There’s a company in Enfield that deals all the time in the one thing everybody’s scrambling for right now: Ventilators. Just don’t ask it for one.
“To date we’ve been able to keep our supply lines open for our standard equipment. The one place we’ve been impacted is we aren’t able to buy a ventilator currently from our manufacturers. We contact them and they’re on back order but they don’t know when they’ll be available,” said Kevin Stanley, operations manager for Keene Medical Products.
Keene Medical Products is a family-owned provider of home medical and respiratory equipment that has been around for 45 years. It has eight branches in Vermont and New Hampshire, including Concord, and about 140 employees. Its first retail office was in Keene, hence the company name.
They have about 2,000 patients at any given time. Most are people who have been released from hospitals but need medical equipment at home. “They could be a premature baby that’s going home for the first time, or a 95-year-old coming out of the hospital after COPD … or somebody recovering from hip surgery,” Stanley said.
The company has about 80 clients on ventilators, Stanley said, but they are people with COPD and other chronic respiratory ailments, all of whom pre-date the arrival of the coronavirus. They do have some COVID-19 patients, but they are not on ventilators.
“As of (Wednesday) we had at least five COVID-19 patients, but we’ve seen a lot more presumed positives vs. actually tested positives,” said Stanley.
The equipment that Keene Medical provides ranges widely, from catheters to bed underpads to concentrators that allow people to refill their own oxygen tanks. Supplies to aid breathing are a big part of its business.
“When it comes to respiratory we can mimic an ICU room in somebody’s home – ventilator, oximeters, oxygen supply,” Stanley said.
A big technology change in the industry are concentrators. They compress room air, which is about 21% oxygen, to create 90-95% pure oxygen, also removing impurities. That allows patients to refill their own oxygen tanks at home instead of having to swap them out every week or so.
The company’s expertise in respiratory equipment has been used by hospitals bracing for a possible COVID-19 surge.
“We’ve been able to help some area hospitals in northern Vermont and southern New Hampshire as they try to get staging areas together. We have agreed to rent some concentrators based on off-site staging for both homeless folks as well as people in a field nursing facility that they wish to transfer out. In Vermont, for example, they have staged for non-COVID patients so they don’t go to the hospital, which frees up ICU units in hospitals,” Stanley said.
COVID-19 has changed many things for the company, as you might expect. For one thing, Keene Medical Products is facing the same supply issues bedeviling all health care. Delivery technicians have almost always worn gloves but masks were less common until COVID-19 came along, worn usually only when visiting a patient with a blood-born pathogen.
Getting enough has been a struggle.
“We’ve worked closely with the state to obtain N95 masks for frontline people. … We just had 130 delivered and are working to try to obtain another 130,” Stanley said.
Deliveries have changed out of concern for keeping employees healthy and to ensure that nothing is spread to their clients, many of whom are at high risk of complications from COVID-19.
“We are having daily briefs – what are the questions we want to ask every patient befoe the driver leaves the office, or even on the telephone from the driveway before (meeting) face-to-face,” Stanley said.
Technicians call in when they arrive and do a quick survey to see if anybody in the house might have the coronavirus, seeing if there people with persistent coughs or fevers who need to check with their doctor.
That isn’t always enough, however. Stanley related one case: “You ask the questions then you go in and (the patient) is coughing and says yes I’ve had a fever,” Stanley said. The technician in that case had to be quarantined for 14 days.
Another employee had to enter isolation after a woman came to pick up a nebulizer.
“She said, my dad’s using this for COVID-19,” Stanley recalled. The company deemed that to be “secondary interaction” that could, however remote the possibility, have transmitted the virus to the employee during the pickup.
“She was our very first quarantine and now she’s back to work. Completed the 14 days and never showed any symptoms,” he said.
One other change: About 20 people are now working from home. “That includes myself,” Stanley said.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)