Delivering to Northeast & Mid-Atlantic

Dolphin FIS Therapy Surfaces in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic

From Portland, Maine down to Charleston, West Virginia, this is the shortest freight in the country. Carrier terminals sit close together, the lanes between them are measured in a few hours rather than a few days, and a pallet leaving a Mid-Atlantic dock has very little distance to cover. If the only question were whether a truck can reach you, this page would be one sentence long.

The question that actually decides whether someone gets a therapy surface on the day they come home is the last fifty feet: a fourth-floor walk-up in Somerville, a service elevator in a Manhattan co-op that has to be booked days ahead, a Baltimore row house with a winder stair, a Brooklyn brownstone with no driveway to back a liftgate into. What we ship helps more here than anywhere else on the map — Joerns lists the therapy mattress at 22 lb and the AutoVector control unit at 10 lb, so what goes up the stairs is two carried items, not a bed. Dolphin FIS and Fluid Immersion Simulation are registered trademarks of Joerns Healthcare LLC; we are an authorized dealer and we are not Joerns.

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Older buildings, tighter access

Coming home from

An academic medical center in a dense metro

This region holds the tightest cluster of teaching hospitals in the country, so the hospital is rarely far. The gap is between a discharge date set on a ward and a building at the other end with its own access rules.
A private home in a co-op, condo or walk-up

The building, not the address, sets the terms: managing agents here commonly require a certificate of insurance on file before anyone carrying equipment comes through the lobby.
An inpatient rehabilitation facility

Rehab floors in older buildings mix frame types room to room. Deck width, deck length and rail style get confirmed for the specific room, not for the building.
A skilled nursing facility in an older urban building

Receiving is often one service entrance shared with food, linen and every other delivery that day, which makes the arrival window a negotiation with the facility rather than with the carrier.

Going home to Northeast & Mid-Atlantic

Tell us the building before you tell us the date. In most of this region the freight is straightforward and the building is not, and the two pieces of paper that hold up more deliveries than weather ever does are a certificate of insurance naming the building and a booked service-elevator window. Managing agents in New York, Boston, Washington and Philadelphia frequently want both, they often restrict moves to weekday daytime hours, and a missed window is a redelivery rather than a wait. If there is a managing agent, a superintendent or a front desk, get us the name and we work to their rules instead of discovering them at the curb.

Coming out of a hospital or a rehab unit, the receiving side is different again. An institution has a dock and a biomedical or materials-management step before anything reaches a floor; a private home has a person who has to be there to sign. We schedule a receipt to a named person either way rather than leaving a therapy system at a door, and we ask who that person is at the time of booking. We are not going to publish a delivery clock we have not committed to in writing — what we will do is tell you the actual constraint, which in this region is almost always the building calendar.

Homes here, and what fits in them

This region has the oldest housing stock of any in the country, and it shows up in the measurements. Pre-war apartment buildings have doorways and hall turns sized before hospital equipment existed. Philadelphia and Baltimore row houses put a narrow winder stair between the front door and the bedroom. New England capes have a steep stair under a low ceiling with a turn at the top. The surface itself is 82 inches long and 35 inches wide in the standard configuration, and an 82-inch object does not negotiate a half-landing the way a folded box does. Measure the stairwell turn, not just the doorway, and send us the numbers.

Electrically, older buildings worry people more than they need to. The AutoVector control unit is rated 115/230 VAC at 0.34/0.21 A — a small, steady draw, closer to a table lamp than to an air conditioner. What matters in a pre-war apartment is not capacity but exclusivity: the unit should have an outlet it keeps, rather than sharing a daisy-chained strip with a television and a space heater. And there is one clinical measurement that is not negotiable anywhere, but that comes up constantly on old and mismatched frames here: Joerns states that the equipment is not to be used where gaps of even a few inches are left between the mattress and the head panel, foot panel or side rails, because of entrapment risk. That is why we ask for the frame dimensions before anything ships.

