Three Changes That Give Your O&P Practice Time Back

The first and most impactful change is also the most boring-sounding: stop entering the same information more than once. 

Clinical notes shouldn't have to be recreated for fabrication. Information shouldn't have to be re-entered for work orders. Documentation shouldn't have to be rewritten for billing. When data captured at the evaluation flows through fabrication, ordering, and billing automatically, the workload drops without any reduction in clinical quality. 

This isn't about doing less work. It's about not doing the same work twice. The research suggests this alone can reclaim 5 to 8 percent of the workday.

The second change is to shift the management of the workflow off your team and onto the system.

That means three things in practice:

• Status updates happen automatically as work moves forward — not because someone manually updates a field.
• Tasks trigger at the right time. When fabrication is done, the right people know. When components arrive, the right people know.
• Communication is tied to workflow events, not driven by emails, phone calls, and someone remembering to follow up. 

When this is in place, the layer of administrative checking-and-chasing that sits on top of the clinical work gets smaller. Estimated reclaim: 3 to 5 percent of the workday.

The third change is structural. Not every task should require the same level of process. 

Today, most systems treat simple items — a shrinker, an off-the-shelf component, a routine follow-up — the same way they treat highly customized devices. Same documentation, same workflow, same time slot. That mismatch is a real and recurring drain.

“I need to provide one shrinker for one patient on one day, and they want it today, and they're gonna pay for it. It doesn't really matter how easy that sounds. I still have to go through all of the administrative steps that I would go through for any other custom device.”

— KC, Certified Prosthetist-Orthotist

The fix is tiered workflows: express paths for simple, routine items and full workflows for complex cases. Reclaim potential: 3 to 5 percent of appointment capacity.

Each of these changes matters on its own. Together, they shift how the practice operates. 

Across the three areas, the research points to a combined reclaim of 11 to 18 percent of the workday — roughly four to seven hours per clinician per week. That's time that can go back to patient care, to reducing backlog, to training newer team members, or to taking on the kinds of complex cases that actually grow the business. 

Time can't be created. But it can be reclaimed. And when it is, everything else changes with it.

Get the full report

The full long-form research report — Time: The Hidden Bottleneck in O&P — releases the week of June 15. It includes the full literature review, the interview methodology, expanded findings, and a detailed look at seven practical strategies for reclaiming time. We'll send a link to subscribers when it goes live.