Health tech companies Wheel and b.well Connected Health are partnering to deliver turnkey infrastructure for next-generation AI-first virtual care.
There are two converging trends driving innovation in healthcare. It’s an AI-first healthcare experience and a consumer-centric model. Consumer health data is pervasive and integrated into everyday life, with information from apps, wearables, devices, and medical records. At the same time, retail stores and pharmacies are becoming access points for care, and life sciences companies are gaining direct access to consumers. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is working to open up access to patient health data.
According to the companies, the partnership between Wheel and b.well will enable AI-native companies, retailers, life sciences companies, payers, health systems and consumer health brands to compete in the consumer-driven healthcare race faster and more completely.
B.well’s platform provides consumer-approved medical record access, consent, identity verification, patient matching, access infrastructure, and open standards-based APIs. Over the past eight years, Wheel has built an AI-first platform for scalable virtual care programs, delivering clinical delivery layers such as virtual care, clinician network operations, prescribing, patient support, and pharmacy workflows.
Kristen Valdez, founder and CEO of b.well Connected Health, said the two companies’ combined capabilities will help close the loop from data to care.
“Today, people are loading their information into platforms like LLM and organizations like Google Health and Samsung Health, but they really need an easier pathway to care when an insight surfaces that something needs to be done, whether it’s an evidence-based care gap, a delay in medication, or a dose adjustment needed for medication,” Valdes told Fierce Healthcare.
The companies say the combined infrastructure is designed to support consumer-approved medical record access, smarter intake and clinical context, AI-powered guidance and care routing, virtual care, prescription and pharmacy coordination, follow-up and outcome measurement.
“This enables the next version of healthcare currently being rolled out in the market,” said Wheel CEO Michelle Davey.
“We’re seeing a lot of people bring AI-native solutions to market that bring in everything that b.well does, including patient health records, wearable data, lab data. We’re seeing patients start interacting with their healthcare sooner because they’re having access to their records for the first time. But what we’re seeing is a lack of ability to go from generating context in patient health records and wearable data to actually getting the care that they actually need and want.” says Mr. “Through this partnership, we are connecting all of the underlying infrastructure to enable healthcare companies to create AI consumer healthcare experiences that allow patients to capture their health records, capture all their wearable data, lab data, and route it to the appropriate healthcare provider.”
She added, “Wheel’s clinical action layer translates all that context into actual clinical actions and behind-the-scenes delivery. So patients no longer have to wait and have all the information at their fingertips so they don’t have to figure it out themselves.”
The integrated service will first be available through Wheel Clinic, which operates behind the scenes on Walmart’s Better Care service platform. Walmart launched a digital health platform earlier this year.
Wheel Clinic supports scalable business-to-business (B2B) and direct-to-consumer (DTC) virtual care programs across cardiometabolic health, GLP-1 care, women’s health, primary care, urgent care, and emerging Medicare bridge models.
“We have a number of other partners that we’re working with and talking to right now to bring this fully to market. It could be different depending on whether it’s a pharmaceutical company or an AI consumer company or a retailer,” Davey said.
He said the partnership between Wheel and b.well provides companies with an “easy button” for a consumer-driven, AI-powered virtual care model.
“This allows two infrastructure companies to pre-wire all their infrastructure and deliver this experience to any company looking to enable virtual first care services,” Davey said.
Founded in 2018, Wheel has grown rapidly by powering the infrastructure behind virtual care with white-label services. The company’s technology helps companies scale up telehealth services in weeks instead of 15 months. Wheel’s virtual care platform includes configurable virtual care programs across urgent care, primary care, convenience care and condition management, as well as a national clinician network.
B.well operates a health data network designed to support consumer-mediated access to raw clinical data across more than 2.2 million health care providers and 320 health plans, laboratories and other sources. The company connects consumers to their health data through a nationwide network of health systems and data sources. This secure exchange is made possible by CLEAR’s secure identity platform, CLEAR1, which validates users and issues reusable digital IAL2 credentials that b.well can trust throughout the interaction.
Typically, patient intake, provider visits, prescriptions, pharmacy support, and follow-up often occur across disconnected systems. This creates friction for patients in managing their health.
Wheel and b.well’s integrated services will seamlessly capture patient health records and direct patients to care and pharmacy services, executives said.
“It captures all the information that clinicians need to consider and, in some cases, diagnose and prescribe. This gives clinicians a new way to provide far more information about their patients than ever before,” Davey said. “If the weight management flow reveals that the A1C is out of range, the patient’s treatment goes beyond weight management, with the possibility of screening for type 2 diabetes and other cardiometabolic health issues, and if necessary, the patient can be referred for in-person care or testing, or treated longitudinally through the Wheel platform.”
Valdez argues that giving clinicians access to patients’ long-term health records during virtual care services can reduce medical errors and support more accurate care.
Virtual care models continue to evolve with AI as the new interface, which will require a different infrastructure behind the scenes, Davey and Valdes say.
“Patients now have access to more information, but the challenge is making that information available to clinicians to assist patients in their treatment journey,” Davey said. “Today, you can pull a patient’s health record from someone like ChatGPT through b.well and run queries and ask a lot of questions. That’s great, but then you’re left with the question, ‘Where do we end up?’ When you book a primary care appointment, which takes about 26 days on average, you end up with a long list of questions for your health care provider and all the information the clinician doesn’t have. Wheel Using , we were able to actually build the underlying infrastructure, the clinical action layer, to absorb all of that context, translate that into a summary for the clinician, determine the next best action, and actually complete that care completely online.”
Wheel is building the next generation of healthcare, Davey argued, as most healthcare begins online.
“We’re seeing it unfold in real time. AI is just the driving force behind everything that’s happening, but it’s just one of the big tailwinds that we’re seeing in the market. I think we’re in a very good position to not only enable that innovation and respond to it, but actually advance the system systemically by building relationships with some of the AI-powered healthcare that we’re building at b.well and Wheel,” she said.
Valdez argues that consumer-driven healthcare is now at a tipping point, with publicly available AI chatbots and efforts by CMS to promote patient access to data and AI tools.
“Platform LLM became the digital front door for healthcare almost overnight,” she said. “What you’re seeing is a shift from a system-centric environment to a consumer-centric and consumer-mediated environment.”
