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.
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