Getting Critical Care Into Our Patients' Hands During COVID-19

As a virtual care provider, our mission is to improve the world’s health through compassionate care and innovation. We connect patients in real-time with board-certified physicians and licensed mental health professionals over secure video, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, across all 50 states. Whether a patient has a medical or mental health concern, we take pride in providing our patients — who range from essential workers to Medicare Part B beneficiaries — with high-quality care within minutes, from anywhere. 

Like many in the healthcare industry, our world changed a few months ago as the coronavirus began to spread across the United States. Demand for our medical and behavioral health services spiked to higher rates than we’ve ever seen as patients turned to virtual care from the safety of home for their healthcare needs. In March, we saw 110% more demand for our services than we had seen the month prior when the outbreak had just begun. Our average wait times quickly climbed from five minutes to hours as we saw daily demand surges as high as 200%. 

We knew we needed to add capacity to get care into the hands of our patients and we needed to do so fast. Not only did we need to hire licensed physicians, psychiatrists, and therapists to meet our patients’ healthcare needs but we needed to hire corporate roles to meet growing technical and backend demands. Most importantly, we needed to hire these roles quickly without compromising on quality. On average it takes over a month to make one provider hire and we needed to make critical hires in days. 

When we learned that LinkedIn was offering free hiring services for healthcare companies, we took them up on the offering immediately. Within one month’s time, the results we saw were astonishing:

• LinkedIn's free job listings, that allowed us to post open positions, helped contribute to over 2,100 applications for healthcare provider, engineering, and sales roles, double the amount of applications we received five weeks prior.

• We also partnered with LinkedIn’s talent acquisition team, as part of LinkedIn’s Recruiting for Good initiative, who helped us hire over two dozen urgent positions, including:

  • 23 PhD Psychologist positions to meet increased demand for mental health needs. On average, it takes our recruiting team 30-45 days to hire for one PhD psychologist and through our partnership with LinkedIn we hired 23 high-caliber psychologists in one month.

  • 2 engineering hires within three weeks. Given the increased demand for our virtual care services, we needed to hire additional engineers to maintain and continuously enhance our online and mobile experiences for both our patients and our providers. Through LinkedIn’s Recruiting for Good program, we significantly boosted hiring time.

• We’ve also seen a 14% increase in traffic to our company page and gained over 800 new company followers through LinkedIn’s free media solutions for healthcare companies that help drive more awareness to our critical jobs.

Through our partnership with LinkedIn paired with our internal recruiting efforts, we were able to increase our capacity for patient medical visits by 67%, psychiatry visits by 42%, and therapy visits by 26%. Furthermore, we were able to reduce wait times back to under 10 minutes within just a few weeks, an incredible feat given our tenfold increase in patient demand. We were also able to maintain patient satisfaction scores of 4.9 out of 5 stars, reflecting our laser focus on delivering high quality care and the best possible patient experience.

For our team at Doctor On Demand, getting care into our patients’ hands is always our first priority. We’re incredibly grateful for LinkedIn’s partnership that helped us bring care to the tens of thousands of Americans turning to virtual care each day during this unprecedented time.

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