San Diego Hoping to fill a hole created when Caire Inc. pulled out of the oxygen concentrator business in November, SeQual Technologies will develop its own concentrator to market directly to the home medical equipment industry, officials said.

For seven years, SeQual supplied Burnsville, Minn.-based Caire with a component necessary to manufacture its oxygen concentrators. When Caire dropped out of the market, SeQual stepped in. "Now that they decided to refocus on their core competency, that has left us without a strategic partner in the home medical field," said Edward Radtke, vice president of marketing and sales for SeQual Technologies. Radtke said he sees that as an opportunity, rather than a setback.

SeQual will service the home care provider directly rather than form a strategic partnership with a distributor, he said. "With such cost pressures in the home health care field, [having a distributor] clearly was not the most efficient way to get to the market," he said. "Removing the extra step in the distribution system will enable us to offer a more competitively priced unit." Cost is a critical factor in providers' purchasing decisions, he said.

SeQual's new unit, which has not been named, will be launched in May, Radtke said. It will feature the Advanced Technology Fractionor, a module used from 1995 to 1998 in Caire's Quiet One and Breeze concentrators that separates air into its primary components of oxygen and nitrogen. "The ATF module eliminates hundreds of components from an oxygen concentrator, including all solenoid control valves and dozens of pneumatic and electrical connections," Radtke said. "There are just two pneumatic connections to the ATF module-a compressed air inlet and an oxygen outlet."

Because many of the standard concentrator components are eliminated, the unit needs little maintenance and is cost-effective, he said.