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LinkedIn Co-Founder Konstantin Guericke Joins Doximity’s Board of Directors

May 14th, 2012   ·   No Comments   

More than once, Doximity’s been described as a LinkedIn that’s optimized for doctors–a real-name network enabling physicians to make professional connections and patient care collaborations in an environment that’s secure and HIPAA-compliant.

We’ll likely be getting even more of that comparison thanks to this nice piece of news: The newest member of our board of directors is entrepreneur and LinkedIn co-founder Konstantin Guericke.

Mr. Guericke’s rich experience growing and managing LinkedIn’s user base (he led the company’s marketing from pre-product phase to six million members and profitability) is a perfect fit for Doximity. With over 9% of physicians already members, we’re expanding quickly, and working with the co-founder of the largest business-focused social network in the world will undoubtedly help manage and shape our next phase of growth.

On the board, Mr. Guericke joins Kevin Spain of Emergence Capital Partners and Dr. Gil Kliman of InterWest Partners. It’s an incredible group, with deep expertise in both social media and healthcare. We’re proud to have each of them involved.

For even more details, Bloomberg and others have posted our press release on their sites. Here’s the quote Mr. Guericke provided for that announcement: “Doximity provides a very useful collaboration service for physicians. By focusing on a specific segment of the professional market, Doximity is well-positioned to deliver a user experience and value that is second-to-none for physicians in the U.S. and worldwide. I’m pleased to join the board of a leader in a large and valuable category and am looking forward to help drive accelerated growth, engagement and profitability.”

Doximity Partners with Stanford on Alumni App

May 5th, 2012   ·   No Comments   

Today, we’re happy to announce a collaboration we’ve been quite excited about. We’ve partnered with Stanford Medical School to develop a product the school has called “first-of-its-kind.”

Building on Doximity’s existing network of 50,000 U.S. physicians, we’ve created a tailored alumni app that will enable users to search a directory of published articles, lectures, clinical trials and curriculum vitae, as well as interact in an alumni-only forum.

Currently, the app is being tested among a limited number of alumni (if you’re a grad and would like to request access, contact Doximity’s Taylor Carroll), but by month’s end all Stanford Med alumni, medical students and residents will be able to download it here.

For more extensive coverage of the app and partnership, head over to Scope, the official blog of Stanford Medical School.

 

Why Social Media is Just What the Doctor Ordered

April 29th, 2012   ·   No Comments   

Editor’s Note: Alex Blau, MD, is Doximity’s Medical Director. This essay originally appeared as a guest post on VentureBeat.com.

 These days, particularly in the wake of Facebook’s $5 billion S-1 filing, few will argue the explosive impact that social media is having on the way we live. We see it in the way relationships build, the way messages spread, and the tremendous amount of data that’s been assembled about who we are and what we do.

The potential is huge; but until very recently, physicians have been largely unable to take full advantage of what these connections have to offer. Specifically, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 prevents doctors from using email or text messaging, much less open platforms like Facebook or Twitter, to communicate about patient care without risk of being fined or fired.

Still, opportunities for physician-focused, web-based networks are many, and HIPAA-compliant tools and sites have indeed started to take shape and populate. Healthcare itself has been (often rightly) criticized as slow to change. In fact, Dr. Leslie Saxon recently published an insightful article on why the Internet hasn’t yet had any real impact on how medicine is practiced. But research has shown that as far as technology goes, doctors themselves tend to be early adopters. Having seen the kinds of conversations that have already begun to take place, I strongly believe that the future of digital medicine will be anchored in these kinds of connections.

Think, for example, of the impact of having a rural doctor in Alaska be able to send pictures of a complicated emergency case to a former classmate now working at a stroke center in Boston — and getting real-time feedback. This is where, in my mind, social networking truly goes from entertaining to life-changing.

With physicians connecting in real time across specialties and beyond the traditional bounds of hospital walls, patients may soon be able to stop worrying about getting access to the right specialist. Medicine’s brightest minds will be accessible from the remotest spots — on an airplane, at an underserved clinic, or in the thick of a disaster zone. Soon, any doctor with a mobile device will have the resources and reach to pull together a personalized, patient-specific team of experts for any given case. Sometimes, it will take as little as a question to the right expert in a sub-specialty to change the course of treatment for the better. In other instances, more lasting and meaningful collaborations might take shape.

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Now on Our Site: Doximity Product Videos

April 20th, 2012   ·   No Comments   

It’s been a great spring for Doximity. So far in April alone, we owe a big thanks to Inc. magazine for including us on its list of 17 Game-Changing Health Start-Ups, and to HealthWorks Collective for naming us one of its Top 10 iPhone Apps that Doctors and Med Students Can Rely on.  We’ve also been growing and expanding our features quickly. Over the past few weeks, we realized that there might be a lot of value in putting together some video tours of what Doximity is–and is capable of–now. You can find these on our product page, and (for immediate gratification) we’ve embedded them below. As always, we love to know how you’re using the site and its features. Follow, connect and let us know on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. We’re looking forward to hearing from even more of you…

 

Overview

 

iRounds

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Why Online Social Networking Should Change What We Know about Health Care

April 15th, 2012   ·   No Comments   

Editor’s Note: Henry Wei, MD, is a board-certified internist and a Clinical Instructor in Medicine at Weill-Cornell Medical College. He is currently a Senior Medical Director at Aetna, where he leads Clinical Research & Development for ActiveHealth Management. (The views expressed here are the author’s alone and do not represent those of his employer.)

Introverts make up about half the population. In any given year, about 7% of Americans are also suffering from social phobia, a fear of being in public so great that’s defined in part by a tendency to get in the way of daily life. What happens to the health care experience for these demographics? If it’s at best uncomfortable and at worst panic-provoking to venture out into the world, does it become impossible for some to seek psychiatric care, let alone regular medical care?

My bet is that the online experience is changing this, and in particular, doing so for health care interactions. What happens when computers, tablets and smartphones start to allow patients to communicate with doctors and therapists in a virtual space? The rise of ubiquitous online connectivity between patients and their physicians is bringing a new era to those who prefer to interact from the safety of their own environments. As a result, there’s currently no shortage of telepsychiatry startups in the current Health IT bubble, among them BreakThrough, iCouch, Cope Today, and HealthLinkNow. Behind the safe, bullet-proof glass of, say, an iPhone or iPad with a front-facing camera, perhaps it becomes easier to think about visiting a mental health professional. (Parking, at least, is no longer a concern.)

These seemingly innovative startups may owe a lot to Dr. Warner Slack, a passionate but otherwise mild-mannered forefather to modern medical informatics. In the 1960s, while still a neurology resident, Dr. Slack was at the front of the incipient patient empowerment movement. He was also wildly optimistic about the use of computers in medicine–this, in the pre-PC era. By the end of that decade, he had developed computer systems that could directly engage with patients. Already then, he noted in one seminal paper, nearly 50% of the 275 patients he studied preferred interacting with the machine, while only 30% preferred interacting with the doctor. Furthermore, a small but significant contingent indicated that they preferred both!

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