Episode 23: The Role of Virtual Providers in the Telehealth Ecosystem with Wheel CEO Michelle Davey
Learn about the industry’s first model for delivering high-quality virtual care at scale by empowering clinicians and providing new efficiencies for healthcare companies
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In this episode you’ll discover:
Where the idea for Wheel started
What role virtual providers play in the telehealth ecosystem and who benefits most from what Wheel is building
What the connection is to the future of work
How Michelle is thinking about the new “virtual first” models that have virtual provider networks embedding with traditional in-office providers
How clinicians are holding up under the strain of the past few years
Learn more from Carrie and Rebecca:
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Read the transcript:
Rebecca Gwilt (00:17):
All right. Hello everyone. Welcome back to Decoding Healthcare Innovation. I am your host, Rebecca Gwilt, and I am super pumped today to be joined by Michelle Davey the CEO of Wheel. Hello. Hello, Michelle.
Michelle Davey (00:34):
Hi, Rebecca. Excited to be here. Excited to chat.
Rebecca Gwilt (00:38):
Yes. Yes. So Michelle I have been fangirling about for kind of a while. She is a founder. She is a mentor. She invests in women. She's a former Googler, kind of a badass. I am also a fan of the company that she founded in 2018. Wheel is a company that provides other companies and care providers and who knows what else we'll find out today, a bunch of the tools they need to make virtual care happen. If you've ever been at a company that's trying to create a company that is serving patients across the country, how intensely difficult that is and expensive and Wheel started in 18 has raised over 200 million. Michelle.
Michelle Davey (01:37):
Yeah, over 216 million now.
Rebecca Gwilt (01:40):
Amazing. And when I heard about this through a friend of Griffin's, your co-founder I thought, oh my God, this is brilliant. This is absolutely brilliant. I can't believe nobody figured this out sooner. But anyway, I'm super excited to speak with you today about the evolution of telehealth, about the role that virtual care providers play in the ecosystem. And are you ready? I are you ready for this?
Michelle Davey (02:09):
I am so ready. I'm excited to chat. I could talk about this all day, so excited to jump into it.
Rebecca Gwilt (02:15):
Awesome. So before we talk about now and the future, which is obviously the point of this podcast, let's go backwards because I think especially for women founders in tech demystifying or making visible what these journeys look like to becoming a woman who is CEO of a company that has raised $216 million is something that I'm sure a lot of people would like to emulate, at least learn more about. I do. I would. So let's talk a little bit about what your journey has been up till this point.
Michelle Davey (02:51):
Yeah, happy to. It's been quite the journey. So we started in 2018, but pre Wheel my background professionally has been in recruiting and operations, both in healthcare starting in large medical equipment companies. And quite frankly, after a couple years being inside of the traditional healthcare system, actually as a 23 year old I swore off healthcare. I was like, it is antiquated. It is slow moving. The innovation that I wanted to see happen really wasn't happening at the time at least in the space that I was in. So I jumped over to tech. I started my career at Google in recruiting, which was an incredible experience and really found a passion for connecting people to work that they love. I believe that if we enjoy the work that we do, we actually produce better work over time. And so we even have a saying here at Wheel that happier clinicians make healthier patients because we believe that.
(03:52):
We believe if you really enjoy and connect to the mission and the work that you're doing, you'll produce better outcomes or better word products. So I actually found that first at Google after a couple years, like many people at big tech decided to try my hand at a startup, I jumped over to an on-demand delivery startup where I got intimately familiar with gig economy and the future of Work and scaled that app through acquisition. And then for me I found telehealth and that was in 2016 less obvious to a lot of people but to me it was like a no-brainer. As somebody had grown up in a rural part of Texas going undiagnosed with a autoimmune condition for over 15 years, it really made so much sense. Why couldn't I connect to my doctor through my phone when I did 90% of all my banking via my phone?
(04:49):
Why couldn't I connect to my medical professionals? And then expanding access and reach to some of the best clinicians made just a ton of sense. So I jumped into a startup that was building technology for doctors to use their tech platform with their patients. Incredible kind of growth in that company. But that's where I saw the same problem that was happening over and over again. We were all building our own tech stacks, all trying to build our own clinical networks, all trying to figure out our regulations and understand them changing and evolving regulations, all trying to build our own clinical protocols and fragmenting healthcare. We were just bringing the broken system that was already fragmented offline, online and that was really a light bulb moment for myself and my co-founder I met there who is a health regulatory lawyer, Griffin, who you mentioned earlier. We had this idea that it would be great to find a company centered around the workforce or the clinicians in healthcare and enabled them to scale and really build a career out of telehealth, which in 2016 wasn't a option for them.
