Hanger Clinic gets early access to Click Medical's adjustable-volume socket system. Here is what that pipeline looks like.

Hanger Clinic and Click Medical announced a commercial collaboration this week. The headline fact: Hanger Clinic gains exclusive early access to Click Medical’s ClickFit system, a modular lower-limb socket designed to let patients and clinicians adjust volume without removing the device or layering socks.

That is a meaningful development for people who have been waiting for adjustable-volume technology to arrive at a clinic they can actually get to. Hanger Clinic operates more than 900 patient care centers across the United States, which makes it the largest O&P provider network in the country. “Exclusive early access” means ClickFit arrives at that network before it becomes broadly available elsewhere in the American market.

Two things are worth unpacking: what ClickFit is solving, and what “exclusive early access” actually means for patients.

The problem this class of device is designed for

If you wear a lower-limb prosthesis, you already know this story by feel: the socket that fits well in the morning may feel loose by afternoon, or tight after a day of sitting. Residual limb volume shifts continuously in response to activity, temperature, hydration, posture, and time since amputation. The traditional clinical answer has been sock management—adding or removing prosthetic socks of varying ply to compensate. It works well enough that it has been standard practice for decades. It is also inexact, requires the user to read their own limb correctly, and creates moments where the fit is genuinely wrong on either side of the adjustment.

Adjustable-volume socket systems approach this differently. Rather than adding material between the liner and the socket wall, they build the adjustment mechanism into the socket itself, allowing controlled changes to the internal volume. The clinical goal is a more responsive fit—one that can track daily fluctuation without requiring a clinic visit or a sock drawer calculus.

ClickFit is Click Medical’s version of this approach. The O&P EDGE has reported the collaboration details; the specific mechanism and the results of any clinical data should be discussed with your prosthetist, who will have direct information from the manufacturer.

What “exclusive early access” means in practice

Exclusivity arrangements are common in medical device distribution, and they mean different things depending on how you read the fine print.

For Hanger Clinic patients, early access is generally good news: you are in the first wave of clinical exposure, which means the technology may be available at your clinic before it appears elsewhere. Whether it is appropriate for you is a clinical question that your prosthetist will assess.

For patients outside the Hanger network, the picture is more straightforward: this technology exists, it is in the American market pipeline, and it will become more broadly available as the exclusivity period ends and other providers are brought in. The timeline for that is not publicly reported yet.

For everyone, “early access” also carries the standard caveat that applies to any newly deployed device: a technology can be both clinically sound and clinically new at the same time. Prosthetists working with it are building experience. That is not a reason to avoid it—all devices have a learning curve when first deployed—but it is worth knowing.

How new O&P technology typically moves

The path from regulatory clearance to a clinic visit has a predictable shape. A device gets cleared or approved, then enters a period of limited distribution—often through pilot programs or early-adopter sites with clinical relationships to the manufacturer. A network deal like this one with Hanger represents a step toward broader access: the technology moves from pilot-scale to a large provider footprint, usually with training and support from the manufacturer.

After the exclusive window, the device typically expands to independent O&P practices and regional chains. The final, often slowest step is insurance coverage: a new socket system may be technically available for months or years before payers have established reimbursement paths, and before those paths are well-enough understood that a prosthetist can reliably obtain prior authorization for it.

That last point matters here. Click Medical’s ClickFit being available at Hanger Clinic does not automatically mean it is covered under any given insurance plan. If you are interested in this technology, the first conversation is with your prosthetist—and the second is with your insurer, before that appointment, to understand how they classify adjustable-volume socket systems and what documentation they require.

The useful question

Hanger’s size matters in both directions. A large network can move new technology quickly through clinical distribution, train a lot of prosthetists, and generate real-world outcomes data that eventually supports reimbursement arguments. It also concentrates early access among people who happen to have a Hanger clinic as their provider—a subset that is not evenly distributed geographically or demographically.

The next useful question, which the O&P EDGE piece does not yet answer, is what Click Medical’s timeline looks like for non-Hanger distribution, and whether clinical outcomes data from this collaboration will be published. Both of those would move this from an interesting business development item to a clearer picture of when and how this technology becomes something the broader patient population can plan around.

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This article is based on reporting in The O&P EDGE. Specific technical details about the ClickFit system, clinical eligibility, and coverage should be discussed with your prosthetist and insurer. Amputee News does not provide individual device recommendations.