![]() ![]() Soon after, a nun who worked as a seamstress at a local hospital asked Mills if he could make and sell them hospital garments. He sold handmade butchers’ aprons that he sewed together for workers in the city’s vast meatpacking district. Mills moved from a small town in Arkansas to Chicago. Medline’s roots go back to 1910, the year A.L. Twelve years earlier, when Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, Medline dropped emergency medical supplies via helicopter on top of the parking garage of a hospital that couldn’t evacuate its ICU patients. Medline bought high water vehicles and boats to distribute its products to nursing homes around Houston, where elderly patients were unable to be evacuated. When Hurricane Harvey hit Texas in August 2017, the company jumped into action to make sure its customers got the medical supplies they needed. Medline has been at the front lines of disasters before. Last year, it sold 23 million trays for $1.2 billion. ![]() Its biggest seller is surgical procedure trays that bundle together such items as gauze, gowns and sponges. Medline makes 550,000 products including hospital baby blankets. “I feel a great sense of responsibility to serve our industry and help the nation during a true crisis,” says Mills. One exception: Medline-supplied nursing homes who, historically, have never needed to order face masks and isolation gowns will be allowed to order them. Louis-based Ascension, which operates 150 hospitals and 50 senior living facilities, get first dibs on all supplies, says Medline, which has turned down orders from potential new customers to meet the needs of its existing ones first. For now customers are able to order supplies “on allocation,” meaning they can only order quantities equal to their traditional orders. Longtime customers such as Mayo Clinic and St. There is good news there: Medline manufactures its reusable gowns and masks in Latin America, which so far hasn’t been greatly affected by the pandemic. But due to shortages, reusable masks are now in great demand. (Unsurprisingly, a couple of months and a few thousand global deaths later, those requests have largely been granted).Įxpanding production of the face masks is also proving challenging. Medline sources its single-use masks from the Hubei province of China, where the virus originated, and factories are just starting to open back up this week. The majority of the requests were denied. government – a lot of Medline’s products are made in China and had been ensnared in Trump’s trade war. To meet demand, in January the company applied for tariff relief from the U.S. "We are getting random calls and emails – anyone from a local dentist to people looking to export 20 million masks to China," says Mills. Starting in early February, Medline employees began receiving desperate calls and emails from all sorts of would-be customers. The largest privately held medical supplies company in the U.S., its customers include hundreds of nursing homes, pharmacies and 45% of the top 150 hospital systems in the U.S. The sprawling campus is nondescript from the outside but inside it is bustling with activity. The campus-like headquarters of Medline are in former Kraft Heinz offices, nineteen miles north of Chicago, set back among the strip malls and chain restaurants of Northfield, Illinois. Inside Medline's headquarters are framed patents for things like flame-retardant medical gowns and a mural made up of 3,000 bandages. ![]()
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