Unicorn Club: How Virtual Care Startup Wheel Health Is Reinventing Digital Healthcare

Vision: 

We have a simple vision for the future: to put great healthcare in everyone’s reach. This vision is rooted in the belief that we can’t solve the problems of healthcare with the same infrastructure that created them. We believe healthcare will be transformed when the next generation takes it for granted that their care journey may be as much virtual as in person — and just thinks of virtual care as care.

The Meaning Of Wheel

The first wheel was invented over 5,000 years ago to help move something that one person could not move alone. And that’s what Wheel represents — a commitment to moving healthcare delivery forward with clinicians, organizations, and patients all playing an integral role. Today, Wheel Health is the leading virtual care platform, empowering organizations to deliver exceptional consumer-centric care experiences with a configurable infrastructure and nationwide clinician network.

History

In 2018, telehealth utilization was around 10% and no one was looking out for the center of the healthcare engine: clinicians on the front lines. Our founders, Michelle Davey and Griffin Mulcahey, had a radical idea that a virtual care platform focused on empowering clinicians and providing great care experiences could fundamentally change the healthcare system.

Enter: global pandemic. Overnight, healthcare was forced to adapt and consumers saw it was possible to get convenient care from the comfort of home. They realized that virtual care was not only possible but preferable – there was no going back.

Wheel now powers the virtual care programs of leading consumer and digital health brands.

This is an excerpt from the Medium post, “A New Way of Working: How Clinicians + Technology Will Solve Our Healthcare Crisis”:

Sadly, I’m not alone in my all-too-long journey to diagnosis and help. Whether in a rural town with limited provider options, an underserved community without quality clinics, or a bustling metropolis with shockingly few available doctor’s appointments, too many people cannot access the care they need, when they need it.

That’s where Digital Health comes in. It’s the promise of technology plus human ingenuity — and it has the power to revolutionize the way we access care. By leveraging tech-enabled capabilities, plus access to Big Data, we can finally connect the right patient with the right insights, via the right healthcare provider, at the right time — improving patient experiences and outcomes.

But Digital Health cannot succeed without quality clinicians and the technology infrastructure to support their work. So I’ve made it my personal mission to solve that problem — enabling virtual care services to effectively, efficiently and safely expand access to quality healthcare in our country.

– Wheel Co-Founder Michelle Davey

About the Author: Tess Danielson is a journalist and writer focusing on the intersection of technology and society.