Profiles in Telehealth: Tanya Mahr - Content Lead

Get to know Wheel Content Lead, Tanya Mahr!

What’s your role at Wheel?

I lead the content team within the marketing department at Wheel. My job is to create helpful, unique, and interesting content that helps attract people to Wheel and keeps them engaged with our company once they become a customer or join the clinician team.

‘Content’ is annoyingly vague — information expressed in written, visual, or audio form is a loose definition. At Wheel, that could look like the words and images you see on the Wheel website, a PDF guide to evaluating virtual care platforms, an educational webinar, a testimonial video, or an email newsletter, for example.

My team includes talented writers, creative folks, and people interested in getting into the minds of customers and clinicians.

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

I grew up on a cranberry farm in the Pacific Northwest by way of Southern California. Before that, I lived in the Middle East. We moved and traveled a lot when I was a kid, and that exposure to a diverse set of people, climates, and cultures has fostered a deep curiosity in me about what makes people tick. (And travel, obviously.)

For college, I attended the University of Washington in Seattle and studied psychology. From there, I taught English in Istanbul, Turkey, moved back to Seattle to work in PR, and eventually made my way down to Austin, Texas. (For music, sun, and fun!)

Why did you join the Wheel team?

Like many things in life, landing in healthcare marketing was an accident — but I instantly fell in love. After working for many years as a copywriter and content strategist for a healthcare advertising agency, I connected with the Wheel co-founders, Michelle and Griffin, through a former colleague. For a few years, I helped Wheel (then Enzyme) as a freelancer, writing SEO content and blogs for the website.

After having kids and working as an independent contractor, I never thought I would go back to a full-time, in-house position. I remember when I got the call from a former Wheel colleague the night before I left for a two-week family vacation. She asked me to join the team. This was in the summer of 2020, a momentous time in virtual care. She told me to take my vacation to think about the offer… I only thought about it for one night.

Something about Wheel, the company’s vision, and the team’s passion was irresistible. Not knowing what I was in for, I left my consulting business behind and said yes to Wheel, and I’ve never looked back!

I’m humbled and grateful every day that I get to work with this incredible team of humans. They show up, make me laugh, and inspire me to be better, both personally and professionally.

What’s your recent Wheel Moment of Reward?

I get the most reward from talking to clinicians and clients. Those who heal us, and those who build the tools and companies through which we receive care, all share an overwhelming passion for what they do. I’m not sure the same can be said about most industries.

Recently, I spoke to a healthcare company founder about his professional journey to virtual addiction medicine. My goal was to understand why companies like his choose Wheel. I got what I needed to inform my project. But his personal anecdotes were what stayed with me. In the end, I learned more about what compels founders like him to create healthcare solutions with such a positive impact. It’s personal.

That’s the most rewarding part of working in healthcare. We all encounter the healthcare system, for better or worse. And by leveraging our own experiences to build something better, no matter how big or small, we can drive incredible change.

What do you think the future of healthcare holds?

It’s wild to think about the changes in my own personal approach to healthcare over the last two years.

Deep in the pandemic lockdown, my squirmy, 1-year old daughter needed to see an ophthalmologist for a non-obvious eye condition. The only appointments available were virtual video calls. I remember thinking, how is this clinician going to evaluate my daughter effectively, with my iPhone? To my surprise, my daughter received great care during that visit. Today, I can’t count the number of ways we’ve used technology to get care in our home, on vacation, and on the go.

The boundaries between virtual and physical care are being blurred and challenged in ways I never saw coming. Similar to how our lives changed with the internet, then with smartphones, and even via ride-sharing, we’re living through an incredible transition to a new way of accessing and receiving care.

Being a part of that transition — building the foundations for simpler, more convenient, fast, and accessible healthcare — is rewarding beyond belief. I can’t wait to look back in 20 years and tell my daughters the stories of where we started, what we faced, and what we solved, when healthcare will look wildly different from how it did two years ago, and from how it does today.

Thanks, Tanya, 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 Gabby Lorestani - Head of People, Tulsi Dharmarajan - Head of Product, and Alan Kopetman - Software Engineer II.