As a stage IV colorectal cancer survivor with numerous follow-up medical appointments for various issues related to my ongoing disease management, and mother to a severely intellectually and developmentally disabled son who has at least 10 specialists regularly monitoring him, I welcome virtual medicine becoming a mainstay of our medical care.
Telemedicine, in its original form of the phone call, has been around for decades. For people in remote or rural areas without easy access to in-person care, consulting a doctor over the phone has often been the go-to approach. But for a large swath of the world used to taking half a day off work just for a 15-30 minute doctor’s appointment, it may seem like telemedicine was invented only last year. That’s mostly because it wasn’t until 2020 that telemedicine, in its myriad forms, debuted into the mainstream consciousness.
In April 2020, Austin-based startup Wheel responded to the Covid-19 pandemic by adding staff to meet the growing need for telehealth services. The company, which had 22 employees in early April, now employs around 80 people across the country. On May 19, Wheel announced a $50 million series B round led by Lightspeed Ventures and an ambitious plan to double its headcount again by the end of the 2021. Also participating in the $50 million series B were existing investors CRV, Silverton Partners, Tusk Venture Partners and J.P. Morgan, along with new investor Future Shape.
Video conferences have long outlived their charm, but one pandemic staple remains popular: the virtual doctor's visit. Now politicians around the country are racing against deadlines to make sure their constituents aren’t forced back to in-person medicine if they don't want it.
If you’d talked to Brandon Welch in 2013, he probably wouldn’t have expected to be the CEO of a global leader in telemedicine. Back then, Welch was a University of Utah doctoral student working on a hospital study to make prenatal checkups easier for pregnant women. Virtual visits made sense, but existing HIPAA-compliant platforms were complicated and expensive, so he built his own technology—just for the project.
SOC Telemed Inc. TLMD, -3.83%, a provider of acute care telemedicine services and technology to U.S. hospitals and healthcare systems, filed for an initial public offering on Tuesday with plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol "TLMD."