Digital health · Post-acute care
Call9
A company that put emergency medicine inside nursing homes, with first responders at the bedside and emergency physicians on a screen. It raised $34 million, ran in a dozen New York facilities, and wound down in June 2019 because Medicare had no way to pay for what it did.
The cot in the conference room
In 2015 an emergency physician named Timothy Peck cold-emailed and called more than 2,000 nursing homes. Three answered. One, Central Island Healthcare in Plainview, New York, was near where he grew up. Its owner made him an offer: sleep here every night until I trust this, and you can run your pilot.
“For three months, I slept on a cot in a conference room at Central Island Healthcare in Plainview, NY, and learned everything I could about nursing homes: the operations, how care was delivered, how the finance system worked.”
The first patient he treated there had diabetes and was complaining about his stomach. Peck noticed he was short of breath, walked a nurse who had never done one through an EKG, and saw a heart attack. “He probably would have died otherwise, had he just been treated for abdominal pain or constipation,” he told TechCrunch that July.
The problem, in the government’s own numbers
CMS research on people enrolled in both Medicare and Medicaid found that “approximately 45% of hospital admissions among individuals receiving either Medicare skilled nursing facility services or Medicaid nursing facility services could have been avoided,” accounting for 314,000 avoidable hospitalizations and $2.6 billion in Medicare spending in 2005 alone.
CMS had also built something about it. Its Initiative to Reduce Avoidable Hospitalizations Among Nursing Facility Residents launched in 2012 and paid seven organizations to work inside 143 facilities through 2016. Call9 is not among the seven. The mechanism that fit its model existed, and Call9 sat outside it.
A service, not a device
Peck built the company with Celina Tenev, a radiology postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, and XiaoSong Mu, a Stanford computer science graduate. What they shipped was staffing. Call9 put EMT trained responders in the building around the clock with a cart carrying an EKG, an ultrasound and bedside labs, and an emergency physician on video to direct them. Nursing homes paid a subscription. Insurers, in theory, would share the savings from hospital trips that never happened.
Index Ventures led a $10 million Series A in January 2016. A $24 million Series B in 2017 brought in Redmile Group. By early 2018 the company had more than 140 employees and was opening a facility about every month.
The policy bet, and the quarter it came apart
On September 13, 2018, Peck testified before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health. Call9 was in 10 New York nursing homes with seven commercial payers, treating patients in place about 80 percent of the time, “however, there is no way for Medicare to reimburse us for the care we deliver, which has severely limited our growth and ability to reach vulnerable patients” outside the cities.
The fix he asked for was the RUSH Act, H.R. 6502, introduced on July 25, 2018 with ten cosponsors. Its last recorded action is a referral to the Subcommittee on Health on August 8, 2018. It came back as S. 3447 in 2020 and as S. 2576 and H.R. 4890 in 2021. Every version ends at a committee referral.
Meanwhile two payment models pulled opposite ways. Aetna and UnitedHealthcare preferred to pay per visit rather than contract on value with a small physician group. Redmile, which controlled more than half the company according to Crain’s reporting, pushed toward fee for service. In spring 2019 cash fell below what the company owed Western Technology Investment, which put a lien on it in what Peck called a “friendly foreclosure.” The Series C never closed.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Regulatory and research record | No FDA 510(k) or PMA, no registered trial, no NIH or NSF award found. | Not found |
| Peer-reviewed publication | A PubMed search for Call9 on September 23, 2026 returns nothing about the company. Fierce Healthcare reported in 2020 that “Peer-reviewed research published in eScholarship indicated that Call9’s technology resulted in an 80% reduction in care escalation.” That paper was not located. | Not found |
| Single site outcome | Central Island Healthcare averaged 154 hospitalizations per six-month period before Call9 and 85 after, with a reported 40 to 50 percent drop in emergency department transfers. Healthcare IT News, February 2018, sourced to the customer. | Customer-stated |
| Company figures in a public record | House testimony, September 2018: treating in place about 80 percent of the time, $8 million saved per 200 beds per year, more than 3,500 Medicare Part B patients treated at a loss. | Company-stated |
| Scale at the end | Twelve New York nursing homes, about 200 staff at peak and about 100 at the wind-down. The company website recorded 142,000 telemedicine visits and 11,000 patients treated. | Independent |
| Later company figures | In December 2020 Peck said the platform “delivered more than 150,000 telemedicine encounters, managed more than 5,000 patients daily and reduced patient transfers from skilled nursing facilities to hospitals by more than 50%.” That daily figure is hard to square with twelve facilities. | Differs from reported scale |
| The legislative fix | H.R. 6502, RUSH Act of 2018, ten cosponsors, last action a subcommittee referral on August 8, 2018. Reintroduced 2020 and 2021. No version received a committee or floor vote. | Public record |
| The lender’s marks | Venture Lending & Leasing VIII, a Western Technology Investment fund, carried Call9 loans at full cost through March 31, 2019. At June 30 the rate is 18.0 percent, the loan is non-accrual, and fair value is $1,252,246 against $2,048,596 of cost. At September 30 fair value is $498,510. Call9 is gone from the December 31, 2019 schedule. | Public record |
| Corporate status | New York lists CALL9, INC., a Delaware corporation filed in Kings County on October 13, 2015, and CALL9 MEDICAL, P.C., filed August 11, 2015. Both are Inactive. | Public record |
Read plainly: the clinical case rests on one facility’s numbers, reported by that facility, and on figures the company supplied. The failure is documented to the dollar and to the quarter, in filings a lender had to make. That asymmetry is the story.
