Lessons from Michelle Davey, CEO of Wheel, on creating the infrastructure for virtual healthcare
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Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Every week, we’ll be getting to know trailblazing healthcare leaders and dive into building a digital health business from 0 to 1.
Today, we’re excited to feature Michelle Davey, CEO of Wheel. Wheel is redefining virtual care by connecting clinicians to telehealth opportunities and equipping healthcare organizations with scalable, tech-enabled solutions. Under Michelle’s leadership, the company has become a leading platform expanding access to care nationwide. Before Wheel, Michelle brought together experience from Google, Favor Delivery, and Medtronic—insight that now helps shape her vision for the future of care delivery.
In this episode, we dive into how Wheel is powering virtual care infrastructure for enterprise healthcare, the strategic thinking behind acquiring GoodRx’s virtual care platform, how Michelle sees the future of telehealth evolving across consumer and pharma markets, and what founders should consider when navigating M&A in digital health.
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Overview: How Wheel Started
Growing up in rural Texas, Michelle spent over 15 years searching for a diagnosis. Her autoimmune condition went undetected for most of her childhood and young adulthood not because the symptoms weren’t real, but because her town simply lacked access to medical care. She carried around a red three-ring binder filled with her medical history, going from doctor to doctor, many of whom dismissed her symptoms or chalked them up to growing pains.
Eventually, one physician finally took the time to listen. He went through every page of her medical binder, piecing together years of fragmented care and validating what she had known all along: something was wrong. That bittersweet diagnosis changed her life. It was the spark that led her to healthcare, and ultimately, to founding Wheel.
But the path wasn’t linear. In 2016, Michelle was exploring the early days of telehealth, which at the time, was mostly used for urgent care visits over video. The market was dominated by large incumbents like Teladoc and Amwell. But for entrepreneurs and clinicians trying to build something new, it was nearly impossible to get started. Each company had to reinvent the wheel, building their own tech stack, hiring clinicians, navigating legal hurdles, and standing up clinical operations from scratch.
Michelle saw an opportunity to change that. What if, instead of everyone building vertically, you built horizontally? What if there was an infrastructure layer or a platform that enabled others to build virtual care offerings without starting from zero?
That was the founding insight behind Wheel. By 2018, Michelle had officially incorporated the company, bootstrapping for nearly 18 months while working a full-time recruiting job during the day and building Wheel at night. It wasn’t glamorous. Telehealth wasn’t trendy, and many investors didn’t see the potential.
In 2018, Wheel began as a marketplace, for clinicians to access flexible opportunities to work in telehealth and companies to tap into a nationwide network of clinicians to deliver virtual care. Michelle quickly realized that companies delivering virtual care needed more than just clinicians as the market was missing a comprehensive solution that offered the infrastructure, tech, regulatory support, and clinical ops to deliver virtual care, especially at scale. And for most, if not all companies, it wasn't feasible to build this internally from scratch.
In 2019 and early 2020, Wheel set out to change that and rapidly built a platform solution to support companies and clinicians delivering care online - this was pre-pandemic! Now, Wheel provides the underlying infrastructure, technology, regulatory support, and clinical operations so organizations can focus on delivering care, not navigating compliance and logistics.
Today, Wheel powers an average of 4,000 virtual care visits a day totaling nearly 6.5 million lifetime visits and supports a wide range of customers across digital health, pharma, and retailers. Its Horizon platform uses AI to personalize care journeys, while integrations with partners allow Wheel to support a wide range of care services including patient education, labs and diagnostics, remote patient monitoring, medication fulfillment, at-home pharmacy delivery, patient payment processing, and more.
Navigating Virtual Care During the Pandemic
When the pandemic hit, most people assumed telehealth exploded overnight and in some ways, it did. Just take a look at FAIRHealth reported claims data from 2019-2021.
“In those early months, we saw a huge influx of what we called the ‘worried well' people who had mild symptoms, things they would’ve normally brushed off as allergies, but now were panicked about potential COVID exposure,” she explained. That drove demand for virtual care sky-high.
But at the same time, Wheel was facing a major challenge: clinicians were being pulled away from virtual care and back into hospitals. Physicians and nurse practitioners, especially those in primary care, emergency medicine, and internal medicine, who made up the backbone of telehealth at the time, were suddenly needed on the front lines of the pandemic.
Even though patient demand surged, clinician supply tightened. And then, about six months in, the pendulum swung again. Once the public became more familiar with COVID symptoms and testing, usage of telehealth for triage dipped sharply.
That forced Wheel to adapt. The company began to see a wave of consumer health and wellness brands entering the market. These weren’t just urgent care telehealth players—they were focused on upstream preventive services. It was a fundamental shift in how virtual care was being used.
