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enough revenue for providers to deliver those to the patient’s home.”
So why then do a sizable portion of oxygen providers continue delivering tanks? A lot of it comes down to familiarity, according to Lyman
“It’s what they’ve done all along for years and years,” he explains “They just feel that they’ve got it down, and that the cost is not what everybody says it is.”
In addition to a reticence to calculate operational savings, a key issue is the cost of portable oxygen devices.
“Folks are afraid to spend that much capital upfront,” Lyman says. “Whether it’s some type of a home filling device or a portable concentrator, I still think that they’re worried about the cost.
“But I don’t believe a lot of providers have done a true cost analysis of what
a delivery costs them,” he continues. “They are just looking at potentially the salary, the vehicle, and the gas. I don’t think they’re adding in all the other over- head expenses.”
Lyman says those costs go far beyond that. Providers must tabulate the total operational costs related to vehicles, such as rent and utilities related to their storage, man hours spent answering phone calls, shuffling delivery dates and times, and the toll on other employees.
Moreover, providers have to “bake in” the lost opportunity cost: “There is a
lot of time involved where the customer service folks could be on the phone with a referral source as opposed to somebody reordering tanks,” he says.
Apart from costs, other provider concerns might be the technology itself. To begin with, some providers might have worried that battery life on portable devices, particularly POCs, was too short, but for several years battery life; the ability to hot-swap fresh batteries; and a variety of recharging options have made battery life a non-issue.
The other might be a lack of standardiza- tion across devices when it comes to the bolus of oxygen generated at one setting or another. A setting of three on one POC might not produce the same amount as a setting of three on another device.
Why They Should
This is why moving to a low/no delivery model with portable oxygen is such a leap of faith for so many providers. They are oper-
ating in familiar territory, delivery models are something they know and understand, their patients are used to it, and their referral partners are used to it. As the old saying
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