For Patients and Referring Providers

Our Clinical Model

Surgical outcomes are largely decided before the incision. Fitness on the day of surgery predicts complications, length of stay, and how fully a patient returns to their life. Most of healthcare treats the weeks before an operation as paperwork. We built a practice around them.

AthleticsMD® is Maryland's first independent Comprehensive Outpatient Rehabilitation Facility, a federal designation that requires physician direction and a full rehabilitation team under one roof. That structure is not incidental to our model. It is the model: one physician-led team that prepares patients for surgery, restores them after it, and builds the lasting reserve that lets them meet whatever their health demands next.

The Arc of Care

Prepare

Every surgical patient starts with objective baseline testing: strength, endurance, mobility, nutrition, and the medical factors that drive surgical risk. From that baseline, our team builds a PREOOP™ prehabilitation plan, typically two to eight weeks of supervised training, nutritional optimization, and medical tune-up before the operation. Patients walk into surgery stronger than they were at diagnosis, and the peer-reviewed literature across orthopedic, cardiac, thoracic, and abdominal surgery ties that fitness to fewer complications and shorter hospital stays.

Operate

Your surgeon operates. We coordinate. The surgical team receives the baseline report and prehabilitation summary before the case, so the operating room knows exactly what the patient can do.

Recover

Rehabilitation begins on the surgeon's timeline with the same team that prepared the patient, which means recovery is measured against a real baseline instead of a guess. Physical, occupational, speech, and respiratory therapy run alongside rehabilitation nursing under direct physician oversight, with progress reported back to the referring practice at defined milestones.

Prevent

Discharge from rehab is an enrollment point, not an exit. Functional and preventive medicine, medical weight loss, and movement screening carry the gains forward. A word on what this is not: this practice was founded by a surgeon and a cardiac anesthesiologist, and we are not against the operating room. We are against patients arriving there depleted. Prevention here means building reserve, strength, metabolic health, and function, so that when life requires an operation or an illness arrives uninvited, the patient meets it from a position of strength. That is the loop at the top of the diagram.

The FITMD Principles

Our phone number is 844-FIT-MD4U. That was not an accident. FITMD is the standard every decision in this practice is tested against.

F · Focused Care

We do a small number of things at depth: prepare patients for surgery, restore them after it, and keep them well between episodes. Focused does not mean narrow. It means every service, protocol, and hire in this building ties back to function, and nothing here exists because it was fashionable.

I · Innovation

The MyPrehab app extends the clinic into the patient's home: a daily plan on their phone, progress the care team actually sees, and coaching between visits instead of a folded handout. Care happens where patients live, not only where we practice. And the deepest innovation is directional: preventive rather than reactive medicine, finding problems while they are small and building reserve before it is needed.

T · Transparency

At every stage of care and on every bill. Patients know the plan, the reasoning, and the cost before care begins. We participate openly with major payers, provide Good Faith Estimates for self-pay services, and send progress data to both the patient and the referring surgeon. No surprises, clinical or financial.

M · Measured Outcomes

Every plan starts with numbers and is judged by numbers: validated functional measures at baseline, at milestones, and at discharge. Referring surgeons receive objective reports, not adjectives. When the data says a protocol is not working, the protocol changes.

D · Dedication

The one principle that cannot be protocolized. The same team follows a patient from first evaluation through discharge and beyond, we answer our own phones, and we stay invested in the long result: not the visit count, the life the patient gets back.

One Team Around the Patient

Fragmented care is the default in American medicine: the dietitian never talks to the therapist, and nobody talks to the surgeon. The CORF structure exists to prevent exactly that. Federal standards require physician direction of a multidisciplinary team, and ours runs the full array under one roof: physician services, rehabilitation nursing, physical, occupational, speech, and respiratory therapy, with rapid lab work on site and the MyPrehab app keeping the patient, the team, and the referring practice looking at the same data.

For Referring Surgeons

Our job is to make your operation succeed: to hand you a patient optimized for the case, and to take rehabilitation off your plate afterward. Your office receives confirmation of receipt, then a baseline functional report after the initial evaluation, milestone updates during care, and a discharge summary with objective measures. Your patient gets one point of contact and a plan that starts before your case and continues after it. We participate with Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare, and most major commercial plans; the full list lives in our footer, and our team verifies benefits before the first visit so neither you nor the patient is surprised.

Tell Us What You Need

Call 844-FIT-MD4U (844-348-6348) or email care@athleticsmd.org. Mention the page or clinic involved and what you were trying to do. Accessibility feedback goes to our leadership team, and every report gets a response.

Last reviewed July 2026. Updated as our practices improve.