142. The Med Matrix & AI in Medical Education | Deepak Melwani

Welcome to Medicine Redefined, a podcast focusing on helping you reclaim ownership of your health. I'm Dr. Darsha, and I'm Dr. Altamasharaja, where your hosts, hair to challenge conventional practices and uncover the stories behind pioneers shaping the future of medicine. Our conversations not only focus on the individual level to dissect common practices for health optimization, but also zoom out to enhance systemic change. Join us as we look to break the status quo, move the needle forward, and put the help back in healthcare. Our guest today is Deepak Melwani. He is a serial entrepreneur and third year medical student at Midwestern University, Chicago of osteopathic medicine. He's got a robust background in computer science, and before starting medical school, Deepak co-founded a retail software service, scaling it to achieve millions in revenue. His passions lie in leveraging business and technology to reach and impact lives globally. Deepak is deeply committed to integrating these interests with the transformative power of healthcare to profoundly influence individual lives. As a founding partner of Med Matrix, he's at the forefront of innovating the educational landscape for health professional students revolutionizing their daily study routines. So in this episode, we're going to answer why medical education has not flourished and why it continues to fail future physicians. We're also going to look into how integrating artificial intelligence into lectures, as well as studying for medical students, can actually make these students more efficient. And lastly, we're going to see how Deepak's company specifically aims to transform medical education. Enjoy the episode. Hey everyone, real quick, we are closer rolling out a newsletter containing high yield notes for our guests and tips and tricks from us. We want to put the help back in healthcare and want to help you do the same by giving you the necessary information to live your best lives and provide value to those around you. Make sure to head to medicine redefined.com where you can input your email and stay up to date. All right. Thanks. Time for the episode. Amen. Deepak, Mulwani. Thank you so much for hopping on here. Joining us on this podcast. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. You know, we connected through a podcast episode I did with your uncle. He's been in my podcast and during that podcast, you know, it was all about how to develop a range. And he actually brought you up, not by name, but he mentioned how he had an nephew who is a medical student and showed him saying, Hey, check out this website and he scrolls down and he's like, watch it be my nephew and it ended up being you. And he said, this was not just his first company, but maybe his second or third that he has started. And so you identify yourself as an entrepreneur. You are a third year medical student. So there's just a lot you're doing. I mean, it's very difficult, obviously, to build a website, build a legitimate company and really try to promote that as you become a medical student. What I'm interested in though is how you developed all these skills of might be coding this interest of artificial intelligence, the love for maybe science, medicine, or helping people. Take us back through when you really found a lot of these passions, how you discovered them, how you integrated all of them and how you ended up where you are right now. Yeah, so it is actually pretty interesting thinking back to my childhood. I'm really grateful to have my parents because they never really restricted me or pointed me in any one direction. And you know, when I was a really young child, I think like 12 years old, I told them that I wanted to get like a gaming laptop so I could start playing some computer games. And at that time, you know, we weren't very well off financially and they were like, there's no way we're going to spend $1,000 on a laptop for you for a Christmas gift. So I like bargained with them and I told him like, okay, take out like my next four, my next birthday gift, my next two Christmas gifts and this one and just give me the $1,000 laptop and that'll be it for like two years. And they're like, okay, if you really wanted that bad, we'll do it. And when I got the laptop, I think I started playing like Minecraft and Terraria and other games and I was like, well, this is pretty cool. Like I want to make stuff for it. So I really ended up like just learning how to write mods and actually my first venture into business at all was like selling these mods for these games on forums and I was like 12 years old. And it was pretty cool because I had made back like a few hundred bucks as 12 years old as developing a skill in like middle school. And that's really where like my passion for like being able to sit behind a computer and create something came from. And it wasn't until I got later into high school and even early college that I really got interested in medicine. Not so much for the reason that a lot of people get into it is because they want to like help people and serve the public. But because I took like a biochemistry class and I was like, wait a second, like, okay, I code, I write instructions, it does things, I debug code, I like put inputs and see what the outputs are. That's pretty similar to like, hey, we don't know what's going on in the body. But if we do this blood test, we might, you know, we can hypothesize what is actually happening. And so I really fell in love with like the human body and the biochemistry there. And as I got further into college, I was like, this is amazing. Like medicine lets me talk to people. Let's me use logic and thinking. Let's me use reasoning and there's tech in medicine. Like it seemed like the perfect marriage. And so I, that's kind of like how I found these passions. And I think those developed a little bit independently of my passion for business, which came mostly out of just selling the things that I created on a computer to people and having them use Minecraft mods and, you know, then it transitioned into building websites for people and building other software products and now here's where I am. Yeah, it's a super cool journey. If you don't mind, just explain what are mods exactly and what is that entail as far as what you have to learn? Yeah, so Minecraft, you know, it's one of the games that came out like, you know, 15, 20 years ago now and there were, at the time, there were different things to do in the game. Like you could farm and, you know, dig in things, but eventually you'd get bored of the game when you completed everything there was to do. And so, you know, Minecraft opened up for community members to add their own items, add their own achievements and tasks to complete in the game. And so really that was, I got bored when I finished the game. I wanted to make something