Health IT, Hospitals, Patient Engagement, Pharma, Startups

Medstro wants to redefine healthcare social media

Another startup has jumped into the healthcare social media space, hoping to capitalize on the […]

Another startup has jumped into the healthcare social media space, hoping to capitalize on the evolving web habits of young physicians and med students.

But unlike others that have emerged in the area, Boston-based Medstro is looking to not only seize the web for collaboration, but also hosting events and collaborative competitions that it hopes will spur more lively engagement among its user base, the founders told MedCity News.

Started in 2013 and officially launched in the spring of 2014, Medstro was borne out of physician and Medstro CEO Jennifer Joe’s frustrating experience as a young physician, having completed fellowships at Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s.

“I was expecting this nice, beautiful place,” she said, where physicians work with one another in a seamless manner with strong patient engagement. “It really wasn’t the case, and I think we all know a lot about the broken parts of the system. Lack of patient-physician relations, many problems with education, which I think of young physicians are experiencing.”

So how does a facebook of healthcare help address that matter? After all, other social media healthcare companies exist and are larger, for example Doximity. For starters, Joe and the founders said it’s much more than just a website that encourages connections. Instead, the focus is on actual, physical collaboration, with the website serving as a mere starting point to other events.

Such events include a partnership with Google, which jointly held a competition with Medstro last year in Cambridge that identified the top 10 Glass applications in healthcare from physicians around the country.

“We created a platform where you could pitch your own idea,” Joe said. “It culminates in a life pitch idea and events.”

That will now be expanded to all wearables and will be an annual event, COO Jim Ryan said, noting that events are one source or revenue for Medstro, which he said is cash-flow positive. Another source is online panels and Q&As with healthcare leaders from around the globe, which is being done in partnership with the New England Journal of Medicine. A host of topics, such as Precision Medicine, are discussed. The hosting organization will pay a fee to Medstro, but physician members of the site aren’t charged anything.

“So in addition to the competition platform, it’s a way to get people interested and talking, which is way more than you can do with a static website or forum,” Ryan said. A third source of revenue comes from jobs listings by healthcare providers.

Being in Boston – virtually surrounded by academic medical centers and teeming with young physicians – certainly helped Medstro identify some of the emerging patterns for younger med students and doctors, Joe said.

That group is far more likely to utilize social media than their older peers, but not if its simply an ad-generated site, Joe and Ryan said. For example, Medstro does not allow ads from pharmaceutical companies on its site, noting that younger physicians view the practice far more skeptically than older generations of doctors. Nor does Medstro sell any personal information on members.

That was a big decision, Ryan said, given the obvious revenue available.

“We’re just lucky to be in a position where we’re funded by founder money,” Ryan said. “Especially with the younger physicians, I think we’d lose their trust if we started running (pharma) ads.”

Medstro has attracted about 7,200 users in about 10 months, Ryan said, and it’s demographic is 50 percent aged 34 and younger. About 43 percent are med students or physicians between 25 and 34, while another 7 percent are 18 to 24, according to Ryan.

Membership is highest in Massachusetts, with nearly 30 percent, and is followed by New York, California, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Texas.

So far, Medstro is founder-funded. It may seek a strategic investor in the near future but does not have any immediate plans to approach venture capital firms, Ryan said.

Ultimately, the notion of healthcare social media hasn’t taken full hold, Joe said, because physicians are a somewhat unique, if not independent, crowd that can’t be reached just through an online forum. Thus, the competitive events and online panels. Without that level of engagement, physicians likely won’t communicate with one another, Joe said, herself a millennial physician.

“Everything is moving so fast – how doctors are communication in healthcare, how to handle healthcare policy like the Affordable Care Acct, how primary care is broken,” she said. “All of those things weren’t being communicated between doctors.”

Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify that members of Medstro don’t pay a fee for online forums in conjunction with the New England Journal of Medicine; a hosting organization pays the fee.

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