24:51 to watch
On the Claim to Fame DME podcast, Alex and Wayne interview Jason Ivey, National Accounts Manager at Motif Medical, a maternity-focused manufacturer offering breast pumps plus pregnancy supports, postpartum recovery products, milk storage bags, and billable resupply parts.
In This Episode
Ivy explains that maternal health is a growing diversification opportunity for DME providers amid reimbursement cuts and competitive bidding in other categories, with ACA-mandated breast pump coverage making access clearer and often simpler. He describes what was historically broken in the insurance pump experience, Motif’s emphasis on DME support, pricing, and using provider feedback and mom test groups for product development. The discussion covers wearable pump demand, patient education beyond pumps to ancillary covered items, the importance of provider support to build long-term relationships, and Motif’s planned pregnancy-validated blood pressure monitor. Ivy advises providers to invest time, understand payer mix and billing rules, and align product offerings to reimbursement realities.
- Duration: 24:51
- Guest: Jason Ivey, National Accounts Manager, Motif Medical
- Hosts: Alex and Wayne (Claim to Fame DME Podcast)
(1:16) Introduction — Nine Years in the Maternity Space
Jason Ivey is the National Accounts Manager at Motif Medical, a manufacturer specializing in the maternity space. The line starts with breast pumps but extends well past them: pregnancy supports, postpartum recovery products, compression socks, milk storage bags — “probably one of our larger businesses in terms of volume”, and the full set of billable resupply parts and pieces DMEs need to support a patient through the life cycle of the category. Ivey is coming up on nine years with Motif in January, and is a familiar face at industry shows and conferences.
(2:24) The Category Providers Overlooked: Maternity as Diversification
When people think DME, they think CPAP, oxygen, wheelchairs, and diabetic supplies. Ivey says providers are just now realizing how much opportunity maternal health represents — specifically as a way to diversify away from categories increasingly squeezed by reimbursement cuts and competitive bidding. “Maternity is just one of those categories that, for the most part, has kind of avoided a lot of the pressures that others have felt.”
(3:42) What Was Broken: Retail Products in an Insurance Model
The insurance side of maternity traces back to the Affordable Care Act, which mandated coverage for breastfeeding equipment and supplies for new moms. The problem was that the incumbent products weren’t built for that model — they were geared toward retail, bought off a registry or received at a baby shower, with hospital-grade rentals covering the exceptional cases. On top of that, the available equipment looked like standard hospital equipment: “that pale white, yellow, whatever — that just that hospital equipment.” Ivey’s team saw two things coming: moms would demand real performance, and moms are high-level researchers when buying anything for a new baby. That created room to bring a design element to insurance-covered products and break from the norm.
(5:17) Why DME Providers Should Pay Attention Now
Traditional DME categories carry added cost at every step, chasing documentation, repeated prior authorization follow-ups, and the rest of the obstacles providers have to clear. Because of the ACA mandate, many of those aren’t as much of an issue in maternity, where “the coverage there is pretty clear cut.” Payers still differ from one another, but Ivey frames it as a chance for providers to look beyond the Medicare patient or the chronic-illness patient and serve a different kind of patient looking for a different kind of support.
(6:38) Doing It Well vs. Dabbling: Time, Research, and Fulfillment Model
What separates a strong maternity program from a side category comes down to invested time. Motif’s customers span the full spectrum — from “yes, we have it, if a patient comes in” all the way to providers where maternity is a core part of the business model. The differentiators are how much genuine research a provider does into demand across their greater region, not just their immediate community, and whether their fulfillment model can service it. A small DME doing pickups and hospital deliveries operates very differently from a regional running pick-pack-and-ship or working with a third-party shipper. One structural advantage: in maternity everything is a purchase, not a rental — “a lot of this can be packed in a box and shipped to the patient,” which Ivey says is a welcome change for providers new to the category.
(8:07) What a Strong Manufacturer–Provider Partnership Looks Like
Ivey’s differentiator is focus: Motif was once “100% focused on DME,” which he now amends to roughly 98% with the addition of e-commerce and Amazon for resupply parts. For providers, that focus means a manufacturer continually improving existing equipment and developing new products for conditions insurance can cover. It also means pricing empathy — equipment costs have been “kind of a roller coaster” over the past year, and working with a manufacturer that understands the pressure the reimbursement model puts on DMEs matters.
