Apria Healthcare Group Inc. is helping victims of Superstorm Sandy breathe easier.
The Lake Forest-based home-healthcare company is providing portable oxygen to thousands of patients in New York and New Jersey affected by the storm (see related story, page 1).
Apria also participated in an emergency-preparedness plan as part of its relief efforts in the region.
“Although our branches must perform [emergency preparedness exercises] periodically, it is quite another thing when a real disaster is under way,” said Dan Starck, chief executive of Apria’s respiratory and home medical-equipment unit.
Checking In
Apria made calls to its patients in the areas affected by Sandy to make sure they had enough oxygen to get through the weekend, said Mark Centolella, Apria’s divisional vice president of operations in the Northeast. The division covers 12 states from Virginia to Maine and has about 950 workers.
The home healthcare provider then distributed pneumatic, pressure-based oxygen cylinders for its patients who had lost power and normally depend on oxygen concentrator devices powered by electricity.
Pneumatic oxygen cylinders come in various sizes, including those that can be carried by patients as well as larger, more stationary ones.
The company also provided other types of medical equipment for the patients who needed it.
“We actually had Ryder trucks, 18-wheelers, come in from Indiana, Kansas City, Georgia and Philadelphia to deliver excess cylinders,” Centolella said. “If we had larger ones, we’d place those first.”
Branch Distribution
It wasn’t possible to deliver oxygen to patients’ homes in New York and parts of New Jersey, so patients visited branch offices to obtain the oxygen.
The company did deliver oxygen devices to evacuation shelters set up in central New Jersey.
A team at Apria’s offices in suburban Philadelphia worked a pair of extra shifts to fill 5,000 portable oxygen cylinders, said Peter LaBerge, the home healthcare company’s national director of distribution.
Apria’s distribution center in Suwanee, Ga., then sent a trailer to a Pennsylvania operation filled with 100 medium and large oxygen tanks and almost 2,000 portable tanks. A second trailer filled with a similar number of tanks was sent to Apria’s Virginia and Maryland branches.
To help with the operation, Apria shifted workers from within the Northeast division, Centolella said.
Apria shipped portable canisters of gasoline and diesel fuel into the Sandy-affected areas to ensure that its delivery trucks could operate amid widespread gasoline shortages.
“Obviously with the power being out, gas stations couldn’t pump gas,” Centolella said. “We couldn’t get fuel to fuel our trucks.”
Phone Alerts
The company let patients know by telephone when delivery drivers were on their way with oxygen.
Apria also helped service patients of providers who ran out of oxygen or faced logistical issues in the storm. But Centolella said Apria hasn’t seen an “uptick of new business” as a result of the efforts.
“With zero reimbursement for our extra labor, fuel, transportation and equipment costs, that is definitely not why we did it—it was to meet an urgent need,” Apria spokesperson Lisa Getson said.
Centolella praised Apria’s employees’ efforts during the Sandy relief efforts. “It’s been incredibly amazing,” he said.
Apria workers who were displaced by the storm have reported to work in spite of their personal challenges, because “they want to help people,” he noted.
Centolella said employees throughout the company have given donations and put together care packages, giving up vacation time, sick time and paid time off to help displaced co-workers.
Apria was once publicly traded, but it was taken private by New York-based private equity firm Blackstone Group LP in 2008 in a $1.6 billion buyout. It had more than $2.3 billion in revenue last year.