(06:09):
And so we founded what was then Enzyme in 2018 as a two-sided matching marketplace and quickly realized that that match or just helping clinicians find employers was really just the tip of the iceberg, helping them manage their careers and finding training and education on virtual care, which back in 2018 didn't exist. So building those out, helping them through credentialing and licensure, but also the clients that we supported helping them as well with more wraparound services. So we raced our series A on this idea back in 2019 and then scaled up since then. And so we've become Wheel in January of 2020, so pre pandemic and we really believed that it would take several five to ten years for telehealth to scale, but overnight the pandemic brought an entire industry online and Wheel was there to support that growth and continues to support the next evolution of what healthcare really is.
Rebecca Gwilt (07:12):
Yeah, I mean the timing of that is not lost on me, but I watched a lot of companies buckle under the weight of the changes that happened in 2020 and it sounds like you all really hit your stride at that point. I do want to say for anybody out there that's building at 22 or 23, definitely don't give up on things. <laugh>, keep going.
Michelle Davey (07:39):
No, no agree.
Rebecca Gwilt (07:39):
Keep going. I'm glad, I'm glad that you didn't swear off of healthcare at 23. I also think it's really important for folks to understand what came before can really inform the unique skills that they bring to what comes after I, I've heard from so many companies that I work with how difficult it is to recruit for and build a working force of clinicians, especially in the digital health space. And it sounds like you cut your teeth on recruiting before any of this happened, and I, I'm guessing that really that was an attribute that you wouldn't have guessed that would've been so useful later on.
Michelle Davey (08:22):
Absolutely, yes. I think what was really interesting was my career had been in recruiting. I'd been a recruiter myself, I've hired lots of people, but then went into the management and understanding how a workforce can grow and scale and how to do that sustainably, how to build efficiencies and operational efficiencies and processes to scale talent over time, not just thinking about one human being sitting in a chair. And that was the end all be all for a shift. And so we applied those learnings from both tech and marketplaces as well as recruiting and staffing services to evolve healthcare from thinking about clinicians as a single shift of coverage to, well, how do we help support patients across the nation and not have to worry about low balancing that supply in a demand in real time and taking that really hard problem to solve inside of each one of these companies and really building it as a horizontal layer for scale so that this industry and companies that are coming into it can have a fair shot to get their innovation into the patient's hands and patients can get the newest technology as well as the newest services for their care conditions across the care continuum and really hit that critical scale that we all need to see the impact of our work to really scale out and actually change healthcare.
Rebecca Gwilt (09:56):
So this is exactly what I wanted to talk about. So thank you for teeing me up here. So I talk with most of the companies that I work with are digital health companies, and I'm sure we've all been observing here in the health tech neurodiverse, the evolution of digital health platforms becoming healthcare providers, and then we're already moving forward to them becoming healthcare payers. But most of the discussions you hear in this space are really about the tech and the platform and the sort of people behind it delivering the care, sort of take a secondary seat. And I went to a really interesting presentation by the AMA recently that talked about how because of the speed at innovation that's happening in the digital health space, a lot of clinicians are getting left behind and it's super, super important to remember that they're really the center of care. And so I'm interested in your thoughts about in this environment and certainly Wheel is tech enabled and has an amazing platform but you do personally tend to talk a lot about the clinicians that are behind this. What are your thoughts about the role of providers in this new sort of virtual omnichannel telehealth environment?
Michelle Davey (11:14):
Well, I think it's a great question and something we've been talking about for a while, but I think there's two parts. I think first and foremost, if we now believe, and I think we all do that the future of healthcare is a hybrid model, both where we will maybe start online, but maybe not all care will end online. Well then it's obvious at least to me that the clinicians behind the scenes or the clinicians at the forefront delivering that care will also have a hybrid work environment. So because without it
Rebecca Gwilt (11:47):
Oh, okay
Michelle Davey (11:47):
Without it, yeah, right. You're not going enough. Clinicians, we're seeing incredible amounts of shortages, incredible amount of clinicians who are burned out. We just recently did a survey and over 57% of those clinicians said they were thinking about leaving healthcare in the next three years. So significant amount of clinicians who are leaving already in a shortage, were not going to have clinicians who, we may have some, but we're not going to just have two groups of clinicians, some that practice in person and some that practice virtually. We just cannot scale that model in healthcare in the US. We have to enable them to work in a hybrid world. And so that is what we've seen and what we're building towards. I would say the other important piece is clinicians are just that they're burned out. They've been through not only three years of pandemic, but pre pandemic.
