A National Provider of Durable Medical Equipment Serving Active Duty Military and Their Families: Tactical Rehabilitation

Tactical Rehabilitation was founded by David Marr in 2013 to address the healthcare needs of the active-duty servicemen and women of the USA. He felt that our nation's heroes deserved better, so he established the company to promote the healing of our heroes instead of focusing on slowing down the degradation of their painful biomechanical injuries.

Today, the Vero Beach, Florida-headquartered company strives to make a positive impact by providing for the healthcare needs within the US Military through its expertise. Tactical Rehabilitation delivers the highest quality products and the highest level of service to active duty service members, veterans, and their families.

Tactical Rehab has paved the way to improve the health of their patients through exemplary products such as industry transforming products such as Sole Supports Orthotics and their self-developed TriWave, the industry’s only triple wave TENS/Inter-differential/NMES units. Recently, Tactical Rehabilitation expanded their solutions categories to include para-sleep disorder, providing the only FDA sleep disorder solution.

We interviewed the company's COO, Mr. Kevin MacRitchie, to know more about the challenges of being in the DME space and how the company is tackling them. Read on for the excerpts from the interview.

Q. What are the challenges of being in the DME space?

The DME space has its’ own dilemma of the corner-store providing solutions, many of which, could be provided through the local large-scale pharmacy, however, less in quality they may be.

The DME space is riddled with insurance complexities more than most, as solutions have fixed benefit pricing no matter the quality of the solution provided. This tends to lead many DME companies to focus on reducing costs through inferior products yet attaining the same reimbursement rates. This has a high tendency to drag the perception of the industry down.

Tactical Rehabilitation focuses entirely on “battle-tested” solutions that promote healing and ensures that they are garnering the best vendors and products to promote healing for the world’s greatest heroes.

Q. How are you tackling these challenges?

Training and certifying all our employees in the areas they are responsible for such as Certified Orthotic Fitters, CPED, Certified Medical Billing Specialists, Certified Product Training, Customer Service/Leadership/Management Training and more. Stringent Product testing and review through our internal process and external verification with our prescribing physicians to ensure we meet and exceed the needs of our patients and our requirements to heal patients, and not just slow the degradation of their condition. This is a major difference and is a part of our corporate mandate.

The constant improvement of our internal systems and process ensures that we are allowing our Patient Care Specialists to maximize their patient care time and minimize repetitive wasted paperwork and other process times that would otherwise reduce our ability to properly fit and educate our patients.

Q. What is innovation for you and how do you incorporate it at Tactical Rehabilitation?

Innovation comes in many ways starting with the lost art of listening. We intentionally spend time listening to our doctors and their needs so we can seek out products that will best facilitate their ability to improve the health of their patients.

Innovation comes through a constant focus on improving the skills and capabilities of every team in our company so that we can outpace our competitors through quality people, who have a high-intensity focus on the needs of our patients and respect and honor the sacrifice they make as service men and women.

Innovation comes through developing our own solutions from the partnerships with leading industry providers facilitating long-lasting and business solidifying partnerships to enhance their already excellent solutions and improve our partner, and Tactical’s, ability to better serve and heal our patients.

Innovation comes through not sitting on our past accomplishments, rather, leveraging them to the next big areas of need for solutions as we have done again recently with the para-sleep disorder needs of our patient base.

Q. Could you tell us about your Sole Supports, designed to improve foot and the entire body alignment process?

Tactical Rehabilitation has had the strongest of relationships and built an incredible partnership with Sole Supports having the exclusive offering of their products to the United States Military Globally. Sole Supports, invented and pioneered by Doctor Ed Glazer, developed the Mass Posture Theory for improved foot and arch support, making all other orthotics obsolete as a result. The highly specialized capturing and rendering of a 3D model of our patient’s feet, in a completely weight calibrated format, allows us to help patients solve their foot disorders and realign the body’s bio-mechanical structure through positive side-affects such as improved posture, reduced back and neck pain and more.

Our ability to create a virtualized 3D model of every foot, allows us to 3D print and custom-tailor every solution repeatedly without the need of re-casting a patient unless other variables require it. This improves our service levels and ensures our customer allegiance to Sole Supports and Tactical Rehabilitation.

Q. Could you tell us about your innovative solutions for Sleep Disorders?

Tactical Rehabilitation has partnered with Nightware; the only FDA approved non-pharmaceutical solution to para-sleep disorders on the market. We have also begun partnerships with other biometric companies that we will introduce through our Nightware partnership. This will help us continue to better analyze sleep patterns and improve our ability with Nightware, to consistently improve the Nightware platform for numerous generations to come and focus on improved sleep for those that suffer from sleep disorders.

Q. How important are partnerships to what you deliver?

Partnerships are the most critical component to all that we deliver and are the core reason for our success. It starts with a solid partnership with our employees and an understanding between employee and the company about our responsibility to provide the best possible solutions and service to the world’s greatest heroes. It then extends to each and every product partner (vendor) and the goal to consistently stretch the boundary by looking to constantly improve each product and solution to ensure that we are ever-increasing our joint abilities to improve our patients' health.

Q. How was it working through the COVID-19? How did you adapt?

Tactical Rehabilitation led the way through COVID-19 by investing in our people and ensuring they felt comfortable and safe at work, offered child care solutions, intensified our employee training, expanded and opened new offices. We also hired more staff while most were laying off, reducing hours or closing their doors. We focused on the fact that our patients and their providers need our services and we must be there for them at all costs. Our patients lay their lives on the line daily to protect our country, so, Tactical Rehabilitation must rise to the same occasion. And it paid off that the partnerships with our providers are as a result, forever stronger.

About the Leader

Kevin has over twenty years of experience working in the healthcare and IT Industry. As a leader in healthcare, Kevin has worked tirelessly to combine technology-based initiatives and quality medical devices to create the best possible patient experience. Kevin specializes in high Customer Satisfaction, Information Technology, and Engineering Leadership. Kevin holds a Bachelor Degree in Information Systems and Operations Management from the University of Toledo. He has received numerous Healthcare Industry awards for his incredible work in transforming Tactical Rehabilitation and the Industry to enable more focus time on patient care and improving the business operational efficiencies of healthcare behind the scenes so as not to interfere with patient care.

“Tactical Rehabilitation focuses entirely on 'battle-tested' solutions that promote healing and ensures that they are garnering the best vendors and products to promote healing for the world’s greatest heroes."