourage more physical activity, perhaps without powered support. Physicians tell The SCOOTER Store it sometimes gets down to a judgment call, "their clinical judgment," as to the patient’s greatest need. The recent overhaul of Medicare rules make their judgment calls even more difficult. The new rules require a face-to-face interview, extensive documentation, and fairly ambiguous guidelines as to what constitutes medical necessity. And a regional Medicare reviewer who has not seen the patient does a paper review of the physician’s documentation and ultimately confirms or denies medical necessity.

"The SCOOTER Store, by virtue of being the nation’s largest supplier of power mobility devices (PMDs), has by far the most contact with physicians who have, or are contemplating prescribing a PMD for their patients. Their expertise in screening a patient on the front end is without peer. Working with the patient’s physician, The SCOOTER Store typically finds that only a fraction of patients seeking a PMD are found by careful review to require this kind of sophisticated and relatively expensive mobility support. What they see every day by the hundreds, a practicing physician sees far less often.

That’s why The SCOOTER Store created a Physician Advisory Board, a panel of doctors with expertise treating elderly patients and others with unique mobility support needs. These physicians provide common sense guidance as part of The SCOOTER Store’s ongoing efforts to communicate more effectively to a prescribing doctor.

This blog is a logical extension of that outreach by offering a forum for new ideas "good or bad" and "group therapy" to alleviate the frustrations of those who see the often unmet medical needs of the elderly every day.