(12:45):
Over half of clinicians we're already burned out and already leaving healthcare. And so how do we think about supporting them through their career journey? Well, all of us, sometimes we want and need to work from home. It doesn't mean that we're not completing our work, but that option, pre telehealth really wasn't an option for clinicians. And when they were coming on virtually, what we were seeing was they were coming onto that effect of being left behind. There wasn't the training, there wasn't the education of how to practice virtually, not just how to set up a Zoom and work with the technology. Yes, that's important, but how do we actually service patients virtually? How do you enable them to pate themselves? How do you get the data from the clinician or from the patient so that the clinician can make sound clinical judgments for the care that they're delivering?
(13:41):
And so Wheel has built all of this education and tech behind the scenes, not only for them to upstart and get ready to start their careers in virtual care, but also to expand their careers. You know, maybe coming on as a family medicine nurse practitioner and you've primarily seen maybe children and in a rural population. Well, how do we help you expand into women's health virtually? How do we enable training that maybe you're not actually seeing so that you have a wider population of patients that you can treat virtually, which is also really interesting for clinicians to get to reach a population that they're not seeing in their typical kind of regional clinic or hospital.
Rebecca Gwilt (14:27):
Sure, sure. Yeah, I love that this is sort of the intersection of telehealth and the future of work. And I think you can only do that when you really are clinician focused so that the idea that you're not just providing an alternative for them to be able to work nights and weekends while their kids are small, you're really talking about skill building and education and expanding their opportunities for care.
Michelle Davey (14:54):
Absolutely. And I think it also helps them reinvigorate their passion for providing patient care because they're seeing different populations they're seeing and helping different types of care across the care continuum and then are also upskilling in their career and seeing the longevity. I mean, we're seeing two thirds of our clinicians are already seeing patients virtually. That's a big number in healthcare, two thirds. So everybody says the genie out of the bottle, those types of things. But it really is going to be the clinicians that drive virtual care and the utilization of virtual care. If the clinicians decide, no, we're not going to work with this because it's a terrible experience for us, the patients won't have that option any longer because a hundred percent of care in this country is delivered on the back of the clinician. And so we can't cut clinicians out of the equation. They are the equation. That is what we start with.
Rebecca Gwilt (15:58):
Agreed, agreed. And it is definitely a reframing for me, it is a reframing to look at the clinician's like to their path. This is innovating in their world in medicine really, which is very cool. How many clinicians are in your network? Now?
Michelle Davey (16:19):
We don't talk about the size of the network because it fluctuates because we are matching patient demand and clinician supply in real time. So in under two minutes across all 50 states, 24/7 Wheel is powering virtual visits across. But there's thousands of clinicians on the Wheel network now all across the US. And so we have some incredible stories. I mean, we have clinicians who are traveling around the country in an RV and in the morning they're doing virtual visits online. And then at night or in the afternoons, they're hiking the national parks. We have clinicians who unfortunately are on their own health journeys. One of our clinicians was recently diagnosed with MS and worried about how do they treat patients with their condition. And so they came on virtually to support patients in a whole new way. And so it really gives that flexibility of the lifestyle of maybe it's just for, you want a lifestyle while you travel around the country and maybe it's that you want to stay in patient care as long as you can, and you are also having a health journey. So there's a lot of different types of clinicians on the platform all experiencing their own journey, and I think that's so exciting here at Wheel.
Rebecca Gwilt (17:37):
Yeah, yeah. I can imagine for women in particular that this is a tremendous opportunity that didn't exist before. It gives them some, I mean, the reality is that there are responsibilities that in general fall on women that don't fall on men and women being able to be successful and really move forward and develop their own careers in an environment that allows them to accommodate the responsibilities they have is all good. Why I created a virtual law firm to provide that kind of flexibility. It sounds like you're doing the same.
Michelle Davey (18:11):
Yeah, absolutely. And we're seeing that over 70% of our clinicians are providers either in childcare or for older adults and within their family. And to that point, that oftentimes falls on the woman. And that's unfortunate because we're taking women out of their career, who've gone to school for a really long time to service patients and are really great at it. And our caregivers by naturally caregivers, and once they decide to become a mom or decide that they need to take care of maybe an aging parent, they didn't have options before of how to continue to service patients, continue to have a career and a family and virtual care is really giving that freedom and that option. So it's pretty amazing to see that happen and we believe it will continue as we see a lot of the pandemic level repercussions for women and their careers.
