Is there a better (and faster) way in Twilio to get the total number of unread messages for a user across all conversations?

Question

I am thinking that this API call is highly inefficient and in fact takes way to long to return as it is currently in my SiteMaster (included on top of all of my websites pages.

                ' get total unread messagecount
                Dim UnreadMessageCount = 0
                Dim dc As New DataConn(ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings("xxxxxxxxxxxxxx").ToString)
                Dim errmsg As String = String.Empty
                Dim dt As DataTable
                Dim strsql = "exec xxxxxxxxxx " & xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
                dt = dc.GetDT(strsql, errmsg, False)
                If errmsg.Length = 0 AndAlso dt.Rows.Count > 0 Then
                    Dim accountSid As String = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings("xxxxxxxxxxxx")
                    Dim authToken As String = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings("xxxxxxxxxxx")
                    TwilioClient.Init(accountSid, authToken)
                    Dim userConversations = UserConversationResource.Read(pathUserSid:=dt.Rows(0)("TwilioSID"))
                    For Each item In userConversations
                        Dim Messages = UserConversationResource.Fetch(pathUserSid:=dt.Rows(0)("TwilioSID"), pathConversationSid:=item.ConversationSid)
                        If Messages.UnreadMessagesCount IsNot Nothing Then
                            UnreadMessageCount += Messages.UnreadMessagesCount
                        End If
                    Next
                End If

I program in VB (not C#). I can only see this routine as becoming much worse as the website grows.