Page 20 - HME Business, January/February 2021

Business Solutions
The impact of COVID-19 can’t be understated. If anything, we can barely comprehend it. Roughly a year ago, from the day this issue of HME Business will reach your mailbox, the first United States recorded its fatality from the disease on Feb. 29, 2020. Fast forward to the moment you’re reading this, and the United States has seen 27 million cases and 426,000 deaths from the disease. That’s the population of Minneapolis.
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And that’s just the grim human toll of COVID-19. There’s the service economy, unemployment, and countless other metrics we could measure the disease’s impact. On the less numbers-driven, more qualitative impact of the disease, there are the ways we have had to adapt our lives and our relationships. All of us can speak to the cabin fever, the isolation, and the longing to simply go visit an old friend without having to worry if either person is a vector for a potentially deadly disease. COVID-19 has impacted everything.
When it comes to COVID-19’s impact on the home medical equipment industry, no category has felt the blow more than oxygen. Oxygen providers not only had to implement the same new policies and procedures to minimize both staff and patient exposure to the disease, but the treatment of that disease involves oxygen, which means all new demands on being placed on the supply chain they use to serve long-term oxygen therapy patients. It’s been an on-again, off-again struggle since nearly the word “go,” and even with vaccines starting to get deployed, no one in oxygen services is breathing easy.
“There’s the early, March-April period when we saw shortages, particularly in ventilation, uncertain PPE or supply based products like gloves and other things like that,” says Josh Parnes, president of national provider AdaptHealth, which provides a full range of HME supplies and services that includes in-home and portable oxygen, ventilation, and CPAP and BiPAP. “Getting into the end of 2020, and particularly the last couple of months, we’ve seen a surge in oxygen. I think that started probably in October time and has steadily increased over the last few months pretty significantly.
“At this point, I’m seeing that suppliers are really, really struggling, particularly on
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COVID-19 has strained America’s oxygen infrastructure like nothing before. What factors are impacting supply and demand, and how are stakeholders responding? What other factors are impacting the oxygen market at the same time? — By David Kopf
oxygen concentrators and oxygen tanks,” he adds. “Our particular supply chain has been okay. That being said, it’s been tight, but not to the point that we can’t get anything. I’d say lead times are longer, and there’s less quantity available.”
Because so much of the fight to stop COVID-19 is happening on a state basis, pinning down the issue isn’t an easy task. At press time, the American Association for Homecare is conducting a survey with its members to track providers’ costs to provide services, as well as a survey on oxygen access, according to association President and CEO Tom Ryan.
“I think we’re heading into a potential crisis, because there are back orders,” Ryan says. “There are allocation issues, and I’m hearing some providers are having trouble. I haven’t heard about any particular area of the country being out of
oxygen yet, but I think we’re approaching a critical concern. After the holiday surge, it was already getting critical.”
THE SUPPLY SIDE OF COVID-19
The reasons why the supply chain has alternated between being attenuated and then opening during the pandemic is multilayered, and not just for providers, but for manufacturers as well. It’s not just an issue in North American; it’s worldwide.
“It has been a learning experience, not only for manufacturers, but I think for the global supply chain in general,” says Eli Diacopoulos, Business Leader, Respiratory Care at Philips. “During the early stages of the pandemic, as demand for the general supplies that crossed the oceans went down, some shipping companies, for example, stopped taking the shipping lanes because they didn’t
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