A DME program built from zero. I designed the workflow, the software, and the team — and I still run it.
A pain management clinic was sending patients home with prescriptions for braces, walkers, and other durable medical equipment — but the DME side of that process didn't really exist. Referrals came in on paper and got lost. Insurance eligibility was checked manually, sometimes after the fitting had already happened. Billing was reactive. Patients waited weeks for equipment they should have received in days.
They were lacking a system.
If the failure modes are at the seams, the fix isn't more people. It's a better system.
Over three years I designed and stood up four things in parallel — workflow, software, team, relationships. Each one reinforced the others.
Referral → eligibility → intake → fitting → delivery → billing → follow-up. Every step has a clear owner, input, and output. SOPs for each handoff.
Patient status dashboards. L-code reimbursement lookup. ICD-10 billable checker tied to Medicare policy. The tools enforce the workflow so steps can't be skipped.
Built and led teams across onsite (intake/fitting), offshore (eligibility/docs), billing, and insurance follow-up. Hired, trained, wrote the playbooks.
Direct accountability for the partnerships. Regular reviews, escalation paths, feedback loops — when something breaks at the clinic, we hear about it the same day.
For the first year I tried to make spreadsheets and Slack do the job, and the workflow kept breaking at the same seams. The custom tools were a force multiplier the moment I shipped them — and in hindsight, the time spent patching broken handoffs was more expensive than the time it would have taken to build the tools sooner.
Most operational problems in healthcare aren't medical problems. They're design problems wearing a clipboard. Bracetek is the version of that observation I got to follow all the way through — design the system, build the software, run the team, own the outcome.
I'm looking for more of this work. Ops or PM roles where someone needs a system designed, built, and run — not just diagrammed and handed off.