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Vallejo Kaiser doctor Ted O’Connell’s idea at the start of the pandemic was truly a breath of fresh air.

O’Connell, a family medicine physician and the Chief of the Department of Family and Community Medicine for Kaiser Permanente Vallejo, is the recipient of the President’s Volunteer Service Award for his part in creating an open-source solution to the pandemic’s oxygen supply shortage. His idea for the do-it-yourself, high-flow oxygen concentrator has helped save lives.

Fearing a possible horrible outcome at the start of the pandemic, O’Connell and others working with him understood that lack of access to oxygen could become significant if hospital beds were full, particularly since patients with COVID-19 can develop very low oxygen levels and one of the mainstays of treatment is oxygen therapy.

Soon after, O’Connell and a group from Texas helped create the idea that led to the prototype of the oxygen concentrator. The concentrator works by drawing in atmospheric air through a filter and passing it through an oil-free compressor.

Next, the pressurized air is cooled using a copper coil heat exchanger and then passed through sieve beds containing a mineral called Zeolite that absorbs nitrogen from the air at high pressures, thus sequentially increasing the concentration of oxygen. As each sieve depressurizes, nitrogen is released. The oxygen-rich air is stored in a reservoir, and a flow meter is used to provide continuous and measured release of oxygen.

“At the start of the pandemic, a lot of health officials and I started discussing what would happen if the health care system was overwhelmed and we theorized what it would be like if we ran out of hospital beds,” O’Connell said. “It would be absolutely devastating. So we knew we needed a high volume oxygen system that could help save more lives.”

Soon after O’Connell launched a podcast to bring accurate, breaking information to the public, with guests ranging from physicians at universities across the United States, to leaders in medicine. An old colleague of O’Connell, who now lived in Texas, head the podcast and urged the Vallejo doctor to get in touch with a small group of people from Texas.

Dr. O’Connell, Maher Daoudi, a social entrepreneur, Ed Mousselli, an engineer, and Robert Byrd, a builder, then set to work and create the concentrator. Utilizing Dr. O’Connell’s input regarding human physiology and real-world clinical scenarios, Mouselli designed their concentrator in just two weeks.

One week later, he had a prototype.

“My first reaction when I saw the prototype was ‘Wow, this is absolutely brilliant,'” O’Connell said. “Now that we have this prototype it can be further developed to help people not only in the United States, but overseas. Although the United States saw several waves of the virus, it hasn’t gotten so bad that we needed the device as much as other countries in India, Africa and Afghanistan.”

The group’s prototype ran for a week in Houston, to ensure it would produce the oxygen flow and not burn out. Tata Engineering validated the device and its ability to generate 92 percent oxygen at a flow rate of 20 liters per minute — essential for the high oxygen requirements of many COVID-19 patients.

Next, the group got their work out to the public at lightning speed via websites and social networks. They provided all of the diagrams and instructions open source, or free.

“Groups worldwide are continuing to modify it,” Dr. O’Connell said in a news release. “The extreme humidity in India created issues, so engineers there are resolving that. Dozens, if not hundreds, of people are actively building and distributing the concentrator. A group of high-schoolers led by Colin Pope even raised funds to build one and record the process. Now they’re applying to college engineering programs.

“My hope is that as the design continues to be tweaked and modified it may become a more consistent resource of oxygen in resource-depleted countries,” he continued. “We’re already hearing that others are building linked, multiple concentrators in order to produce oxygen on a larger scale.”

O’Connell is the Founding Director of the Family Medicine residency program at Kaiser Permanente Napa-Solano. He also serves as an associate clinical professor at the UC San Francisco School of Medicine and an assistant clinical professor at the UC Davis and Drexel University Schools of Medicine. He also founded the Kaiser Permanente Napa-Solano Community Medicine and Global Health Fellowship, the first fellowship in the United States to formally combine both community medicine and global health.

O’Connell is thrilled to have received this top honor — which came as an absolute surprise — from the White House.

“It was a complete shock,” O’Connell said, with a laugh. “But it comes from the highest office, so it’s quite an honor to be recognized for this work … the most important thing was just to be a part of this thought process and to have come through in the moment.”

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