Information Superiority in the O&P Practice

I read an article this week talking about “Information Superiority” and it made me think about our commitment to O&P practice success.  Back in 1996, the U.S. military coined a phrase for something every business competes on but almost nobody names out loud: information superiority. The idea, laid out in a planning document called Joint Vision 2010, was blunt. Whoever gathers, understands, and acts on accurate information faster than the other side tends to win. Speed and clarity carry the day. 

Run a small O&P practice long enough and you'll recognize the logic immediately. Every call you make — which referral sources to cultivate, whether to add a second location, when to push back on a payer — is only as good as the information that reached you before you made it. The edge isn't just having data. It's having accurate data get to you faster and cleaner than it gets to everyone else. 

What the military learned the hard way, over two decades of expensive lessons is that better sensors and faster networks don't automatically produce better decisions. It found that there's a layer of human judgment between the information landing on someone's desk and the decision getting made. People were deciding what to report, how to phrase it, what to leave out. And that's exactly where the advantage disappears. 

In your practice, how good is the information that actually reaches you? 

Most of us assume our information is solid. We've got reports, huddles, an open-door policy. But information almost never travels upward in its raw form. It gets smoothed out at every step along the way, it is not out of malice, it’s just human nature. By the time it lands on your desk, it looks clean, professional, and settled. It may also be missing the parts that mattered most. 

You can't easily notice this happening, because distortion doesn't look like distortion. It looks like a tidy summary. It looks like everyone agrees. That's what makes it dangerous — you don't know what you're not seeing. 

Three patterns show up constantly in small practices: 

Suppression. A rising denial rate or an aging accounts receivable bucket gets waved off with "we'll catch it up next month." The problem is real and someone on your team already knows it. It just never makes the trip to your desk in its full weight. 

Inflation. Someone tells you collections are "fine" or the WIP "looks good." It's said with total confidence, and there's no reason to doubt it — except there's no yardstick behind the statement. It's a feeling dressed up as a fact. 

Certifying. You get a single number — days to deliver, say — presented as the answer, when the real picture varies a lot by device type, payer, or case complexity. The caveats got stripped out somewhere between intake and your inbox because caveats are messy and a clean number is easy to report. 

Small practices aren't immune.

It's tempting to think this is a big company problem, something that happens in organizations with layers of management between the front line and the corner office. Small O&P practices don't have six layers. You might have one. But the mechanics are identical — they just move faster and feel more personal. One comment in the hallway can do the same job an entire reporting chain does somewhere else. 

We came up as clinicians, or we built the practice ourselves from the ground up. Nobody handed us a checklist for asking "compared to what?" or "how sure are we of that number?" We take the report at face value because it sounds professional, and professional sounds trustworthy. I just want to you be on the lookout for these distortions.  

Your OPIE monthly Acuity reports are already fighting this battle.

If your practice reviews our monthly Perspective and Acuity reports, tracking billing and admin quality, financial health like AR aging and write-offs, and clinical or operational metrics like delivery timelines, you already have a structural defense against at least some of this. You may just not have thought of it that way. 

Reports that track things like your claims-to-prescription ratio or whether patients still owe a balance at delivery work directly against suppression. A shaky billing habit shows up in the numbers well before it turns into bad debt sitting on your books. 

Reports that benchmark your practice against a peer group work against inflation. "Collections are fine" is a comfortable sentence. A specific percentile next to a peer average is not comfortable — it's just true. This is the practice-level version of a technique researchers recommend for countering overly rosy forecasts: compare yourself to a real reference class instead of trusting your gut feel. 

Reports that break a single score into its component parts work against certifying. Instead of one statement "the WIP is fine," you get several gauges, and the one furthest from where it should be tells you exactly where to look first. The nuance survives instead of getting flattened into a single tidy statement. 

The report isn't the fix. Reading it is. 

None of this works automatically. A report sitting unopened in your inbox has never corrected a single distortion. The fix is a habit, not a document. 

Here's a simple one: pick the same day every month, block fifteen minutes, and look at whichever metric sits furthest from your peer range. Don't assume you already know why. Ask the team. Let someone push back on your first explanation. That fifteen minutes is where the report's clean data meets your judgment — and it's exactly the layer the military discovered mattered more than the sensors ever did. 

Speed without accuracy doesn't make you sharper. It makes you confidently wrong, faster than a slower competitor would be. The practices that come out ahead aren't the ones that feel best informed. They're the ones that built a habit of checking whether they actually are. 

The next time one of your monthly reports lands, it's worth asking which of these patterns it's quietly working against — and whether you're reading it closely enough to notice.