But just as quickly as the boom came, the correction followed. As venture funding slowed and some digital health startups struggled to stay afloat in 2022, the market for smaller virtual-first companies shrank. Many of Wheel’s early SMB clients either ran out of runway or couldn’t compete in a post-COVID market.
Wheel had already started shifting its focus. By late 2020 and early 2021, the company was moving upmarket by working with large enterprises, national retailers, health plans, and scaled digital health companies. That decision became critical to its survival and eventual growth. As the SMB landscape tightened, enterprise demand picked up. Wheel found itself supporting larger companies looking to add virtual care to their offerings at scale.
“The reality is that telehealth isn’t just one thing anymore. It’s evolving by specialty, by demographic, by business model. And while people think of virtual care as a 20-year-old idea, the modern era of infrastructure-building and the scaled platform era really started in late 2021.”
From Digital Health to Pharma: How Wheel Powers Enterprise Virtual Care
Wheel operates almost entirely at the enterprise level. Approximately 99% of its revenue comes from large organizations, typically public companies with more than $100 million in annual revenue. Its clients span three primary sectors: digital health, retail, and pharmaceutical/life sciences.
Digital health remains a core focus for Wheel, currently accounting for about 30% of its business. The company supports high-growth virtual care players like GoodRx, helping them scale clinical services beyond single-specialty care to deliver complementary, patient-centered services for holistic and preventive health. These companies depend on Wheel’s end-to-end solution to drive patient access, deliver clinical services, manage care delivery operations, and serve back data-driven insights, allowing them to focus on consumer experience and strategic growth.
Retail represents another meaningful share of Wheel’s enterprise base. While many believe retail giants have scaled back direct telehealth efforts, the opposite is true internally. Wheel works with major retailers to embed virtual care into pharmacy services, health and wellness programs, and employee-facing benefits. These efforts are often invisible to consumers but power significant volumes of clinical interaction across distributed infrastructures.
Pharmaceutical and life sciences companies make up Wheel’s fastest-growing segment. The company enables virtual deployment of direct-to-consumer programs to facilitate equitable access, evidence-based care, and long-term patient engagement. For example, Wheel powers the virtual care infrastructure behind Otsuka Precision Health’s digital therapeutic for major depressive disorder, Rejoyn, allowing patients to conveniently meet with a clinician and receive access to the treatment program as needed. Wheel also delivers educational services across dozens of conditions, guiding patients through treatment awareness, eligibility, and next steps even when prescribing isn’t part of the model.
Today, Wheel supports over 75 disease states and treatment areas across these three verticals. It enables companies to deliver virtual care that is scalable, compliant, and clinically robust without needing to build an internal care delivery system from the ground up.
M&A Lessons from the GoodRx Deal
As Wheel scaled across digital health, retail, and life sciences, one of its most strategic moves came in late 2022: the acquisition of GoodRx Care’s backend virtual care technology. The $19.5 million deal enabled Wheel to elevate its existing platform with an established EMR system, clinician experience tools, and patient engagement infrastructure which were components that became increasingly essential as enterprise clients sought end-to-end virtual care platforms.
At the time, many large enterprises lacked systems built for virtual-first care. Most traditional EHRs weren’t designed with telehealth workflows in mind, and building new solutions internally posed significant barriers. Wheel saw an opportunity to provide that infrastructure in a seamless, clinician-friendly format.
The integrated GoodRx Care platform stood out across Wheel’s customer base. Clinicians consistently praised its EMR interface and usability, and the patient experience design was known for being transparent, intuitive, and responsive, which aligned with Wheel’s commitment to high-quality virtual care. After years of partnership and collaboration, Wheel initiated a preemptive conversation with GoodRx, resulting in a fast-moving but deeply strategic acquisition.
While GoodRx retained its consumer-facing brand, Wheel took over the underlying technology and integrated it into its broader product ecosystem. Over the next 12 months, Wheel merged the acquired systems into its new AI-powered Horizon solution, which now powers the majority of its enterprise book of business.
The acquisition also included the transition of approximately 20 GoodRx team members to Wheel, strengthening product continuity and accelerating integration efforts. The deal not only enhanced Wheel’s technological capabilities but also demonstrated its ability to execute on high-impact M&A.
For founders evaluating M&A opportunities, the Wheel-GoodRx deal offers several lessons.
1.Clarity of intent matters. Whether the goal is product capability, team expansion, commercial growth, or all three, understanding the primary value drivers helps guide due diligence and post-deal integration. In Wheel’s case, product strength and platform fit were the clear priorities, with added value from team integration.