What to watch
- Whether a Medicare value-based contracting authority for skilled nursing facilities is ever enacted. Three tries across three Congresses all ended at a committee referral.
- The eScholarship paper Peck cited in 2020. If it exists it is the only peer-reviewed evidence for the model, and it is not indexed in PubMed.
- Curve Health, the successor Peck founded in 2020, which holds Call9’s intellectual property and branding rights.
- The Call9 Medical restart announced in July 2019. It does not appear in the record, and the New York entity is Inactive.
In their words
“To date, we have treated more than 3,500 Medicare Part B-enrolled patients at a financial loss to our company.”
Timothy C. Peck, House testimony, September 2018 · Public record
“However, the show must go on.”
Michael Ostreicher, Central Island Healthcare, to Skilled Nursing News, 2019 · Independent
“But we also know that fee for service can give you more revenue compensation in the short-term, and start-ups often feel that pressure to focus their efforts there.”
Timothy Peck, to CNBC, June 2019 · Independent
“We had to do services in a particular way that in no way brought value to our model.”
Tim Peck, to Crain’s New York Business, July 2019 · Independent
“Their model wasn’t able to move the needle sufficiently to justify the ongoing expense.”
Scott LaRue, CEO, ArchCare, to Crain’s New York Business, July 2019 · Independent
“You can’t lean into fee-for-service in order to maximize the amount of cash that you’re getting in the short term, and keep the good graces of the payers and the world out there, who’s trying to work with you toward being a value-based company.”
Timothy Peck, to Skilled Nursing News, 2019 · Independent
“Medicare itself didn’t pay us well for what we were doing, and we couldn’t make profits on treating Medicare patients with the previous telehealth regulations.”
Timothy Peck, to Fierce Healthcare, December 2020 · Independent
“For me, it was a quick moment of feeling bad about myself, that I wasn’t able to keep Call9 going long enough to get there, followed by a moment of feeling responsibility to serve these patients.”
Timothy Peck, to Skilled Nursing News, May 2020 · Independent
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordTestimony of Timothy C. Peck, MD, Subcommittee on Health
- Public recordRUSH Act bill status: H.R. 6502, S. 3447, S. 2576, H.R. 4890
- Public recordInitiative to Reduce Avoidable Hospitalizations Among Nursing Facility Residents
- Public recordVenture Lending & Leasing VIII, Forms 10-K and 10-Q
- Public recordEntity records for CALL9, INC. and CALL9 MEDICAL, P.C.
- Public recordPubMed search for Call9, no matching publication
- IndependentCall9 is shutting down operations
- IndependentOnce Backed with $34M, Call9 to Shut Down
- IndependentVenture-backed telemedicine startup Call9 is shutting down
- IndependentAfter shutdown, Call9 founder plans a comeback
- IndependentThis founder lived in a nursing home for 3 months
- IndependentTelemedicine reduces hospitalizations from 154 to 85
- IndependentCall9 Raises $10 Million Series A Led by Index Ventures
- IndependentCall9 Delivers On-Demand Doctors In Emergency Situations
- IndependentCall9 Sees Second Chance at Success as Curve
- IndependentThe founder of shuttered Call9 started a new venture
- CompanyLet Me Tell You a Story
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
