Client confidential: The strategy behind concealing our virtual care partners
I get asked nearly every day, “So, who does Wheel work with?” With a smile, I always answer that question the same way, “We power a lot of the healthcare companies you know and love.”
It’s not always satisfying to be on the other end of that answer, but when I explain why Wheel doesn’t publicly talk about our clients, everyone gets it.
We are the industry’s secret weapon.
It used to be that building your own clinical network was seen as a differentiator — a way to ensure quality patient experiences and clinical outcomes in the telehealth industry. But times have changed. It’s actually become an inhibitor of quality and growth.
Running a virtual care company is hard. Acquiring patients, establishing yourself as a world-class brand, complying to the ever changing landscape of some of the most unwieldy regulations — this takes substantive capital. And even more, this takes TIME.
On average, it takes telehealth companies over 265 days to stand up a 50-state network.
When it comes to scaling your services to meet the needs of patients across the nation: Why wouldn’t you work with a partner who is maniacally focused on one thing? Providing the highest quality of care with virtual-care trained clinicians.
At Wheel, we obsess about the clinician — everything from credentialing and state licensure, to education and quality measures. And our virtual care clients reap the rewards. They get to serve more patients with the fastest response times in the industry, while never sacrificing the quality of care. In fact, we demonstrate over 99.8% clinical accuracy and review more than 10% of all of our weekly patient visits. That’s thousands of charts that are scoured over to ensure that our clients’ patients are receiving the highest quality of care, when they need it.
So why don’t we talk about who our clients are?
Clients choose Wheel for three reasons: quality, speed to market, and because our service is white-labeled. That means our client’s brand is front-and-center to the patient experience — not Wheel’s. No one needs to know that Wheel is behind the scenes. The star of the show is the virtual care brand and the care they provide their patients.
At Wheel, we know how much trust it takes for healthcare companies to share with us their big audacious growth plans, their areas of expansion, their patient population. They look to us for guidance to make those plans a reality. It’s a delicate relationship. And it’s crucial that our clients’ proprietary information doesn’t get into the wrong hands.
We don’t talk about our customers because it is their brand and their company to talk about.
Our clients’ patients depend on them for high quality care. In return, they depend on us to support their businesses with a white-labeled, tech-enabled infrastructure and an on-demand 50-state clinical network. This is not something we take lightly. In fact, Be Trusted is one of our core values that permeates our decision making across the company.
Our namesake is fundamental to who we are and how we serve others. Over five millenia ago, the wheel was invented to move something that was too substantial for one person to move alone. In that spirit, at Wheel we help our partners reach those big goals and wild ideas, while protecting their interest and ensuring that they have the turn-key infrastructure that is suited for scale.
So, when people tell me it’s detrimental to not talk about our clients — that it doesn’t allow people to recognize how much Wheel is actually doing to move the industry forward — I let the data speak for itself: the 170,000 patient visits we have served, the 9,000+ clinicians in our network, and the innovative healthcare partners supporting those figures (as of Aug 2020). That’s the information that truly matters.
