Empowering Clinicians with Technology to Solve Healthcare Problems
Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash
Less than 2 weeks ago, on June 14, 2023, I graduated from the Stanford University School of Medicine's Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program on and also dropped CS103: Mathematical Foundations of Computing. The latter, as I had mentioned in my last article, would have been my first formal entry into the computer science (CS) track and the first year of four (2023 - 2027) if I continued with my MS in CS plan I had previously shared in this Google spreadsheet.
Well, I guess that's life.
I imagine quite a few may have already predicted this as I've been quite burnt out trying to juggle everything. Nonetheless, I'm much more excited about what I'm hoping to share in this article which will, hopefully, be a long-term, if not lifelong, commitment towards my future goals.
Solving the healthcare interoperability problem
As many already know, I'm keenly interested in connecting the world's healthcare data. How I've approached it has changed drastically over the years since I first started to explore this life goal of mine back in 2016 (maybe sooner?). From creating YouTube videos about pharmacy informatics to creating online courses at Pharmacy Informatics Academy to now, building OpenClinTech, a new entity that I hope will serve as the de facto learning resource for clinicians interested in solving healthcare problems via technology.
Ever since I joined Verily just over a year ago in April 2022, I've come to appreciate the technical complexity that powers many of the health information technologies (#HIT) that many of my clinical colleagues use everyday. Further, the professional development courses that I've completed in parallel from Coursera, Health Level Seven International, and Stanford University have really broadened my perspectives as to how we can solve the interoperability problem from a different lens. Most importantly, how powerful solutions can be when we combine the domain expertise we have as clinicians with a more technical skill set of computer science and data science. To feed the hype, we might as well throw in generative artificial intelligence (#AI) and large language models (#LLM) too, which to be fair, can provide a lot of value in exploring innovative solutions in healthcare. The new book, The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond, from Peter Lee, Carey Goldberg, & Isaac Kohane, does a wonderful job of showcasing how we can apply these new technologies in medicine.
Plans for OpenClinTech
I've been thinking about this quite a bit over the last year or two. Especially after I read Peter Thiel's book: Zero to One. Essentially, I'd like to build something of value, but I'd also like to capture a small fraction of it as Peter suggested. That notion alone has been a struggle as I've toiled over how best to do just that in a way that supports my mission to train the next generation of biomedical informaticians. Specifically, how do I make it universally accessible to everyone, regardless of their financial status?
I can continue funding these efforts using my own pocket, which I've done for seven years now, but it has taken a large toll on me beyond finances at the expense of my personal health and relationships. In all transparency, I've strongly considered using more lucrative mechanisms to extract more value through expensive online courses, coaching, or masterclasses. However, I was never able to go through with it and ended up not creating anything at all. That is, until a potential solution came to my mind a couple of weeks ago...
What if I created value that was more or less the same, but with different pricing tiers?
That idea led to the following three tiers that I'm planning to pursue with OpenClinTech:
Free tier: All content will be publicly available on YouTube.
Membership tier: All content will be accessible on a website behind a membership paywall at a very low cost of $10-20/month. The website will link to the same exact YouTube videos in the free tier, but also provide code labs and written blogs and articles to provide additional learning methods that are hands-on and reading-based.
Formal learning management system (LMS): All content from both the free and membership tiers will be hosted in a formal LMS like Thinkific with added assessments (e.g. quizzes, exams), formal course completion certificates, and other bells & whistles that come with a typical LMS. My current thought would be to break even with the cost of Thinkific hosting, which is ~$80/month, but also capture a bit of value to continue upgrading the features from the LMS to allow for a better learning experience. Currently thinking of $35-50/month with some sort of one-time, lifelong payment of $1,000-$2,000.
This idea isn't fully fleshed out as of yet, but my goal is to make the vast majority of my content (i.e. videos) free through YouTube and the membership tier will help me offset the operational costs that come with video production. If you weren't aware, I spend a few thousand every year in content and software licensing along with equipment just to produce videos. Breaking even using the revenue from the membership tier will be my goal. Lastly, the LMS tier will be most in line with capturing a small fraction of the value as Peter Thiel described. The thought is that individuals and companies would be most interested in that tier and have some sort of company benefit that reimburses them.
Concluding thoughts
Yesterday, I spent some time setting up my handles on GitHub (https://github.com/openclintech), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/openclintech), & Squarespace (https://www.openclintech.com/) to reserve my spot. The website isn't even live yet, but I've added a simple tutorial on GitHub already for connecting Google Colab to Google Cloud's BigQuery. For the remainder of 2023 and for the years to come, my hope is that I'll build out a large repository of free resources that will help train any clinician interested in developing (pun intended) their technical skills further.
If you have any feedback in the form of ideas, questions, comments, or concerns, I'd certainly love to hear them! Shoot me an email at brian@briankfung.com.