Sept. 10, 2019

A Chicago medical company has chosen Sioux Falls as the site for a new division.

Medcor Inc. plans to offer telephonic triage to workers injured on the job from an office in downtown Sioux Falls.

The relationship began when the company’s executives came to South Dakota to hunt and met Brady Terveen, owner of A1 Al’s Pheasant Ranch in Emery, where they stayed. Terveen has a background in nursing and now will serve as Medcor’s “pod leader” in Sioux Falls.

“They’ve selected Sioux Falls because of our two huge health systems … it’s a good place to get employees,” said Gregg Brown of NAI Sioux Falls, who leased Medcor its space.

“They are basically going to be a call center, but it’s not a typical call center that we’re used to. The idea is they will be staffing the call center with nurses, people with nursing degrees who have graduated but maybe didn’t want to work in a hospital or worked in a hospital and wanted to try something different.”

Medcor was founded in 1984 by two Illinois paramedics who noticed they were transporting people to emergency rooms when they didn’t need emergency-level care. They began their business with on-site clinics in large employment centers and started triage by phone a few years later.

The company now offers on-site clinics, telephonic injury triage, construction health and safety services, and through telemedicine.

“Our branch of Medcor is telephonic triage,” Terveen said.

“Our clients are big corporations like Walmart, Target, Dollar General and McDonald’s. When employees get injured at those workplaces, we take their call. We triage them and recommend appropriate care for that injured employee. The employee gets the right care in the right amount of time, and it saves the company money because they are not sending everyone with a sprained ankle to the ER.”

There already are about 180 nurses working remotely nationwide, but as turnover ticked up in recent years, Medcor decided to try a physical office, or what it calls a pod.

The Sioux Falls office will be in the Foundry Building, above Duluth Trading Co., at 320 S. Phillips Ave. Medcor is leasing 4,100 square feet on the second floor.

“They loved the energy of Phillips Avenue. They loved that there were apartments above. They’re thinking big and different,” Brown said.

“They said it was important to get it right. Because if it works, they want to replicate it in other cities.”

The concept is for a Silicon Valley-style office with an emphasis on team building. The plan is to hire 15 people, including LPNs, RNs and paramedics.

“We’ll have shuffleboard or pingpong or video games,” Terveen said. “From our exit interviews, the newer workforce thought they wanted to work from home — until they actually did. It’s lonely. There’s no one to talk to, and they didn’t want to do it anymore. So we’re going to see how this works with a smaller knit team.”

Hiring has started, and the hope is to open the office in October. The first team hired will work from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. weekdays, although Medcor could expand with additional shifts, he said.

“And you don’t have a big patient load. It’s one injured employee at a time calling,” he added. “Something the company stresses is work-life balance. I know a lot of companies stress that, but Medcor actually means it. They know if you’re happy and spending time with family, you’re going to be a more productive worker. You don’t feel like you’re another number.”

For information, visit medcor.com.