Oxygen Refills While On The Road

Have you talked to your supplier? My dad found out that his supplier would send cylinders to his location when traveling - he just had to provide the date(s) and location ahead of time and they would take care of it.

Our experience has been that it's difficult to get any oxygen equipment and oxygen while traveling because they want prescriptions and then you are in a different state. However will follow along to see possible solutions.

Our solution is to travel with the larger 120 concentrator and the 12V portable with battery. We can run either while driving.

My supplier basically said "too bad about you" when we were in a city they didn't service.

Who supplies your dad?

I think it was Apree - through Kaiser (he died a few years back, so I don't remember exactly). They said there was no problem having it delivered to his next stop - he even asked about if he went to Alaska and they said no problem.

I know of two national suppliers...Apria and Lincare. My spouse uses Apria. They never offered to send the cylinders, but then we never asked. We just try to plan ahead. Sometimes that has meant carrying a lot of the small cylinders with us. We have also had some issues getting replacements at the offices, but eventually always got it worked out.

You could look at their websites and see who has the most locations in the areas you travel in.

I have no experience in this, but.... Welding supply stores? O2 is O2, right?

SAR Tracker wrote:
I have no experience in this, but.... Welding supply stores? O2 is O2, right?

For all intents the two are the same BUT industrial suppliers are prohibited by law from dispensing into a medical oxygen container.

Lincare is one of the largest suppliers of oxygen therapy supplies and is nation wide.
www.lincare.com
I you are one of their customers, tanks can be exchanged at any of their stores.

We traveled many years with DW on O2. We first set up with Apria and later used Lincare. Both had her Rx set up as a 'nat'l account'. In both cases, the companies furnished me with the addresses of all of their offices in electronic format which I 'dropped' into my Streets & Trips POI. As we traveled, it was easy to pull up that POI map and see the next supplier on our route and plan accordingly. I would just take all her empty bottles to the nearest supplier, furnish them with the last "fill sheet" I had from the prior fill, and they'd pull up her acc't #. I don't think it ever took more than 10 minutes, with either company, to exchange empty for full and I never ran into a situation where they didn't have sufficient B bottles on hand.

I did switch from Apria to Lincare due to a billing issue. Her O2 was paid by Medicare. One time an Apria location made an error and ran it as their account rather than 'nat'l'. That screwed up all future stops which relied on the prior chain of erroneous info. Being billed to Medicare of course meant that we never saw a bill and the error ended up with Medicare not paying. Apria never sent a bill or letter to us at our PMB nor did they ever call us. They never flagged the account so that the next office would bring it up when we stopped and they never went back to the original filling Apria office in Sioux Falls to get the correct info.

Instead, one day while passing through Nebraska, we were denied exchanges. One bottle of O2 left and all Apria would do was to tell us to go to a fire station (where they will have O2 for you in an emergency) or hospital. (It was some months later that Apria finally untangled their accounting mess, talked to us and tried to make it right by telling us that they would handle her O2 needs again.) Not wanting to have DW's life sustaining drug, O2, held hostage by backroom accounting etc., I contacted Lincare. They were happy to "shine" and help us in Neb. with a temp fill and then they contacted her Dr and got a new Rx and we dealt with Lincare thereafter - probably 5 yrs without incident until DW's passing. I don't know what Lincare posted to DW's electronic profile, but nearly everytime we stopped somewhere for an exchange, it was obvious that the local office knew that Apria had denied O2 to her.

Lincare also went out of their way to get her one of the small portable concentrators when first available, even though Medicare wasn't yet paying for them, all at Lincare's expense.

Other than a cascading Apria billing error, O2 on the road was a non issue both in terms of finding suppliers all over and in terms of quick and easy exchanges.

Thanks, all!

We will be switching to Lincare tomorrow when we get a new script from the doc. I spoke with our current provider today and was flat out told they didn't want my business when our insurance was in a flux, even though I've self paid a lot of money to them. That's fine with me, I was going to switch anyway since they can't provide me service where I want it.