We have our database set up to calculate the time a practitioner spends with patients in general. We've recently put in place a note/charting system by which we can calculate time, including the initial evaluation, casting, scanning, alignment, and fitting. We can pull that information in the future and, say, look at the time practitioners are spending on casting, or on evaluation.

I think of granite in terms of a millennium.

The clay, the model, that's an additive and a subtractive process. If you have too much on, you take it off. If you don't have enough, you put more on. You can't do that with this guy.

In theory, in the private sector, with the L-code system, I know the end dollar amount that I can be reimbursed for a patient, so the less I see that patient in terms of clinical hours, the more profit is generated. That's not good in a rehab world.

Mr. Sullivan had complex financial affairs.

We're going to have to have a more specialized and educated work force. And that will require reimbursement rates that relate more to clinical care than to components.

It's not a very complex kind of a thought or concept, but his gesture expresses that.

Nobody with common sense would come in and put this stuff down. That's what they're telling us: They don't want us to be buried here no more.

I just call him the reverent fireman.