Rehab Medical: 'We're not missing anything’

INDIANAPOLIS – Rehab Medical turns 20 this year and is marking the milestone not just with scale but also with something harder-won: a clear sense of who it is. 

The company, which today operates in 18 states and employs more than 700 people, is doubling down on serving high-need patients with high-touch care, a mission that it defined through a decade of hard shifts and sharper focus. 

“In your early years, you’re just trying to create a business and you’re trying to stay in business,” said Kevin Gearheart, president. “You don’t have the luxury of thinking about who you want to be.” 

But once the foundation of the company was stable, Gearheart said, Rehab Medical began to fine-tune its identity—and commit to it. 

That identity came into sharper focus in 2012, when Rehab Medical made the leap from a general DME provider to a full-fledged complex rehab technology company. The shift was prompted partly by the disruptions of competitive bidding, but the deeper draw was in the work itself. 

“(Competitive bidding) forced an opening to ask, 'What else is out there? What are we doing?'” said Gearheart. “One of the options was CRT, and that’s a subset of patients that really need support. Those are the types of patients we wanted to work with.” 

In 2010, just before it made the shift to CRT, Rehab Medical had zero ATPs; in 2023, the company hired its 100th. Over those years, it has had numerous programs to develop ATPs, but this year, it formalized that work into a career development path—a program of shadowing, mentorship and support designed to ensure that new ATPs aren’t just certified, but prepared. Last quarter, eight employees became ATPs. 

“We’ve got a lot of incentives internally for people that want to become an ATP,” Gearheart said. 

Throughout its growth, Rehab Medical has also remained independent. That structure, Gearheart says, helps keep the focus on mission—not investor returns. 

“We're really proud of where we're at, and more importantly, we still have a lot we want to accomplish,” he said. “A lot of times you bring in outside investors because they're going to give you something that you're missing, whether it's expertise or funding, and right now, we don't feel like we're missing anything.”