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Tag: Josh Herigon

Doximity Raises $54 Million. But What Value Will They Add?

Screen Shot 2014-05-04 at 5.43.36 PMLast week’s news that Doximity has raised another $54 million got me thinking ..

On one hand, I’m glad to see these guys continue to raise money and continue their development.

On the other hand, I’m disappointed that we don’t have a better physician-centric social network. While they have been successful at signing up doctors, it seems (at least anecdotally) few are engaging with the network.  I have connected with many of my classmates and some physicians I know on the network. I have never interacted with any of them through Doximity.

The article quotes LinkedIn co-founder and Doximity board member , Konstantin Guericke:

I think a lot of doctors will have a LinkedIn profile and Doximity profile. But the key is which part is really going to get ingrained in their lives.

The key question is—what value does Doximity provide over other, non-physician centric social networks? More plainly, what is going to make me open up Doximity on my iPhone instead of my favorite Twitter client?

The current answer to that question is: nothing.

In their smartphone app, the news feed features medical journal articles from the likes of NEJM, JAMA, Lancet, etc. It is unclear exactly how these are selected, but quite clear they are not tailored to my interests.  Twitter, on the other hand, provides a constant stream of thoughts and articles related to my interests because of the people I’ve chosen to follow.

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Why Bad Research Makes It into Good Medical Journals

Last week, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine called into question the effectiveness of surgical checklists for preventing harm.

Atul Gawande—one of the original researchers demonstrating the effectiveness of such checklists and author of a book on the subject—quickly wrote a rebuttal on the The Incidental Economist.

He writes, “I wish the Ontario study were better,” and I join him in that assessment, but want to take it a step further.

Gawande first criticizes the study for being underpowered. I had a hard time swallowing this argument given they looked at over 200,000 cases from 100 hospitals. I had to do the math. A quick calculation shows that given the rates of death in their sample, they only had about 40% power [1].

Then I became curious about Gawande’s original study. They achieved better than 80% power with just over 7,500 cases. How is this possible?!?

The most important thing I keep in mind when I think about statistical significance—other than the importance of clinical significance [2]—is that not only does it depend on the sample size, but also the baseline prevalence and the magnitude of the difference you are looking for. In Gawande’s original study, the baseline prevalence of death was 1.5%.

This is substantially higher than the 0.7% in the Ontario study. When your baseline prevalence approaches the extremes (i.e.—0% or 50%) you have to pump up the sample size to achieve statistical significance.

So, Gawande’s study achieved adequate power because their baseline rate was higher and the difference they found was bigger. The Ontario study would have needed a little over twice as many cases to achieve 80% power.

This raises an important question: why didn’t the Ontario study look at more cases?

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The Real Problem With Med Student Debt


America might never agree on how much doctors deserve to earn. But there ought to be much less debate on the immense debt today’s medical students incur on the way to becoming doctors.

Few people are more aware of the stress of medical student debt than med students themselves, and there’s evidence that it affects our specialty and practice decisions later on down the line.

Enter this tweetchat. What began as a typical med student complaint about their debt load evolved into a provocative discussion about the underlying factors and potential solutions to the debt problem.

We’ve incorporated some notes explaining perhaps unfamiliar concepts, but otherwise this is the unvarnished product of a few med students procrastinating on a Sunday night.

Allan Joseph (AJ): The easiest way to tell if med-student debt is becoming an acute problem is if the demand for medical-school spots (easily measured by the number of applicants) is declining relative to the supply. That’s just not happening. In fact, the opposite is.

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