Good to know in Northeast & Mid-Atlantic

The certificate of insurance is the real lead time: Co-op and condo boards across New York, Boston and the District routinely require a COI naming the building and its managing agent before a delivery crew enters. Requesting it early costs nothing; requesting it the day before a discharge is how a surface ends up sitting in a lobby.
Service elevators are booked, not simply available: Many buildings here release the service elevator in weekday daytime blocks only, and hold the block for one delivery. A discharge that lands on a Friday afternoon may be looking at the next available block rather than the next available truck.
Thirty-two pounds, in two pieces: Joerns lists the therapy mattress at 22 lb and the control unit at 10 lb. In a region where a meaningful share of bedrooms are up a flight of stairs with no lift, that is the specification that decides whether a home setup is possible at all.
Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia and northern New England are the exception: Inside this otherwise dense region there are counties that behave like the High Plains: long final legs off the interstate, fewer terminals, and a truck that reaches an address on a set day rather than on request. We say so when your ZIP is one of them instead of quoting you a metro lead time.

Communities we deliver to

Boston and eastern Massachusetts · Providence · Hartford and the Connecticut River valley · New York City and the five boroughs · Long Island and Westchester · Northern New Jersey · Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley · Pittsburgh · Baltimore · Washington, DC · Wilmington · Albany and the Hudson Valley · Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse · Portland, Maine · Manchester and southern New Hampshire · Burlington and the Champlain valley · Charleston and Morgantown, West Virginia

Most requested in Northeast & Mid-Atlantic

Standard Dolphin FIS Mattress

At 35 inches wide it is the narrowest full-length configuration, which is what makes it the one that clears a pre-war doorway and a winder stair. It also matches the deck width of most homecare frames already in these bedrooms.

$X,XXX–$Y,YYY/mo

Low-Profile Dolphin FIS System

Eight inches deep instead of ten, so the transfer height stays lower. That matters in a small city bedroom where a family carer is working from one side of the bed because the other side is against a wall.

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Dolphin Wheelchair & Stretcher Seating Pads

In an apartment with no room for a second surface, the seated hours are often where the pressure risk actually accumulates. A cushion ships and stores in a way a second mattress cannot.

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Pediatric & Crib Dolphin FIS Systems

The corridor from Boston to Washington holds an unusual concentration of children’s hospitals, and children discharged from them go home to the same apartments and row houses as everyone else.

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Discharge coming up

Coming home from hospital in the next day or two?

Send us a note with the discharge date and the surface the care team has recommended, whether the patient is leaving a hospital, a rehabilitation facility, a skilled nursing facility or hospice care. What can arrive in time depends on stock, the freight lane and the hour you call, so the earlier the better.

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Nearby areas we deliver to

Southeast Midwest & Great Lakes All areas →

Equipment rentals in Northeast & Mid-Atlantic: questions

Our building requires a certificate of insurance before any delivery. Can you provide one?

Tell us at the time of booking and give us the managing agent’s contact details and the building’s requirements, because the wording differs building to building. This is the single most common thing that delays a delivery in this region, and it is far easier to sort out while the discharge is still being planned than on the morning it happens.

My mother’s bedroom is on the third floor of a walk-up. Is this even possible?

Usually, yes, and more easily than people expect. Joerns lists the therapy mattress at 22 lb and the AutoVector control unit at 10 lb, so what has to go up the stairs is two carried items rather than a bed. What we need from you is the stairwell, not just the door: the width, the turn at the landing and the ceiling height at the top. The standard surface is 82 inches long, and length is what gets stuck on a half-landing.

There is no driveway and the street is permit parking. Where does the truck go?

That is a normal condition here, not an obstacle. What we need to know in advance is whether there is a loading zone, whether the building has a service entrance on a side street, and whether the block has restrictions at certain hours. We plan the receipt around that. What we will not do is leave a therapy system on a stoop — it is scheduled to a person who signs for it.

The apartment is pre-war and the wiring is old. Will the control unit overload a circuit?

The AutoVector control unit is rated 115/230 VAC at 0.34/0.21 A, which is a small continuous draw. The practical advice is about sharing rather than capacity: give the unit an outlet of its own rather than a power strip shared with a heater or an air conditioner, and keep the cord out of the traffic path on the carer’s side of the bed. If the room has genuinely questionable wiring, that is a question for an electrician, not for us.

Can you deliver straight to a rehab facility or nursing home room?

We deliver into institutional settings as well as homes, but the receiving process is the facility’s, not ours. There is normally a dock, a materials-management or biomedical step, and a window set by the unit. Give us the facility contact and the room, and we work to their schedule. We also confirm the frame in that specific room first, because rail style and deck width vary between rooms on the same floor.

Book a rental delivered to Northeast & Mid-Atlantic

Tell us the address, the date and what the care team recommended. We confirm stock, the monthly rate and a delivery window by phone.

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