About

We built this because we watched the gap.

VitalityCall did not start with a technology. It started with a frustration that most physicians share, and with a few losses that some of us are still carrying.

The frustration

Doctors have always known what to do. They have never had the reach.

A physician can see it coming. A patient with heart failure who gains a pound a day is not gaining weight, they are retaining fluid. That fluid will reach their lungs. They will struggle to breathe. They will end up in an emergency room, and then in a hospital bed, on intravenous medication, for something that was visible weeks earlier.

It is predictable. It is preventable. All it takes is somebody asking, this week, what the scale said this morning.

For decades the answer to that has been a care manager, and there have never been close to enough of them. So the calls go to the sickest handful of patients, and everyone else waits until something breaks.

The knowledge was never the missing piece. The reach was.

What happens instead

The chart says what happened. It rarely says why.

Read enough hospital records and a pattern appears. A patient is admitted, short of breath. The labs are recorded, the treatment is documented, the discharge is written up. Almost nowhere does anyone note what actually set it off.

So the patient goes home without learning the one thing that would have protected them, and six months later the same sequence runs again. Not because anyone was careless, but because nobody had time to sit with them and connect two things that were never written down together.

That conversation is the whole job. It has simply never been possible to have it with everyone.

The personal part

Some of us are here for a reason we do not talk about in meetings.

People on this team have lost parents and family members who might have had more time, or better time inside the time they had. Not because anyone failed them exactly. Because in the long stretches between appointments, nobody was checking in.

Several of us have watched that gap from the inside, as a son or a daughter, wishing someone had called to ask a simple question that week. That is not a market analysis. It is the reason this company exists.

We are trying to close the gap we already lost people in.

What we believe

Three things we are not willing to compromise on.

1

Everyone deserves a care manager

Not the sickest five percent. Not whoever the annual list surfaces first. If the check-in works, and it does, then it should reach the whole panel, at whatever intensity each person actually needs.

2

Recommending is not the job. Following through is.

Telling someone to see their doctor tomorrow is easy, and most systems stop there. We go back and confirm it happened. If a patient did not act on it, that is not their failure to own alone.

3

The savings are real, and they are not the point

Everyone in this model does well. The practice performs better, the plan performs better, the payer spends less. Anyone in this industry can do that arithmetic without our help, so we would rather talk about the other end of it. The prescription that got picked up. The admission that never happened. The person who got another good year.

The people

Built by people who have actually run this.

We have run accountable care organizations, managed populations at risk, practiced medicine, and read the literature. We are not technologists guessing at how care works.

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Christopher Landrum

Founding Principal

"[ Christopher's reason, in his own words ]"

Founder of VitalityCall and the architect of its platform. A technologist and inventor with a long career building software used at scale, Christopher built VitalityCall to put proactive care management within reach of every patient.

BTech, Cape Breton University
Richard Ferrans, placeholder headshot

Richard Ferrans, MD, ScM

Co-Founding Principal

"To make a dent. There is more to do in this world than anyone can finish, but a real dent in it is worth a career."

A physician executive with more than 30 years across medicine, data, and health system leadership. Former chief medical officer and chief executive of a Medicare accountable care organization, with deep expertise in population health, risk adjustment, and value based care.

MD, TulaneMS Health Care Management, Harvard
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Karen Landrum

Founding Principal

"[ Karen's reason for being here, one line, in her own words ]"

A technology executive with a career leading IT organizations in complex, mission-critical environments. She led the IT teams supporting trading floor operations at Koch Industries and served as Chief Information Officer for North America at Van Leeuwen Pipe and Tube, where she was known for building cohesive teams and workflow discipline that made operations run.

BS, Trinity University
Patrick Dolan, placeholder headshot

Patrick Dolan

Principal

"I have lost parents and in-laws to things that might have been caught earlier. Some of them might still be here. I want to work on things that make a difference."

A technology executive with more than 25 years commercializing emerging technology, with senior leadership roles at GoDaddy, Virtuozzo, and Patmos. His healthcare focus began with MedTech Ventures, a medical and wellness startup program built with Arizona State University, and his own research into everyday health signals that can reveal problems before they become crises.

MBA & MS, Arizona StateTwo US patents
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[ Additional principals ]

Principal

Same shape for each: a photograph, a role, one line on why they are here in their own words, and two or three sentences of background. Nothing that cannot be verified.

See it live

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