Exceeding limitations is expected for innovative CEO and the DME company he founded

On the wall of Keen Healthcare’s headquarters in Northeast Portland hangs a row of five crutches. On one end, hangs the product that turned into a company: the original crutch that Vail designed 14 years ago. It has a shock absorber borrowed from a bicycle. It has an “ankle” made from a pivoting showerhead to keep the tip of the crutch flat to the ground.

Garza Wooton, ATP, shows off the most recent version.

“Now, in its fifth or sixth and, so far, final revision, we have a lightweight crutch with a polymer shock that allows a half-inch of travel,” he explains. The original spring shock absorbed shock, but bounced it back up into the shoulder. The polymer doesn’t do that.

“It has a pivoting tip that even at a 45-degree angle allows for complete ground contact,” he continues. “And it has a micro-adjustable handle.”

(The eight-year-old company prides itself on its innovation and on minimizing layers of management. Garza isn’t sure what his title is. Maybe it’s head of Keen Home Medical, a dividision of Keen Healthcare. Maybe it’s vice president. “My job is to grow the company and solve problems,” he says.)

Since its founding, Keen Healthcare has grown to include manufacturing wheelchairs, canes, wheelchair pads, pressure wound dressing and other products for people who, like Vail, need them for everyday living. It also distributes equipment that is equally innovative.

“I never wanted to be a dealer,” Vail says. “We became a dealer because people kept calling and saying, ‘Please become a dealer.’ Never wanted to get into complex rehab, but therapists begged us to get into complex rehab. Never wanted to get into oxygen, but I have this strange, suspicious feeling it’s going to be coming down the pike.

“We don’t want to reinvent the wheel. If someone has invented a real innovative product, and has figured out a way, business-wise, to provide it at a reasonable cost that makes sense, we partner with those people.”

And that includes paying attention to small details.

For example, the crutches and canes come in a variety of colors for the simple reason that Vail prefers people to say, “Hey, that’s a cool crutch,” rather than “What happened to you?”

Garza explains the therapeutic benefits: “One of the hardest things to do is to actually get people to actually use adaptive equipment when we get to the point in our lives when we actually need them,” he says. “One of the benefits of adding color and not making it institutional gray is that you get people to actually use them.”

“We’re very results based,” Vail continues. “So if it’s a distributed product, we don’t just believe the marketing. We don’t believe the salesperson. We don’t even believe, sometimes, the doctor or the nurse that’s advocating for it. I myself take that product, find patients that it’s for, and I watch the healing. So if it’s a wound-care product, I want to see the pressure sores heal with my own two eyes.

“I sleep on our own mattress. When we hire someone new, they have to sit in our own wheelchair, they have to tell us three things good about our wheelchair and three things bad about our wheelchair. They’ve got to use it for 24 hours. They have to take it home, or to the bathroom and do all those things.”

“We’ve got to figure out a way to make it easier to do the right thing.”

There is much more innovation possible, Vail says. Take the electric wheelchair, which still uses car batteries for power. That adds a great deal of weight to a wheelchair, which means that vans adapted to carry them are very heavy, virtually tanks on the road. Finding an alternative source of power would make wheelchairs and vans lighter, safer and less expensive.

As a nation, “we’re the second highest spenders on health care in the world,” Vail says. “My hope is that we can figure out a way to get more bang for the buck. How we can accomplish that, I’m not sure. But hopefully Keen can help with that.”