The best outcomes I've ever seen shared one thing: everyone in the room understood the plan.

I was told I might never walk again after a spinal fracture, let alone play sports again. I became a three-sport varsity athlete anyway. Kintsugi is the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with gold instead of hiding the crack. The break doesn't disappear. It becomes the most valuable part of the piece. That's the frame I've built every chapter since on, from the clinic floor to the boardroom.

Clinics stall the same way recovery does: a new tool gets handed down, nobody on the floor understands why, and it's dead within a quarter. Real expertise that never turned into a plan anyone could actually follow.

I'm John DeLucchi, PT, DPT, MBA. An outpatient orthopedic and sports physical therapist, and Director of Digital Recovery at HURT!, an on-demand orthopedic injury care company. I ran full P&L across a 14-clinic region before that. Neither title is the point. What both taught me is that closing the gap between real expertise and an actual usable plan is the whole job.

This site and everything I write here is mine. Not a company platform. My day job is where I get the floor-level experience. This is where I teach it.

If you run a clinic, treat patients, or are trying to work out where AI actually belongs in orthopedic care, I write and teach on that here, from the floor rather than a conference stage.

Plan of Care is where the weekly writing lives. Free, every week.