In 2009, Lexington native Sidney VanNess left his job as an investment banker in New York to move to Alaska with his wife, who would be working there as an OB-GYN at a U.S. Air Force base for the next three years. Without many finance opportunities in Anchorage, VanNess figured it was time to do something different.
Several months before his trip to Alaska, he wrote an idea on the back of a napkin at a cocktail party after hearing something he found problematic. An OB-GYN at the party relayed a story to him detailing how doctors would take phone calls, give out some form of medical advice, and then hang up without a single moment of that conversation being documented. It was as if the phone call had not taken place.
VanNess then began working with programmers to develop something that essentially replaces a live answering service for medical practices with a 100 percent automated service that records and permanently archives every call that passes through. By the time he moved to Alaska, he had a prototype for what would later be known as On Call Central.
After the model was finalized, he began trudging through the zero-degree Alaskan air, visiting medical practices door to door, trying to get someone to bite while getting a flurry of doors slammed in his face — that is, until he made his first sale. The person he sold to is still a client today.
By the time he left Alaska to return home to Kentucky in 2011, VanNess had sold to the largest urology practice in the state, one of the largest OB-GYN practices in the state, the largest orthopedics practice in the state and a number of other practices.
“So far, we’ve sold exclusively to medical practices,” said VanNess, who employs one person in Lexington and has contractors based around the world. “We’ve had some organizations come to us that aren’t medical practices, but they’re definitely medical businesses. ... We’ve had some pharmacies come to us, we have some clients in the Northeast who work for state-run homes for the disabled, but it’s medical practices that we sell to overwhelmingly.”
After a patient seeking medical advice calls a medical facility that uses On Call Central, that person will leave a message and hang up. Within 10 seconds of leaving that message, the medical provider will receive a text, a page, a call or an email.
“Then our system waits to see if the person actually listened to the message that’s been left for them,” VanNess said. “That’s really, at that point, our job — to ensure the message has been delivered to the provider.”
If the medical provider doesn’t listen to the message quickly enough, the system will keep sending notifications until that message has been heard.
Doctors can listen to a patient’s message directly. After they listen, they can press “3,” and the system will call back the patient’s number while keeping the anonymity of the doctor’s cell phone number intact. Instead of the caller ID showing the doctor’s number, it will show the number of the doctor’s medical practice. It sets the two parties up into what is essentially a conference bridge, but it sounds like a point-to-point phone call.
VanNess believes this process is beneficial to doctors, as many are very hesitant to divulge their cell phone numbers to patients.
This method cuts down on the median response time by about 75 to 80 percent, VanNess said. A peer-reviewed case study showed that when a person goes through a live answering service, the median response time is nine minutes, with 25 percent of those calls not being returned within a half hour. With On Call Central, the median response time is two minutes.
On Call Central is web-based, and after a message has been archived, practice administrators can log onto the website, see all the phone calls, play them back, download them, or put them in the electronic health record.
“I don’t know of any live answering services in the United States that are going to permanently archive every single call for their clients and provide a web interface,” VanNess said.
In terms of metrics, On Call Central deals with about 50,000 phone calls per month and has had triple-digit percentage growth for two years in a row.
VanNess believes his entrepreneurial spirit began to develop while he was studying for a Ph.D. in neuroscience at Emory University, and the motivation for On Call Central stems mostly from his overall desire to create something from nothing.
“I was doing a lot of molecular biology, cloning genes and making things, and I liked making something and going from something that didn’t exist at all to something that did something interesting and functional,” said VanNess. “Looking back on it, I think I learned a lot of things in grad school about [the] hard work that’s just required in making something from scratch, and I think I really liked that.”