Shahid Akhter, editor, ETHealthworld, spoke to M S Dandinawar, Managing Director, Oxy Aid to figure out the challenges and way forward in bringing oxygen to the last talukas.

Medical Oxygen: Post pandemic
Post-COVID, do we really need more medical oxygen? Is there enough medical oxygen to meet the requirements? If you ask me honestly, we aren’t prepared. There’s a lot of disparity in the availability of oxygen. Oxygen may be readily available in cities and metros. The picture is grim in rural India, where 70% of our population lives.

Medical Oxygen: Challenges
We have four challenges to overcome.

Accessibility. You all understand that oxygen factories are located outside the corporation’s limits in industrial zones, so getting access to oxygen is not easy. And all the dealers who reside in the districts open their shops only in the morning at 10 and close by seven in the evening. So a lot of patients at home and in the hospitals were not able to get oxygen on time.

Availability. During COVID 2, the big challenge was making cylinder banks available in small towns and villages. There were a lot of deaths due to a lack of oxygen in these villages. As we were reading and watching the news, a lot of reports were going unnoticed and unreported. due to the lack of oxygen in rural India.

Affordability. Oxygen is, of course, not very affordable, but we need to make it so. And we can make it, and we will make it. More importantly, we want to make it free for the poor and needy.

Accountability.During this COVID crisis, it was very important to know that the supplies of medical oxygen were properly utilized. One cannot practically go in for oxygen auditing. And it became more difficult to tell who was getting easy access to oxygen: the corporate sector hospitals, the private hospitals; they had the privilege to pay more and get oxygen, whereas the less privileged and the poor people didn’t have this accessibility to oxygen. So we need to bring accountability into the system. This was one of the biggest challenges.

Medical Oxygen: Way forward
Now, I come to the crux of the problem. The main point here is that we need to address three pieces of equipment: One is the oxygen generator, which generates oxygen using atmospheric air; it’s a captive source of oxygen generation. Second are oxygen cylinder refilling stations. This is very important. And we need to integrate oxygen generators with oxygen refilling stations. This is going to provide total solutions. The third being effective distribution and last-mile delivery. This can happen only through mobility solutions. So if you see these three pieces of equipment, like the generator (number one), the refilling station (number two), and the last mile delivery (mobility), the third part is mobility. This can happen only through a containerized medical oxygen plant. It’s akin to a factory on wheels.

OXY AID: Idea and growth
Oxy Aid is the medical division of our company. We have been in this industry for the last 25 years. COVID was a very big eye opener. COVID impacted everyone. I lost seven of my own people during COVID 2. I myself was on a ventilator and on ECMO for 47 days, grasping for breath, and I know the value of breath. I know how hard it is to keep yourself alive with breathing problems. As I was watching this dance of death during COVID, it called for a lot of introspection within me. That was the time I called my company’s engineers and designers, and we took a strong resolve to start manufacturing medical oxygen generators out of a Tier II city like Belgaum in Karnataka.

Medical Oxygen on wheels
With 25 years of experience behind us, we came up with a solution. We thought of four things, as I just enumerated earlier: we needed mobility solutions; we wanted to make oxygen available in talukas. At the very source of where COVID is generated, we envisaged designing a containerized medical oxygen plant. This serves all three purposes: it is a source of captive oxygen generation; it can refill cylinders; and third, it can go anywhere at any time and fill the cylinders. You cannot have a better option, a more versatile model, or a more efficacious system than this. So we took the challenge upon ourselves. It took us two years to do this research.

And today, we are proudly India’s first company to have launched the IoT-enabled containerized medical oxygen plant that not only generates oxygen but also refills oxygen in cylinders and makes them available.

Medical Oxygen: Creating infrastructure
90% of the hospitals in India are dependent on cylinders. The cylinder is what is really essential; it is the indispensable part of the story. Our containerized plant addresses total oxygen generation and, more importantly, the filling of oxygen cylinders. That is what is needed; the cylinders are going to save lives. Our thought process led us to understand that we need to keep this containerized plant available in the fire stations of every district in the country. Why a fire department station? because all the locations of the fire brigade stations are within the city limits and thereby accessible to the public at large. Secondly, we don’t need to spend anything more on infrastructure. The existing manpower working in the fire brigade station can be trained by us to operate these generators, as well as refilling cylinders through these generators. This containerized plant can go to every Taluka headquarters fire brigade station and fill cylinders.

Medical oxygen grid: tools of transformation
We are leveraging technology, basically the IoT (Internet of Things). So with a central monitoring station, you can monitor the containerized plant whether it’s in Ladakh or Port Blair. The performance of the generator, the filling station, as well as the duration of operation are very critical. This sets up accountability. We have gone one step ahead. We have gone into geotagging all 60,031 government hospitals in India, once again, right from Ladakh to Port Blair. Now, what does this geotagging do? This will help us leverage technology and ensure last-mile delivery. We are investing a lot in these technologies. We call these technologies “tools of transformation.” In the coming days, you will see more innovative products that will create a lot of value and save a lot of lives.