Wheel is healthcare’s answer to the gig economy. Its online platform matches doctors with patients and also enables any company to stand up a virtual care practice.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the healthcare industry found itself turning to telemedicine to meet patient needs. Every digital health company, hospital and insurer faced the same two obstacles: a need for more doctors and better technological infrastructure. Even the major virtual care players like Teladoc Health and Amwell had long waiting times as patient demand vastly outpaced physician supply in those first weeks and months.
Michelle Davey was ready. At Austin, Texas-based Wheel, cofounder and CEO Davey had already been building this back-end infrastructure for years—both the technology end and the doctor and nurse network. “The vision of Wheel is really about expanding access,” says Davey, 32. “It's about connecting patients to the right care for them, when they need it most.”
Wheel doesn’t provide branded telehealth services like the Teladocs of the world. Instead, it offers tools that enable health providers or even employers to offer telehealth services. Before the pandemic, Wheel had already developed a software platform that would vet, train and credential virtual care clinicians and match them with patients in real-time for other companies’ virtual care programs. Its white-labeled platform allows any company to launch virtual care. With a $50 million Series B funding round announced Wednesday, Davey and the Wheel team are looking to scale up and sustain its newfound growth in the post-pandemic world. The company is also branching into solutions for speciality care, including behavioral health.
Wheel is positioned to meet the demands not just of telemedicine companies, but a whole new crop of startups that want to introduce a virtual care component, says Ling Wong, a senior advisor at Lightspeed Venture Partners who is joining Wheel’s board. Lightspeed led the round with participation from existing investors CRV, Silverton Partners, Tusk Venture Partners and J.P. Morgan. Future Shape joined as a new investor. Wheel has raised $66 million to date.
Consider a meditation app that wants to offer therapy or a digital pharmacy that wants to deliver medication after a physician appointment. In order to expand, these businesses would need to spend millions of dollars and months of hiring and coding software to build the technology in-house. Or, they could just call up Wheel and use its platform instead. “Wheel powers the back-end of that and in the process aligns the incentives,” says Wong. “As those companies scale, Wheel will scale and meet them and their demand as well. So it's a win-win, which I think is a great way to build a business.”
The pandemic really didn't change our business model. It actually solidified what we were building towards.
Davey’s frustration with the existing healthcare system started when she was a child living in rural Texas. It took 15 years being ferried between doctors for her to be diagnosed with an autoimmune condition. After working at medical device companies, she jumped to a recruiting role at Google and later to recruitment for an on-demand delivery startup at the height of the gig economy. She built up the network of contract drivers from 300 to 45,000 people. But when she jumped back into healthcare at telehealth startup Medici, it wasn’t such a cakewalk. “I thought, ‘Easy, I've hired thousands of people in my life, how hard can healthcare hiring be? And was very much humbled very quickly,” she recalls.
Davey was hearing from others in the industry that the biggest sticking point to scaling digital health startups was understanding the regulations across all 50 states and recruiting licensed clinicians. In January 2018, Davey and Medici’s general counsel Griffin Mulcahey founded a virtual health clinician matching marketplace called Enzyme, which later became Wheel. Mulcahey, 37, now serves as Wheel’s chief compliance officer.
Wheel’s explosive growth shows just how much appetite for both fulfilling staffing needs and the core software infrastructure for companies to be able to offer virtual care options. Wheel delivered nearly half a million patients visits in the last year. Its contracted revenue in the fourth quarter of 2020 was $3.3 million and has grown to $42 million in the first four months of 2021.
The company also hasn’t had any trouble recruiting thousands of contract clinicians to join its network. More than 80% of its growth has been organic and the company has a 90% retention rate, says Davey. One of the main selling points is that Wheel allows doctors to practice on their own schedule—when the kids are in school, late at night, on the weekend—similar to a driver for a ride-sharing company like Uber or Lyft. “They can really have the flexibility to design a career for them,” says Davey. Doctors also practice across Wheel’s clients, so it breaks up the monotony and burnout that could come from doing the exact same thing day in and day out.
“The pandemic really didn't change our business model. It actually solidified what we were building towards, and the fact that clinicians needed an entirely new way to work,” says Davey. The pay model can vary, but for the most part clinicians are paid based on the amount of time spent per patient. Wheel charges its customers, be it a startup or a health system, a baseline fee for use of the software and then a fee per consult.
Looking towards the long-term, Wheel will continue to invest in building out its technology and also recruiting different specialists, in addition to psychiatrists and therapists, as healthcare moves to a hybrid model in the future. “What we're really trying to do is span a broad industry and really change the way it works,” says Davey. To that end, she’s all for more startups entering the market. “As you invite more competition into healthcare, it actually is going to be better outcomes for patients,” she says. “By breaking down the barriers for innovation, as Wheel really tries to do, we'll be able to add more players to the space to change it.”
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