Rebecca Gwilt (19:15):
So the last question I wanted to ask you about was just to put a little bit of a futurist hat on your head. I just got done with a ViVe Conference in Miami where health that's run by the same organizers. It's a lot of futurism, it's a lot of what's coming next. And I'm interested in your thoughts about the role that provider networks and platform providers like Wheel are going to play in the future of this what you call the hybrid model, which the other terms are the omnichannel model. There's a virtual first model, but the whole point is we're going to have a bunch of different entry points and there's a lot of entrance into the market that are doing things like remote monitoring and home-based care and out hospital without walls and sniff without walls and all of that. What do you think the role of companies like Wheel is going to look like maybe in two, maybe five, maybe 10 years?
Michelle Davey (20:26):
Yeah, that is a great question. I think there's a couple different points. I think really the underlying infrastructure companies that are being built like Wheel those that have provider networks that are powering the future of healthcare, really enabling companies to come in both in healthcare and outside of healthcare and build interesting and important offerings to patients that are the types of experiences that we want are really important for the patients. We're building personalized patient care right now for a number of different types of patients across their care continuum based on gender, based on heritage, based on almost everything. I think you're saying some sort of point solution around it where I see we all we're really the backbone, the underlying infrastructure and the network to power it in the next five to 10 years will be helping those companies who are coming in and building point solutions expand their ability to service more patients, whether that's in different populations, different genders, et cetera.
(21:38):
Moving from a point care solution to a much broader care platform over time and not having to then build entirely new tech stack, entirely new clinician network. Really being able to tap the power of Wheel. We're also building much more than just telehealth. We were building telehealth in 2018 and we've kind of got that infrastructure down and all of the connective tissue that really connects what I call the virtual front door to the patient front door, the diagnostics and labs, the remote patient monitoring platforms, what are the data that needs to flow back to the clinicians so they can make sound clinical treatment decisions for patients and then connect that care back into what we are now calling offline care. But I believe all care will be virtually enabled in the next 10 years.
Rebecca Gwilt (22:32):
Well, I'm excited having gone through all sorts of journeys with family members of mine. I think what I'm going to be looking for next is my peers. I mean, I spend my life doing this stuff, but my peers to understand how to pull the pieces of this system. So while you work on, on getting providers up to speed, I'm going to start with mom and sisters, but I think eventually patients are going to want to know, is this something I pick up the phone for? Is this something I walk in the door for? And I think once we bring those two pieces together, I agree we're going to have complete virtual enablement both from a technology and a sort of patient and provider perspective. So anyway, so I really enjoyed speaking with you today, Michelle. Thank you so, so much for spending time with me. I'd like to close these just with a give back. So I'd love to hear just one piece of advice or one hint or something that our listeners can use to supercharge their efforts toward health innovation. What's one thing they can do today or tomorrow to move themselves forward?
Michelle Davey (23:53):
Ooh, that's a really great question. Let me think. I think there's so many different things. I would say one of the most impactful things that I've done is really focus on my network and finding people all across healthcare. I think coming in to healthcare after several years off coming back into healthcare, it's hard to navigate. It is a very complex system and it's really important to find people that understand different parts of it because it is so wide and so broad and connect so many different points of both patients and clinicians together. I would say find a great advisory board or great partners that you can trust to help lead you through those moments of build, of figuring out a very complex problem within the ecosystem and really lean on that because we don't know at all, right across the entire healthcare landscape. I'd like to find experts in each area and kind of give back as well when people need advice of how to build a great virtual first platform or a program for their patients. Also helping them navigate that. So definitely finding the network and staying connected to the community because there's so much innovation happening. There's so many great people in this community who are really willing to help to move healthcare to the next level.
Rebecca Gwilt (25:21):
That's great advice. Awesome. And I will tell you that some of the most impressive founders that I've spoken to have said something very, very similar. So thank you so much again. Thank you for listening to Decoding Healthcare Innovation. I hope you enjoyed today's discussion with Michelle Davey about the role the virtual providers play in the telehealth ecosystem and the evolution of the omnichannel telehealth industry. If you haven't already, please subscribe to Decoding Healthcare Innovation. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter. Join us next time when we'll be interviewing Omar Manejwala, MD Chief Medical Officer of DarioHealth about the arc of digital health adoption and re-imagining care. And as always, you can check out all the links and resources in the show notes. Find out more about our work with healthcare innovators at nixongwiltlaw.com. And thank you. Thank you. Thank you. See you next time.