Evergreen Prosthetics & Orthotics moved into bigger, better facility

Tim Harty, The Business Times 

After operating in Grand Junction for several years in a small, old building, Evergreen Prosthetics & Orthotics moved into a new location that figures to be life-altering for the business.

Not unlike the prosthetics it makes that allow people with limb loss to live better lives.

Evergreen Prosthetics & Orthotics relocated from 2305 N. Seventh St. to 1035 Wellington Ave. in mid-October, and it celebrated its newer, nicer space with a ribbon-cutting ceremony Nov. 5. The occasion warranted a flight to Grand Junction from Portland, Ore., for Alex St. Louis, vice president of the company, which originated in Oregon with four locations. St. Louis said Evergreen has grown to “about 60 clinics” in 11 states.

St. Louis said the move to Wellington Avenue was really about space for its 11 staffers, which include four practitioners, and its equipment. Now, there’s more room to move around; more room for equipment; more room for storage; more room for more people, etc.

Evergreen Business Development Director Matt Hammond added, “We’ve been ramping up and building relationships for a few years now, to a point now where we’re expanding the team, increasing the reach and moving into a bigger, newer medical space to serve a larger, more complex population.”

Evergreen Prosthetics & Orthotics’ previous home is only a few blocks away from the new one, but in terms of what the business can do now, they’re miles apart.

“That was an older building, small rooms, it wasn’t ADA compliant, because it was built in the 1950s,” St. Louis said. “And so we just needed things to service our patients better.”

St. Louis offered tours of the new building to everyone who attended the ribbon cutting, which was put on by the Grand Junction Area Chamber of Commerce. He is particularly thrilled with the new gait room, which isn’t finished. In fact, the room awaits a 20-foot-long set of parallel bars to complete the room. But when it’s ready, which St. Louis estimated would be about two weeks, it’s going to be a facility highlight.

It’s where people who get prosthetic legs use the bars for support to learn to walk with their prosthetic. And Evergreen Prosthetics & Orthotics practitioners and technicians can observe, analyze and collaborate to make adjustments and get a patient fitted correctly.

Other bigger, better rooms at the Wellington facility included a fabrication room for making prosthetics and orthotics.

“We do all our manufacturing in-house,” St. Louis said. “Other clinics, other companies don’t. They send it to a central fab. We keep it in-house.”

St. Louis, who has a prosthetic right leg below the knee, used himself as an example. He said if he was going to go to his dream job interview, but the day before the interview a socket cracked in his prosthetic leg, Evergreen Prosthetics & Orthotics could make him a replacement socket in about four hours.

Whereas other companies, he said, would say, “Hey, Alex, I need that leg. I’m gonna ship it to our central fab; they’re gonna fix it. Come back in two weeks.

“So, Alex is going to New York in a wheelchair for his dream interview, which no one wants to do, right? No matter if you can’t discriminate (based on a disability), but you understand the point.”

So, St. Louis said, “We want to be able to service anybody that comes in here for any need, emergency or not.”

St. Louis said in-house fabrication is costly – “We have financial advisors all the time chew me out and say, ‘Go get a warehouse,’” he said – but Evergreen Prosthetics & Orthotics is committed to doing it “because it’s that important.”

And he provided another example, instances that bring Evergreen’s practitioners and technicians to tears, the good kind:

“When a little 6-year-old with no legs wheels in, and she walks out, oh, it’s the coolest, most unbelievable feeling,” St. Louis said. “And we can do all this and make tweaks; we can do all of it in-house. Probably the coolest thing, coolest experience you could ever go through.”

He added Evergreen Prosthetics & Orthotics has two technicians devoted to in-house fabrication, “and I’m looking for a third.”

The facility tour also revealed a grinding room.

Another room had a large oven, and Lab Manger and O&P Technician Dion Foster made an appearance and helped St. Louis explain how the oven, which can get up to 999 degrees, is used to melt plastics used in prosthetics.

And at the end of the facility tour, St. Louis made it a point to show off a storage room with off-the-shelf storage, and there he grabbed a package containing a limb protector and said its importance couldn’t be overstated.

“When you lose your limb, we get called day or night to go to the hospital, and we put this on your stump,” he said. “Reason being, people will wake up, forgot they lost a leg, and take a step off the bed and they injure themselves.”

In the case of a below-knee stump – and yes, St. Louis said, stump is the politically correct term – such a fall could crack it open and turn the damage into an above-knee stump, which can be much more difficult, because now the patient needs an artificial knee as part of the prosthetic.

“No one can make a knee like God,” St. Louis said. “There’s some great microprocessor stuff that we can do, but above-knee can be difficult. But we work with them and get them going.”

Back to his original point, he said of the limb protectors, “We put this on every patient possible – protection.”

And Evergreen Prosthetics & Orthotics’ off-the-shelf storage is not the norm in the industry, but it’s another service Evergreen is committed to providing.

“We’re one of the very few companies that still do 24/7,” St. Louis said. “No one around here does, but we do. And it’s important.”

When he finished that tour, St. Louis joined the gathering for the ribbon cutting, and he shared the following with the assembled group:

“We work 24/7 for the hospitals here locally, and I opened up here, because there’s nobody like us, and this community needs us. And I’m an amputee myself, so I get to wear the boss hat, but then also look through the patient’s eyes and understand what people might need.

“We work on the physical side of care, but also, sometimes more importantly, we help them with the emotional battle of limb loss and limb difference and getting through the hurdles of becoming or being disabled.

“We also work with a lot of pre-op patients that might be losing their leg, their limbs due to vascular disease, and we get to meet them prior to surgery, and we have doctors all the time that tell us what a great job we do, because we prepare them for what’s next. So when they wake up, they have the answers, they understand what’s going to happen next, versus you wake up and you know nothing about the prosthetics, and you don’t know what to do. So we’re trying to educate.”