ApolloMD Strengthens Clinician Wellness with WHOOP Unite

ApolloMD is a leading physician and advanced practice clinician (APC) operated, multispecialty practice that partners with top hospitals, teaching facilities, and health systems across 12 states. Their 2,500+ physicians and APCs help care for more than 3.2 million patients annually and specialize in emergency medicine, hospital medicine, and anesthesiology.

Clinician-led and operated, the organization is deeply committed to protecting the holistic health of its clinical team members. With the increasing demands on frontline healthcare providers, ApolloMD sought a comprehensive wellness solution to support clinicians both during their shifts at the hospital — and when they're recovering off the clock.

The Impact of Clinician Burnout 

Many factors contribute to elevated stress among healthcare workers, including long shifts, demanding workloads, and unpredictable environments. For instance, ApolloMD’s emergency medicine staff alone has an average annual emergency department volume of over 40,000 visits across partner hospitals.

While clinicians’ physical and mental health was a public health concern long before the onset of COVID-19, the arrival of the pandemic pushed healthcare workers to their limit. In 2021, 62.8% of U.S. physicians reported burnout, with 1 in 5 physicians intending to leave their current practice within two years.

The impact of burnout ripples across the healthcare ecosystem: When clinicians aren’t operating at their best, patients don’t receive optimal care, errors and accidents increase, and patient engagement can suffer. When clinicians are exhausted, they often aren’t able to give 100% to their jobs, leading them to consider other roles or even different fields. In turn, retention plummets. It’s not a script for success — not for the clinicians themselves, the hospital administrators, or the patients. 

Finding a Customized Solution for Clinicians 

ApolloMD recognized the urgency around clinician burnout years before the pandemic, already investing in a number of wellness solutions. One thing missing was access to data and insights that could help the clinicians themselves make more impactful decisions. With individualized insights about their habits and behaviors, clinicians could make holistic adjustments to their daily lives that improved how they showed up to their shifts. In turn, the organization could perform at a higher level to deliver better patient outcomes. 

After hearing about WHOOP, Hargraves explored WHOOP Unite. He saw big potential for his teams using this program — the only comprehensive health and wellness solution that offers personalized insights, coaching, and education for healthcare organizations, businesses, athletic programs, and beyond.

Designed to adapt to specific organizational goals and needs, WHOOP Unite could help ApolloMD not only quantify the problems they’ve known about for years among clinicians, like insufficient sleep and negative coping habits, but leverage objective data and individualized coaching to prevent burnout. 

Overseen by a dedicated WHOOP Unite customer success team, the partnership with ApolloMD included customized onboarding, education, and engagement. It couldn’t have been a better fit. 

Testing Success with a Pilot Program — Then Scaling

To test the efficacy of WHOOP Unite among clinicians, ApolloMD ran a 10-month pilot program in one region with a group of clinicians who had expressed interest in engaging with their data and making changes to their lifestyle. With the WHOOP Unite customer success team to support them, onboarding and deployment were extremely smooth.

Sarah McGlone, Project Manager, ApolloMD also shared “Lauren, our Customer Success Manager from WHOOP Unite, offered direct educational support via virtual sessions, emails, and app notifications that kept our team informed and engaged. Rolling out this program takes a team — and we couldn’t have done it without her.” 

Based on the overwhelmingly positive results, ApolloMD expanded the program tenfold to cover multiple practices and hospitals for phase two of their pilot program.

These holistic strides come alongside improvements in sleep, including more restorative sleep (the sleep your body and mind needs to heal and repair) and reduced sleep debt (the difference between how much sleep you need and how much you actually get). 

Achieving Enduring Holistic Wellness at the Individual and Organizational Level

One participating clinician from ApolloMD asked: “WHOOP Unite is an extremely valuable program. Can we keep it?”

Since implementing WHOOP Unite, the team at ApolloMD has a way to connect and share a common language to talk about how their habits impact their shift work and holistic health. Many clinicians report friendly competition with their peers when it comes to comparing strain and sleep scores.

Beyond individual behavioral changes, Hargraves and his team are encouraged that WHOOP Unite will spur organization-wide transformation. 

Healthcare providers are the first people that individuals turn to in times of need. Yet, because of the fast-paced, unpredictable nature of their job, clinician needs are often hard to address. They require a holistic and tailored solution. ApolloMD is eager to expand WHOOP Unite to more of its clinicians and reap measurable improvements in their staff’s holistic health.