Medudy: streaming service for medical knowledge

Doctors have very little time, but still need to keep up to date with the latest developments. The start-up Medudy wants to remedy this situation and, with the help of AI, is creating compact learning content in the form of videos that can be inserted into doctors' daily work routines. Avatars of certain experts can reproduce the learning content in more than 60 different languages. We spoke to Medudy founder Felix Stockmar about the details of the platform, which will be released in 2023.

How has the feedback been so far?

The feedback has been very positive. Our users are often amazed at how lifelike the avatars look. We also repeatedly receive positive feedback from the speakers. For them, working with us saves a considerable amount of time. They appreciate the opportunity to create high-quality content in several languages without having to put up with complex production processes.

Which AI language models are in use?

We rely on a mixture of different AI models in the field of generative AI to create realistic avatars and text-to-speech voices and to make our production processes faster and more efficient. As new models are constantly coming onto the market, we try out a lot and remain flexible – we are not fixed on one model, but are constantly optimizing our solutions to always deliver the best results.

On the one hand, we use the guidelines, but also many specialist publications as a basis and create new content based on published studies or updated guidelines. This is because doctors often don't have time to read through hundreds of pages to keep up to date. Our content is then divided into small blocks of knowledge, which doctors can then view on our streaming platform and receive training points for some of the content – if they answer the questions correctly in a multiple-choice test. We have an interface for this so that the points go directly to the doctor's account.

And that also works with short content?

There is still a challenge here, because the content actually has to be 45 minutes long for us to be able to award points for Continuing Medical Education (CME). In our view, this does not correspond to modern communication. We wanted to make the topic of continuing medical education suitable for everyday use for doctors, similar to a Netflix series in which the content is strung together and you can pause at will.

We have organized the whole thing by specialty. Content for urologists only goes to urologists via our distribution network, cardiology topics only to cardiologists and so on. The doctors then come to our site via the network, where the interaction takes place. One of our strongest channels is a newsletter, with which we now reach around 240,000 doctors from all specialist areas.

How is the whole thing financed?

We don't monetize the medical profession; they have free access to the site. The whole thing is financed through cooperation with healthcare organizations from the pharmaceutical and life science sectors, which implement content together with us.

How is independence guaranteed?

The content is prepared by our editorial team in a scientifically balanced way. We do not want to be an advertising channel for the pharmaceutical industry, but rather generate high-quality knowledge content for doctors and specialists. We have sovereignty over the content.

(mack)