The Father of Home Filling: J.B. Richey

• By Janis Rizzuto
• Sep 01, 2010

As Invacare’s own Thomas Edison, J.B. Richey has a long history of significant inventions. Back in the 1970s, Richey headed R&D for Technicare Corp., where he developed the first whole-body computerized axial tomography scanner (yes, that CAT scanner). After Technicare was sold to Johnson & Johnson, he continued on to create MRI machines. Radiology was never the same.

Now senior vice president of electronic and design engineering of Invacare Corp. and president of Invacare Technologies, Richey came to the company in 1984 and brought his ability to make game-changing products to the HME field. In particular, he introduced the nondelivery model in home oxygen via the Invacare HomeFill.

“It started about 1997,” Richey says. “I was in my office one day when Lou Slangen, who was head of marketing for respiratory and rehab at the time, came in. He had just had a meeting with a customer, and the customer asked him about filling tanks at home. Lou asked me, ‘What do you think of filling tanks at home?’ I said, ‘I can do that; we can make a home filling system.’ Up until that time, this was out of the question. No one had messed with it; I mean, oxygen is dangerous if you compress it.”

The idea immediately struck a cord as the kind of project Richey loves to tackle. “There’s nothing I like better than a technical challenge,” he says. “We started the skunkworks eff ort to build a system, and we had it built in six or seven weeks.”

Richey gleaned some inspiration from an unlikely product — a paint sprayer. “I was on the board of another company that made paint sprayers, and the company had an engineer who invented a sprayer that delivered paint at 2,000 psi. I thought that if they can do it with paint for a home unit, why can’t we do it for oxygen? Even though paint is completely diff erent than oxygen, it led me to believe that it could be done and helped to motivate me and other people on my team.”

The Invacare Venture HomeFill Complete Home Oxygen System was unveiled at Medtrade in October 1997. The first units shipped in January 1998. “HomeFill got a lot of interest, but it was early for the market,” Richey says. “It was neat and everybody understood what it would do to home oxygen deliveries, but the market would take some working on. And we also knew that we had to work on the unit. It had to be a little more practical, lighter and less costly.”

With the unit weighing 120 pounds and sporting a heavy price tag, providers agreed. So work began on HomeFill II, which was introduced in 2002. In the time between the first and second model, downward pricing pressure on oxygen intensified, speeding up the industry’s recognition of the nondelivery model’s efficiency. “After HomeFill II was introduced, we couldn’t make them fast enough. Orders were strong.” About 200,000 HomeFill systems have been sold to date, which have served approximately half a million oxygen patients, according to Invacare estimates.

Richey credits Invacare CEO Mal Mixon for supporting the product from the start. “When something is new and truly disruptive, it takes a while for it to sink in. There were some people who were naysayers, but Mal was always behind this, so we kept going at it, and it turns out it was the right thing to do. … It changed the industry for ambulatory oxygen.”

It’s not unlike, Richey says, how refrigerators changed food storage. At 73, he can remember the ice box his family had when he was in kid in the ’40s. “We couldn’t buy an electric refrigerator because the war eff ort took all the metal that was available,” he says. “So we had a wooden icebox, and the ice man would come every two or three days to deliver ice. We always had to worry that we didn’t use up the ice or leave the door open, so that we had enough ice until he got there the next time. That’s a good analogy for HomeFill, except the delivery person was bringing oxygen tanks instead of ice. Now people just fill their tanks themselves.”

Indeed, Richey is proud of the freedom and independence the product gives patients. He recounts a story about how an early device helped the elderly and ailing parents of a friend go on the cruise of a lifetime. “They needed oxygen, so I told him to call one of our dealers and get a HomeFill. The dealer put it right on the cruise ship for them, and they were able to fill their tanks and walk all around the ship.” Providers have shared lots of positive patient stories with him since.

Still, Richey believes there are many more who can benefit from the technology. With about 800,000 ambulatory oxygen patients in the United States, there are plenty of HomeFills left to sell. Even so, he understands the huge investment many providers have in their systems for oxygen delivery, from trucks and cylinders to staff . “A lot of them are hesitant to throw all that away, but they are slowly being forced into it because home filling is a lower-cost way to deliver oxygen. With reimbursement coming down, they are looking for ways to save.”

Speaking of saving money, driving cost out of products is an engineering exercise Richey embraces as much as inventing products from scratch. “It’s not boring to work on the [economic] aspect of a product’s development cycle because you really have to be innovative. If a product is unaff ordable, what good is it? It has to be aff ordable.”

Home respiratory providers can appreciate Richey’s recognition of that fact — and his drive toward continuous improvement. “When we began, home transfilling was a new technology, but we have to keep making it better,” he says. “The ways to make HomeFill better are making the unit itself smaller so it doesn’t take up so much space, making it lighter and easier to deliver to the home, and making it less costly to keep up with reductions in reimbursement.”

Where does the inspiration come from? Richey has one word for it: need. “All I need is to have someone say, ‘Oh man, if we only had this, wouldn’t that be fantastic.’ … If someone waves a need in front of me, I get motivated. It can come from talking to people in the field or with customers. I love to hear things that they need. That’s what I’ve done my whole life, with Invacare and the imaging products.”

What’s left on his drawing board Richey won’t say. “I’m an innovative person, and I’m not happy unless I’m coming up with new stuff . I know you wish I could drop a few hints.” True enough. But with half of Richey’s work dedicated to home respiratory products, the industry can be sure that it will be just a matter of time.

This article originally appeared in the Respiratory & Sleep Management September 2010 issue of HME Business.