ROMTech CEO Peter Arn on Scaling Home Rehab Care
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
In 2025, ROMTech had a problem that most startups would envy: far more demand than it could immediately meet.
The Connecticut-based company makes PortableConnect, a connected rehabilitation device that allows patients recovering from orthopedic surgery to perform therapy at home while clinicians monitor their progress remotely. As orders accelerated, CEO Peter Arn made a decision that defies most growth-stage playbooks: He put revenue on hold.
The company continued to grow, but deliberately moderated its expansion by strengthening the operational infrastructure and clinical oversight needed for larger scale. This meant leaving some short-term income on the table. It also meant giving the service model time to catch up with demand – and as those systems strengthened, patient volume reached record levels, with more than 57,000 patients served in 2025 and 34% year-over-year growth.
“Sustainable growth in health care must prioritize quality, safety and patient outcomes,” says Arn. “In this industry, growing faster than your ability to deliver is not ambition. It’s risk.”
Transitioning home care
ROMTech’s bet sits within a much larger trend. Hospital-at-home programs, remote patient monitoring, and virtual physical therapy have all expanded as health systems look to cut costs and patients demand convenience. Rehabilitation is a natural candidate: it’s frequent, repetitive, and traditionally requires patients—many of them fresh off joint replacement surgery—to travel to a clinic several times a week.
The catch is that home care only works if doctors can still see what’s going on. This is the gap that ROMTech is trying to close. PortableConnect combines an adaptive therapy device with software that captures objective performance data—range of motion, session compliance, progress over time—and feeds it back to the care team.
To date, the company says more than 190,000 patients have used the platform.
Transforming demand into scalable care
Health care is notoriously difficult to change, and for defensible reasons: the cost of error is measured in patient outcomes, not retention rates. Arn’s experience building ROMTech reflects this reality. The company’s biggest obstacle was not demand. Doctors recognized the pattern almost immediately, and health systems were open. The hardest work was building the operational discipline required to turn a new model of care into a scalable national service while the company was already growing rapidly.
His response has been to lead by evidence and real-world execution rather than innovation. “Innovation only matters if it solves meaningful problems,” he says. “Healthcare entrepreneurs should spend more time understanding patients and doctors than chasing the newest technology.”
It’s advice that goes against the grain at a time when AI features and flashy demos dominate the health tech fields. Arn’s version of product development is less flashy and more disciplined: listen, listen, listen; verify with data; improve based on real-world usage; repeat.
This disciplined approach is beginning to gain validation abroad. ROMTech was named to Healthcare Report’s 2026 Best Healthcare Technology Companies list, won the 2026 MedTech Breakthrough Award for Best Home Healthcare Solution, and appeared on Fast Company’s 2025 Most Innovative Companies list and the LexisNexis Top 100 Global Innovative New Properties list.
What comes next
The more interesting question is how far the model travels. ROMTech is piloting applications beyond orthopedics—cardiology, oncology, metabolic care, and post-acute recovery—betting that the same combination of guided motion, remote monitoring, and engagement applies wherever recovery depends on patients doing the work at home.
The company’s accumulated rehab data may prove to be its most enduring asset. Extremely dense, real-world recovery data at that scale is rare and has opened the door to more personalized protocols and AI-driven prediction, optimization and mitigation.
The next test is how widely ROMTech can expand its nationwide platform. The company is focused on expanding into new diagnoses, provider relationships and patient populations while maintaining the consistency of service, clinical quality and operational discipline required at scale.
“Building a healthcare technology company takes patience, persistence and a willingness to overcome obstacles,” says Arn. “Success is not simply measured by growth. It is measured by the number of lives you improve.”
In 2025, ROMTech had a problem that most startups would envy: far more demand than it could immediately meet.
The Connecticut-based company makes PortableConnect, a connected rehabilitation device that allows patients recovering from orthopedic surgery to perform therapy at home while clinicians monitor their progress remotely. As orders accelerated, CEO Peter Arn made a decision that defies most growth-stage playbooks: He put revenue on hold.
The company continued to grow, but deliberately moderated its expansion by strengthening the operational infrastructure and clinical oversight needed for larger scale. This meant leaving some short-term income on the table. It also meant giving the service model time to catch up with demand – and as those systems strengthened, patient volume reached record levels, with more than 57,000 patients served in 2025 and 34% year-over-year growth.
