Improving Virtual Care and Provider Experiences for Better Outcomes

Michelle Davey, cofounder and chief executive officer, Wheel, discusses the health care industry’s transition to virtual care during the COVID-19 pandemic, emphasizing how improving the clinician experience can result in better quality care for patients.

Read the full transcript:

I'm Michelle Davey. I'm the CEO and cofounder of Wheel. I got into health care because of both my professional and personal background aligned to building what is Wheel.

Professionally, my background's been in recruiting and operations. First, starting in health care, where I worked at companies like Medtronic, and then going to tech at companies like Google and an on-demand delivery start up.

Then, finding my way to health tech into telemedicine, where 2016, maybe not as obvious to everybody else, but I knew that telemedicine was the way of the future.

Personally, it connected so much to my story. I grew up in a rural part of Texas, and, unfortunately, went undiagnosed with an autoimmune condition for over 15 years. I've interacted with the health care system from an early age and often. I saw how much opportunity there was for telehealth to expand access.

When I joined a telemedicine startup trying to solve the access problem in health care as it exists today, that was what resonated with me.

What we do at Wheel is take that one step further to make sure that access includes not only geography or the socioeconomic aspect of it, but also ensuring that the patients are getting matched to the right clinician at the exact right time. That is what the fundamental of Wheel is built around.

To tell you a little bit about Wheel, at first, it is helpful if you can imagine pulling out your phone and instantly getting connected with the best doctor for your care needs. That infrastructure and that feat is extremely complex and expensive, and Wheel makes it possible for virtual care companies to do this instantly.

Wheel is the health tech company that brings together the technology and the clinical services to power many of the leading virtual care services. We make it simple for our companies to launch their virtual care under their brands, and we offer clinicians the one place and the best place to work in virtual care.

Framing that all up, in other words, Wheel is everything you need to start seeing a patient virtually.

Can you talk about the PwC report that said that more than 90% of health care executives plan to prioritize clinician experience following the pandemic? Why or how did the pandemic reveal this need?

First, I would say it's about time. Prepandemic, clinicians were already reporting extreme amounts of burnout and moral injury, so about 50% of clinicians were already saying they were burned out prepandemic. Then, you add on the fact that doctors have the highest rate of suicide of any industry.

You can see, prepandemic, how terrible the clinician experience was in health care, and, ultimately, then you pile on a global pandemic on their back. Now—highlighted by COVID and the pandemic—3 in 10 health care workers are saying they may quit practicing medicine altogether because of the pandemic.

The alarm bells are starting to ring across the board. Executives in both traditional and digital health companies are starting to see the need to prioritize the clinician experience.

Also, one step further of the fundamental problem is the fact that historically, we've limited clinicians' reach by having this one-to-one model. When I say one-to-one, it's one clinician works for one hospital system or one geographically located community.

When we went to telemedicine, we brought that broken system online. You see that with telehealth 1.0. We could have said, "Well, we have one set of clinicians that works for this company and one set of clinicians that works for another company." That doesn't scale.

We have extreme shortages, about 150,000 physicians needed in health care by 2025 alone, and then again, exasperated by the pandemic, more and more clinicians leaving.

We have to figure out a way to amplify the impact for clinicians and make their jobs, quite frankly, of providing high quality patient care as easy as possible. The most direct way to impact patient care is by impacting the clinician.

Can you discuss how well-supported clinicians lead to better patient relationships and experiences?

We have a saying here at Wheel that, "Happy clinicians make healthy patients," so right along that line. We all know what it's like to have our very worst day at work. We're burned out, we're stressed, we're overwhelmed, but that's the life of a health care worker every single day, and the facts support that.

Again, the high levels of burnouts. One in 4 clinicians say they're less motivated to be careful with patient notes because of burnout. One in 8 say they express frustration in front of their patients.

You can imagine, I've been in an office or with a clinician who's burned out and frustrated, and that makes patients disengage with the system altogether, because it's not a great experience in a world where patients are demanding and getting consumer experiences from other parts of their lives.

Then, you turn to think about your best day. You're engaged, you're happy, you get to work and see your colleagues. That's what we need to do for clinicians, and unlocking that is how we're going to drive healthier patients so that they are interacting with the health care system earlier and often.

How has your company, Wheel, helped some leading companies drive the virtual care movement?

Wheel helps turn big ideas in health care into reality. We bring together the best tech and the human capital to make that a reality.

You can think of examples of this. You may have your meditation app that consumers are in every single day, getting their daily meditation through. What if you could go one step further and see a therapist when you need that little extra help?

That is what Wheel can power, enabling virtual care services to companies, whether in health care, or adjacent to health care, or completely outside of health care, to deliver care that's at the highest quality, because they can focus on the patient experience or the member or consumer experience.

Wheel is taking care of all of that back end, from the clinical perspective. We're making sure that you have the highest quality clinicians, that your infrastructure is set up to scale, that they're all trained on the protocols and education, and that we're matching them to the right patient.

All of the clinicians to their exact right patient in real time so they can deliver better health care experiences no matter what type of company you are.

Can you talk about how health care organizations can optimize clinician experience? Do you have tips for health care executives as they begin to transition to a more prioritized clinician experience?

It first starts to building your program or your services with the clinicians in mind. We have an acronym here that is very different than the one in the market. We call it D2C. That is, direct-to-clinician. It's building consumer experiences for clinicians inside of here.

D2C elsewhere serves direct-to-consumer, but it's with that same light. How do we build great experiences for clinicians? It starts there. Then, it's involving them throughout the process, getting feedback.

If it takes a clinician 16 clicks to get to the next page where they can see the information they need from the patient to put together an actionable clinical diagnosis or process for the patient, it keeps clinicians from engaging with the system. How do we build with them in mind?

The second one is recognizing that clinicians are caregivers. More than 70% of clinicians at Wheel are parents or primary caregivers. Why that's important is because you have to realize that clinicians aren't going to interact with the system all day, every day.

They don't want to live there. They have a million other things going on, whether that's their kids, their kids' Zoom schools, providing direct care to their families, whether that be eldercare, etc.

How do we enable experiences that are simple, that they can engage with and go about their daily lives, because that's going to be incredibly important.

The most important, I believe, is around the training and support. True for both traditional and telemedicine. Clinicians are seeing 50 to 175 times the amount of patients virtually than they were before.

If you think about prepandemic, most med schools or residency programs didn't train in virtual care. Clinicians have never received that level of training anywhere else.

It's going to be incredibly important for people to start to train, not only on the software itself, but things that Wheel does is go one step further, what we call webside manner.

How to engage with patients virtually. How to make eye contact. How to make a patient feel warm and welcome. How to explain to them that sometimes, even though they're coming in, if they are coming in for a prescription, that maybe that's not the best care path forward, and there's another care path.

Making them feel engaged in that consult together. That training, education, and support is going to be incredibly important for clinicians and the outcomes to patients.

What else would you like to add to this conversation?

For Wheel, one thing that we're doing that's different is allowing clinicians to be their own boss again and dig into that entrepreneurial spirit.

I talk a lot about, if you think about doctors in the '60s and going in and making house calls, they were this ingrained part of the community. Everybody knew the doctor around them. Even in rural Texas, where I grew up, we all went to the same doctor.

What happened over the last few years, for a number of reasons, where we saw hospital systems and provider groups start to employ the majority of clinicians.

Wheel enables clinicians who maybe still have an in-person practice, whether that be at a hospital system, a community system, or their own family practice or practice, to add virtual care as a part of their career. That gives them the reins back to controlling their career.