Profiles in Telehealth: Drew Johnson - VP Finance & Business Operations

Get to know Wheel VP of Finance & Business Operations, Drew Johnson!

What’s your role at Wheel?

My title at Wheel is VP of Finance & Business Operations.

My role is to build the tools, systems, and teams that empower people to make data-driven decisions and push the business forward. Data is paramount to everything that we do at Wheel, and, as a company, we have to use data to prioritize our work so it has the highest impact, guides our decision-making, and drives focus and alignment across teams.

Whether it’s reporting our monthly/quarterly financial performance to the leadership team, setting up dashboards to track our company OKRs, working with our operations team to build client P&Ls, or helping to implement a new Sales CRM with our commercial organization, the business operations and finance teams strive to provide access to data across the organization to run our business.

What’s your background? What did you do before working with Wheel?

I’m a native Texan who settled in Austin with my wife, 10-month-old daughter, and bernedoodle. I went to DePauw University for undergrad, started my career working for an airline, and spent several years in consulting before going back to school to pursue my MBA at the University of Texas. From there, I joined the startup scene, working at Silvercar and Lyft before joining Wheel.

In my free time, I enjoy hanging out with friends and family, traveling whenever we can, and doing pretty much anything that is both active and outdoors. My favorite outdoor activity is running Lady Bird Lake Trail with my dog, Louie.

Why did you join the Wheel team?

I started working with Wheel in June 2020 as an independent contractor building out Wheel’s analytics and data infrastructure but came on full-time in my current role in August 2020.

The reasons I joined Wheel were 1) Business opportunity - the pandemic brought about increased awareness/need for virtual care and Wheel was building both the marketplace and platform to enable virtual care offerings across the industry, 2) Company's leadership team - we shared the same set of values and I had a significant level of trust in the company leadership, and 3) Personal interest in healthcare - I come from a family of doctors, but I never had an opportunity to work in healthcare during my career.

What’s your recent Wheel Moment of Reward?

At Wheel, our north star metric is patient visits (consults), which represents the number of patients seen by Wheel clinicians on behalf of our clients. Seeing this metric grow exponentially over the last year has been incredibly rewarding. It represents all the hard work the team at Wheel is doing to enable quality healthcare to patients across the US, to power virtual care offerings on behalf of our clients, and to offer earnings opportunities to our network of multi-state licensed clinicians.

There is still more work to be done, but it is the key data point that shows Wheel is growing and that there is significant traction in our business.

What do you think the future of healthcare holds?

Healthcare is notoriously expensive and inaccessible in the US, and every day new capital is flowing into the space and new companies are springing up to address the broken system.

An increase in market participants and competition within the industry can help to expand the market as a whole, enable cheaper cost of care, and deliver better outcomes for patients—which is desperately needed in the industry.

Thanks, Drew, for all your hard work with The Wheel Team! We appreciate everything you do.

Interested in joining our team? Check out the latest career opportunities with Wheel!

Get to know other team members through prior staff profiles with Will Poon - Business Operations Manager, Kirk Goodman - Director of Sales, and Rachel Boles - Marketplace Operations Associate.