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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.
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