Call9 celebrated a big birthday this year; on July 15, we turned 3!
For a growing health tech startup, it was a momentous celebration to be able to gather more than 100 members of our team, plus family and friends, for Mr. D Day in honor of our first patient.
The story of Mr. D is legend around our office. He was the first patient we saw — and we saved his life. The amazing thing is, it wasn’t supposed to happen that way. We were scheduled to go live on July 16, but the administrator at Central Island Healthcare (our first facility) asked us to come in a day early to make sure everything was ready to go. Because the clinical team was at the facility, we were activated for Mr. D, who was having vague abdominal pain — and as they say, the rest is history.
This year, Mr. D Day was an opportunity to gather as a team and celebrate his life and the impact he’s had in shaping our mission, vision and values.
“Mr. D is a huge cornerstone for us and our culture,” said Katie Davis, Call9’s SVP of Clinical Operations. “He was the first patient we ever saw, and we ended up saving his life.
“Starting this from literally nothing and building it up to what it is today, recognizing how much we’ve been able to do in this short amount of time is absolutely incredible.”
Here’s why Mr. D Day is special to Tim Peck, Call9’s Cofounder and CEO:
“I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between 0 to 1 and 100 to 101. There’s the same amount of space in between both of those intervals — the exact same amount of space. But there’s something special about the 0 to 1.
“Zero attracts some people. Some people are drawn to that. Some people see that and say, okay there’s nothing there, there should be, what can be there, what’s the possibility around this zero. Whereas other people see that zero and they ignore it, they get scared of it, they’re fearful. Honestly, it makes me fearful when I see nothing as well — but the type of person that comes around Call9, we come together as a family, we find that bravery and we lean into the number zero.
“When you build something from 0 to 1, you make something. And Call9 has made something for people when there was nothing there for them.
“This is just a small part of what we’re going to build. We are a fraction of the size of what we’re about to do. There are over 15,000 nursing homes out there, and each of the patients in those nursing homes needs Call9. We need to move fast, we need to scale, we need to grow to be able to reach them. That’s what Mr. D Day is about.”