(9:43) Using Provider Feedback and Mom Test Groups
Motif constantly requests feedback from its DME customers — what’s working, what isn’t, and what the manufacturer could help with. On the end-user side, product development always runs through a mom test group: moms using products currently in development, or using a competitive product so Motif can understand how theirs stacks up. “I feel like we do a really good job at listening to not just our customers, but also moms that are out there really using our products.”
(10:57) Wearables, Crowding, and Why Motif Won’t Launch a Pump Every Six Weeks
Maternity, Ivey says, “has to be one of the most competitive categories in the medical equipment field” — largely because patients are so research-driven and behave like consumers, which forces manufacturers to stay ahead. The wearable boom has made the space crowded, with new manufacturers and new models appearing constantly. Motif deliberately isn’t chasing that pace: “I think that dilutes the offering.” Moms gravitate to wearables for discretion and convenience — many are returning to work, or managing other children at home without time to sit down for a full pump session. Early wearables were expensive and moms proved willing to pay upgrade charges to get the product they wanted; as the technology matured and costs fell, that changed. Motif’s Aura Glow is now among the most popular choices “because in most cases, it’s covered at no cost.”
(12:59) What Patients Still Don’t Understand About Their Benefits
Awareness of the pump benefit has come a long way, helped by DMEs with strong e-commerce operations doing online targeting. The message Ivey is now working on is that coverage “doesn’t just stop at the pump.” The same patient may benefit from a range of other items her doctor can prescribe — and for the provider, that requires no additional marketing spend and no new referral source, since it’s largely the same referral source. That one-stop-shop offering is where he sees the biggest remaining education gap.
(14:55) Why Support Beyond the Product Matters
For many first-time moms, this is their very first interaction with a durable medical equipment company — they may have known nothing about the industry until they started researching what they qualify for. Ivey argues the support opportunity extends far past the transaction: “these mothers today are very well going to be the caretakers for aging family members in the future.” In an industry as diverse in offerings as DME, “people remember where they had a good experience and they remember who was there to support them in their time of need” — which makes maternity a chance to build a relationship lasting years, and to raise lifetime customer value.
(16:40) The Next Five Years — and a Pregnancy-Validated Blood Pressure Monitor
Ivey’s reminder for anyone eyeing the category: “there are nearly 4 million babies born in this country every year. And so the category is not going anywhere.” From the manufacturer side, the focus is expanding access to different product types through an R&D cycle where most candidates never see the light of day. One that will: heading into the back half of 2026, Motif plans to release a blood pressure monitor for expecting moms dealing with high blood pressure during pregnancy — validated specifically for use during pregnancy, which most monitors, validated only for the general adult population, are not.
(18:47) The Scope of What’s Covered Keeps Expanding — Including Milk Storage Bags
The single thing Ivey wishes DME leaders understood is the scope of what’s covered, and that it keeps growing. While other parts of the industry slow down, maternity coverage and access continue to expand, with additional parts and pieces getting coded by CMS. His example is milk storage bags, which Motif advocated hard to get onto fee schedules: for years pumps were covered under insurance, but “there really wasn’t a solution in place for all the milk that was being produced by this equipment that was covered by insurance.” Motif worked to get that coverage understood by both providers and moms, so moms would know to ask.
(20:05) The Question He Hears Most at Conferences: “We’re a Respiratory Company”
Meeting providers at AAHomecare, Heartland, and Medtrade, the recurring theme is what a provider can offer in addition to the core product. The most common objection he hears is “we’re a respiratory company — I don’t talk about maternity.” His answer is that the models are nearly identical: respiratory has a core device (a CPAP machine) plus a resupply business, and maternity has a core device (a breast pump) plus the same resupply structure. “If folks understand respiratory, then it’s not a huge leap for them to understand the processes involved in putting together a maternity program.”
(22:10) One Piece of Advice: Invest the Time and Know Your Payer Mix
Ivey’s closing advice is to invest the time and understand what the business will actually deliver back. He suggests sorting payers into three buckets: Group A that both reimburses well and pays promptly, Group B in the middle, and Group C at the lower end — then understanding which product mix applies to each bucket, since maternity reimbursement is “all over the place.” Where providers get tripped up is billing guidelines: not knowing the rules, not watching reimbursements, shipping product and then facing denials they can’t explain. “Every payer is a little different. You have to follow the rules that they have in place, and then everything is pretty smooth sailing.” Nobody wants to go back to a new mom with that conversation.
Connect with Jason: jivey@motifmedical.com — or find him and the Motif team at industry conferences and Medtrade.
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