Dr. Ben Lefkove is an emergency room physician, but during the heat of the Covid-19 pandemic, like everybody else, he had to scramble to find a Covid test. That scramble spurred a partnership with Ron Sanders focused on bringing tests to Atlantans in a more efficient way: drive-thrus.
They called the business Viral Solutions and thought it would be a side-hustle. Instead, they treated close to 4 million people.
One of those patients sparked a new idea when she needed a Covid test to visit her doctor for a rash. Sanders, a physician assistant, took a quick look, immediately diagnosed shingles and phoned in a prescription, all while the patient remained in her car.
Lefkove and Sanders realized the Viral Solutions drive-thru system could be scaled beyond Covid.
Now they plan to fold Viral Solutions' services into a new company, DriveThru Urgent Care. The aim: to condense the typically hours-long emergency room or urgent care visit to as little as 10 minutes with their drive-thru design. They believe it will disrupt what they see as an outdated model.
“Just imagine a world where you can get registered, you can be seen, and ride off with your medications and be evaluated all within 10 minutes, which sounds unheard of,” Sanders said. “That's what we're trying to bring to health care.”
Their first drive through clinic is slated to open in early August at 1605 Howell Mill Road, a former Jimmy John’s location. It's an appropriate location for founders who took their inspiration from the fast-food business.
“We pattern our model after Chick-fil-A,” Sanders said. “Just imagine how efficient they are with taking orders and every little second matters — how to shave seconds off of each encounter, from how fast their credit card machines process things to the to the speed in which you can get your food...."
Lefkove, the former chief medical information officer at Emory Decatur Hospital, is obsessed with maximizing this concept, which he calls “pure time” — the time the patient and provider are interacting — and minimizing everything else.
“We can kind of come to the car NASCAR-style and swarm it," Lefkove said. "It creates a lot of efficiencies in health care, especially in the acute care space. We're trying to carve these visits down as tight as possible.”
How it will work
Lefkove and Sanders are convinced they can diagnose and treat the most cases while patients stay in their cars. Health care providers arrive at their diagnoses primarily from talking to patients and quick visual exams, especially for the types of complaints usually seen at an urgent-care clinic, Lefkove pointed out.
The clinic will even have digital X-ray machines that can be used while the patient remains in their vehicle. For those who need certain procedures or private exams, the new clinic will also have rooms.
DriveThru Urgent Care will also be open longer than most doctor’s offices, from 8 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., with plans to extend hours even further. The clinic will also be able to dispense common prescription medications.
Lefkove and Sanders have not faced problems staffing the clinic. The pair has drawn on staff from Viral Solutions and another company they founded, FirstClass Healthcare, that provides health services to jails.
“We know that the satisfiers for people are … they need to be paid at or above market, they need to have a good non-evil employer who gets them and understands their needs, and they need to come to work and not feel like it's hair on fire, like they're being overtaxed,” Lefkove said.
“We believe in leading by example,” Sanders added, noting he, Lefkove and other equity partners will also be seeing patients at the clinic.
Sanders and Lefkove think their new model has the potential to change health care, and are scouting new locations, primarily on the south and east sides of Atlanta.
“These big health systems turn like ships,” Lefkove said, nothing that he and Sanders, as the founders of a small company, can be nimble and responsive.
The company developed its own custom registration app that asks for a patient's car’s make and model – something the founders say no off-the-shelf software could provide.
“We're building our own health care delivery model that looks the way we think it should look, and we're providers, right?" Lefkove said. "We know what our patients need, and now we have a way that we can give it to them. ... If we continue to focus on that, we think that will keep patients coming in the door."