2. Timing and trust are essential. The strongest acquisitions often emerge from long-term partnerships, not cold outreach. Existing trust enables faster alignment and more honest conversations especially when the stakes are high.
3. Founders should recognize that even successful acquisitions carry weight. M&A is never a light lift. It demands company-wide focus, cross-functional effort, and sustained attention to integration. But when aligned with long-term goals and executed thoughtfully, the payoff can transform a company’s trajectory.
Wheel’s Vision for 2025 and Beyond
As 2025 unfolds, Wheel is entering a new phase of growth, with virtual care tailwinds stronger than ever. The company sees this year as a defining one, anchored around three priorities: expanding consumer health capabilities, deepening partnerships with pharmaceutical organizations, and continuing to evolve its Horizon platform. Today, Wheel has powered nearly 6.5 million virtual visits, and facilitated more than 16 million patient-clinician messages.
Consumers are arising as a new payer class and demand for virtual-first care continues to rise, particularly in proactive, preventative areas like women’s health, wellness, and longevity. Interest is translating into action. Around 60 to 70 percent of visitors to consumer health sites powered by Wheel are converting into real patients, a striking contrast to traditional chronic condition programs like diabetes, where engagement rates may hover around 7 percent.
In 2025, Wheel is doubling down on personalization, helping match people not just with the care they want, but the care they need. A patient seeking treatment for hair loss, for example, may be guided through personalized screening into a menopause care program if clinically appropriate. This type of intelligent care routing is central to Wheel’s Horizon platform and reflects the company’s broader vision for a more tailored, accessible care experience.
Pharmaceutical partnerships are another major area of focus. In January 2025, Wheel and Huma announced a partnership to create an end-to-end digital care infrastructure for pharma. Huma’s technology, which powers care for over 50 million patients globally, brings advanced capabilities in remote monitoring and digital therapeutic delivery. Paired with Wheel’s clinician network and virtual infrastructure, the collaboration enables pharmaceutical companies to more effectively launch and scale patient programs across therapeutic areas. These programs can include digital therapeutic access, caregiver engagement, and condition-specific education, delivered through a secure and compliant platform.
At the heart of this strategy is Horizon, Wheel’s AI-powered virtual care platform. Originally built on technology acquired from GoodRx Care, Horizon now drives how patients are triaged and routed into care journeys using demographic data, clinical signals, and behavioral patterns. The platform is designed not just to respond to patient needs, but to anticipate them, guiding users from early entry points like symptom checkers into longitudinal, personalized care.
Looking ahead, Wheel sees rising consumer expectations as one of the most important forces reshaping healthcare. Patients today are more vocal, more informed, and increasingly unwilling to accept the friction-laden experiences of the past. Personalization, speed, and transparency are no longer optional. Wheel is building the infrastructure to meet that demand.
Key Advice for Founders in Healthcare
Building a company in healthcare is uniquely challenging. The pace is slower, the systems are more complex, and the path to meaningful scale can take a decade or more. For founders navigating this journey, a few lessons stand out:
1. Prioritize Longevity Over Intensity
Founders often hear the phrase “it’s a marathon, not a sprint,” but the reality is that it’s both. Success in healthcare requires endurance, years of persistence, and the ability to move fast when needed. Founders should think about what creates longevity for them personally. That means identifying the parts of the business that bring energy and doubling down on them, while building a team that can manage the rest. Time and energy are finite, and sustainability matters more than burnout.
2. Stay in Motion Even When It’s Hard
Momentum is one of the most underrated assets in a founder’s toolkit. Especially in healthcare, progress can feel slow and uncertain. But simply continuing to move forward like one decision, one conversation, one milestone at a time, can eventually snowball into significant traction. Founders who consistently put one foot in front of the other, even on tough days, tend to be the ones who survive and scale.
3. Invest in the Ecosystem You Care About
Founders should find ways to stay connected to the broader ecosystem by engaging with other builders to create perspective and a renewed sense of purpose. Michelle actively supports women-led healthcare startups through angel investing and hosts monthly “hero office hours” to mentor early-stage founders. Her approach is highly personal because she backs companies in areas she cares deeply about, such as maternal health and pediatrics, and commits to being an involved, hands-on investor. Supporting others isn’t just about giving back, it’s also a way to stay energized and inspired while building.
4. Lead Where It Matters Most
Founders don’t need to be involved in every corner of the business, but they do need to know where their leadership adds the most value. For Michelle, that’s staying close to the commercial side by talking to customers, listening to the market, and understanding where healthcare is going. Delegating well and building a strong leadership team frees founders to focus where they can lead best.
Interested in Wheel? Learn more on their website and LinkedIn
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