Meet Wheel, the company quietly powering the doctors behind the companies who want to ship prescriptions like Viagra and birth control straight to your door

Lydia Ramsey

Jan 28, 2020, 17:33 IST

Meet Wheel, the company quietly powering the doctors behind the companies who want to ship prescriptions like Viagra and birth control straight to your door

Meet Wheel, a startup quietly powering companies that prescribe and ship Viagra and birth control to customers' doors with doctor's visits.
The company was initially founded in 2018 with the name Enzyme Health, which was built to solely connect doctors with direct-to-consumer companies looking to build out their doctor networks.
Now, Wheel manages a workforce of doctors that healthcare companies - from direct-to-consumer players to companies like health plans that don't have a particular virtual presence - can turn to as needed to meet with patients virtually.
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The way people are going to the doctor is increasingly going online.

Wheel, an Austin-based startup, is looking to make sure companies that want to reach patients online have the right doctors for those visits.

Founded in 2018, the startup had previously worked under the name Enzyme Health to help connect doctors link up with direct-to-consumer companies looking to build their virtual medical networks. It worked initially with companies like Hims, primary care startup Parsley Health, and telemedicine companies like Doctor on Demand.

But over the years, Enzyme decided to get more involved in owning the medical networks, managing a workforce that healthcare companies - from direct-to-consumer players to companies like health plans that don't have a particular virtual presence - can turn to as needed. Wheel declined to share the names of the clients it currently works with.

The company has raised $13.9 million from investors in a round led by CRV, with Tusk Ventures and Silverton Partners, which led the startup's seed round, joining in.

"We're really starting to see an appetite from the clinician's perspective to want to do telemedicine and virtual care," Wheel CEO Michelle Davey told Business Insider.

Connecting doctors with companies that want to care for patients virtually

Wheel, under the name Enzyme, was founded by Michelle Davey and Griffin Mulcahey in 2018 after the two worked together at Medici, a telemedicine platform company. There, they saw the disconnect between telemedicine companies and the medical providers they needed to provide care.

"I quickly realized that there's this whole industry trying to access clinicians, and nobody was there fulfilling the need," Davey said. Prior to founding Wheel, Davey's background was in recruiting at companies including Google, as well as in medical device sales.

At first, the startup facilitated matchmaking between doctors and nurses looking to practice telemedicine and companies looking to add to their ranks, at which point they'd become employees of that particular company.

Over time, however, the team noticed it could take on the responsibility of managing medical networks on behalf of the companies so it'd be one less thing for the company to think about as they juggled recruitment for patients and other businesses like shipping prescription drugs.

Now, Wheel manages a team of doctors that can be plugged into different services, training them on what Davey calls "webside" manner (a play on the bedside manner a doctor has when interacting with patients in an office), and employing them. On Wheel's platform, doctors can toggle through different companies and types of visits.

"We've really seen that the clinicians really like that because when you sit with one company doing one treatment area it's really monotonous," Davey said. "By allowing them to switch it out also enables them to engage more and have a variety of what they're seeing."

The changing ways patients are going to the doctor

Companies seemingly overnight have sprung up to prescribe and mail you medications like birth control and Viagra, raising hundreds of millions in venture dollars to grow their businesses.

As that's happened, the fast-growing companies have needed services to help facilitate those prescriptions. For instance, Truepill, a startup that describes itself as "pharmacy API and fulfillment service," has worked with companies like Hims, Nurx, and Lemonaid by filling prescriptions and sending them out around the US.

But as those companies mature, many have brought those business elements in-house. For instance, Hims is building a pharmacy in Ohio, which will move some of the volume it sent to third-party pharmacy fulfillment services like Truepill in-house.

Similarly, many direct-to-consumer services maintain their own doctor networks who work exclusively for a particular startup.

Davey sees Wheel's role as supplemental, allowing companies to add additional staff when they need to.

"As they need to scale, whether that's cold and flu season or they're bringing on new clients, we can actually seamlessly plug in with our technology to their platform and extend their offering," Davey said. Wheel's services are white-labeled, so patients wouldn't necessarily know they're meeting with a Wheel-employed doctor.

Simultaneously, as the direct-to-consumer healthcare market grows, others in the healthcare industry are also looking at taking care of patients virtually - whether it's health systems with massive physical footprints to maintain, or health insurers that haven't historically been in the business of employing doctors.

Davey said she's keeping an eye on companies like Best Buy that historically haven't been healthcare companies getting interested in having a digital health presence.

Wheel is one of the first investments Kristin Baker Spohn has led since joining CRV.

"They understand this isn't a 'move fast break things' market," Spohn said, alluding to Facebook's longtime motto. "You don't get a second chance to break things in healthcare."

Spohn thinks of the company along the lines of how companies think about Amazon Web Services. That is, while some companies might want to build out clinical networks, for others it might not make sense to own that piece, similar to how some companies own their own data servers while others use cloud services like AWS to house their data.

For instance, Davey said, one of Wheel's biggest clients isn't primarily in the business of virtual care, but they're adding it as another way for patients to access care.