The History of Our Arm Dynamics Centers

While at the rehab hospital, John worked closely with the occupational therapists. “That was when I learned just how valuable occupational therapists can be and that is why we have them on-site at each of our Centers of Excellence now. At that hospital, I was promoted and put in charge of five different locations in the state. After a while I knew that I wanted to move back to California, where I’m from. In California, I began working for a company that became one of the larger prosthetic care providers in the world. I loved upper extremity prosthetics, but I was asked to manage an office. My first office was in downtown Los Angeles, and then I was asked to manage more offices providing mostly lower extremity prosthetic care. But providing lower extremity prosthetic care wasn’t what I wanted to do — I wanted to provide upper extremity prosthetic care. I went to the president of the organization and proposed creating a department that just specialized in upper extremity prosthetics. The president initially rejected my proposal as he didn’t believe there would be a big enough benefit to the company. So, I covertly contacted local offices owned by the company and offered my time and expertise at no charge to provide upper limb prosthetic care. After the first year, I went back to the president, told him about the covert services and was able to quadruple their revenue all by myself. This caught the president’s attention, and he let me expand the program throughout the company by training local prosthetists to become upper extremity specialists. The program really took off — it was very profitable and rewarding to me to help many more patients than I could by myself by building and managing the team. Ultimately, some people at the company were unhappy with my initiative and the attention it was receiving. In the end, I decided to leave. At the time, my wife and I had just bought a new house, and our daughter was a baby. I remember going home to have dinner with my parents, my sister and my wife, and by the end of dinner, it was clear to me that I didn’t like working for other people.”

So, John founded the first iteration of the Arm Dynamics company. “When Arm Dynamics began, it was called Advanced Arm Dynamics, and we mostly did consulting. We would go to different prosthetic care providers all over the country and help with the insurance authorization, the fitting and sometimes the billing. While that was helpful for so many patients, the problem that we found was that prosthetic care providers were contractually obligated to provide follow-up care for these patients. They would need to have regular maintenance, or they wanted to add a second terminal device, and that follow-up care just wasn’t happening for the patients. That didn’t sit right with me, so we opened our first center in Dallas in 1998. Shortly after we started, we had a full-time, on-site therapist, and that’s how it’s been every time we open a new center. I created a centrally located support services team that provided authorization, billing, HR, accounting, compliance, marketing and business development services to each center.”