The top three most expensive bariatric products cited by hospitals are beds, patient lifts and durable medical equipment, such as wheelchairs, according to the Novation report.

Medline Industries, Inc. has a Durable Medical Equipment division, which develops and manufactures bariatric products. Rich Derks, the division's vice president of marketing, says the company is seeing growth across all health care segments, with higher demand in some sectors than others.


The evolution of the demand for bariatric products started at the home health segment, with people purchasing bigger beds and bath benches for their homes, says Derks.

"I would say that was our early warning signal that this is going to be a pretty explosive market," he says. "The next area where we started to see really high growth and continue to see it was in acute care because as some of the people that are very, very obese start to have health problems, they have to be rushed to the hospital."

This was followed by a higher demand for bariatric equipment in emergency departments, intensive care units and operating rooms.

"What we're seeing today, along with the home health and acute care continuing in strong growth - now even faster growth because a lot of the heavier people are getting older and more seriously ill or coming out of acute care - long-term care is in a very reactive mode," says Derks.

A lot of nursing homes have traditionally rented equipment. However, long-term care facilities are now purchasing equipment because of an increase in bariatric patients in that sector, says Derks.

The company's most popular products are wheelchairs. If you asked providers what kind of wheelchairs they purchased a decade ago, the typical answer would be a chair that is 18 inches wide with a capacity of 250 pounds.

If you shared those dimensions with facilities today, "they'd laugh," says Derks. "Very few people fit into a chair that's 18 inches wide today. If I want to accommodate 90 percent of the population, I need at least a 20-or a 22-inch-wide chair, with a weight capacity of at least 350 pounds."

The second-highest area of growth is in the patient handling sector. Nurses experience some of the highest rates of musculoskeletal disorder injuries, says Derks.

"What we're seeing on the long-term care side is a 13 percent incident rate in the course of a year of back injuries related to patient handling and in acute care, we're seeing 8 percent," he says.

Several long-term and acute care institutions are investing in patient handling equipment that is mechanized to help nurses transfer the patients.

More Industry Headlines