else for me to do and I shared it with other people. Tell us, you know, you mentioned that tech and I mean, yeah, I think most people will get into it because of the personal story that you mentioned, right? So either it's going to be some own experience with a family member experience with some types of injury, such as folks, you know, who go into the field that I've chosen to go into or something fascinating about the science kind of like you're describing, you're in that ladder category, but you did mention that, you know, it was one way for you to kind of combine health and tech. And what's interesting that the tech component is quite poor, right? I just had a patient today who was actually been in the healthcare industry for almost 30 years and she was a nurse and now she has a couple of companies that she's running, a couple of businesses and we talk about how everybody hates Epic. Epic is actually regarded, no dislike, Epic anyway whatsoever, although it's not the first time we're doing it, but it's regarded as one of the best EMRs out there, right? And I'm actually a big fan of it. That being said, though, it has a lot of bugs that people, you know, find to be barriers and just actually disrupts the workflow yet you, I guess at what was the point that you decided you wanted to go to medicine, where were you in your journey, were you undergrad at this point or are you still high school? Yeah, yeah, undergrad. So let's rewind the clock. So maybe that's what six, six years ago, seven years ago, somewhere around that age. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And so I would say we're still and it's an infancy, right? We're just starting to scratch the surface when it comes to health tech. In fact, when we think about this, Darshan, I, as recently as maybe three, four months ago, we're having this conversation about talking about this being the next boom, the next bubble, every single person that you have a conversation with talks about, oh man, this is the place to invest in. Like what's going to be that next health tech company that's going to really take off? Yeah. Six years ago, that's what inspired you. And so I'm curious, like, was there a specific health tech thing that you came across? That was really ironed out because I can't think of one six years ago that was like, oh yeah, I look at that and like, yeah, that's working really well. I want that. Yeah, I think the thing that inspired me was more abstract and it kind of boils down to the sense of, you know, as a programmer, I can create one website and whether one or one million people access the website, like, I'm reaching all of them for the same amount of effort really that I put into making the website. As a physician, you're a little bit limited in a sense that maybe you can see 20 patients a day, but beyond that, you're at max capacity, like how much more can you push yourself without having to sacrifice patient care and all the things that come with it? And so, you know, the difference beyond, like, how many people you can reach is the level that you can impact. If I have a million visitors on my website, sure, they might enjoy the nice website or they might learn better, but if I have patients that I'm seeing every day, that level of impact is probably one of the highest that you can achieve. If you do something to really change that patient's life. And so for me, the whole concept of software reaching a ton of people, but medicine reaching them when they needed the most is something that I'm really passionate about because I feel like it lets me take my skill set and my passion and touch, like I said, a lot of people and some of the moments when they needed the most. So let's fast forward now, right? Let's talk about your company, Medmatrix, right? Talk a little bit about the inception of Medmatrix specifically, and then we can kind of dive a little bit into how it works, what are the gaps that it's filling, and, you know, maybe some of the experience that you've had over time. Yeah, I really love telling the story because it's a bit funny how Medmatrix came about. You know, I'm currently in my third year of med school, so seven, eight months ago, I just finished taking, like, step one, first level of our licensing exams, and that is a beast of an exam, but a month before that exam, you know, we entered this period in school called dedicated, I'm sure physicians everywhere are familiar with it. And it's basically where you sit down for like 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and you just study for the step one or licensing exam. And what was crazy to me at the time was, hey, I just spent two years in school studying 60, 80 hours a week, but if I took the exam without the dedicated period, I don't know that I would have passed it. So I feel like there's something weird here, right? Like that doesn't seem like it should add up. And then the night before my licensing exam, I stayed at a hotel because I had to book an exam like two and a half hours away, started at 6am, and I was with one of my buddies from med school, who also has like engineering background. We were actually in a hot tub, relaxing like 6pm at night, and we're like, hold on, we did something crazy here, like we never, like why would we re-study all the information if we learned it over two years? And we kind of realized that we're playing two different games here, but there should be a way to merge the two of them together. And so in that hot tub, we came up with the name Med Matrix, and we said, hey, why don't we just use AI to make licensing exam prep that can help you pass your classes? That was kind of like where it all, you know, springboarded from. I love that. I guess hot tubs are where the magic happens. Might need to get into more hot tubs, get creative. So okay, you come up with this concept, and you know, for every entrepreneur, for every business, you know, person, business-minded person at least, it seems like there has to be an ability to understand what the gaps are, and you definitely mentioned the gap being, why do I need two, three months of dedicated studying when I should be knowing all of this? But we obviously know, right, like throughout medical school, there's just so much information, and it's tough to actually keep up with questions, and remember what you learned maybe in block one of first year, and then you're taking your step one end of second year, and to go back and say, oh, that cardio block, what, you know, how do you calculate cardiac output again? And so I'm wondering, you know, is that, I mean, that is probably why we had the dedicated, but for you, you thought that was inefficient. Why did you think that at least? I think the way that we measure success in med school is based on like a teacher or a course or a school level. So the school evaluates our ability to learn the information that teachers are teaching us and asks questions the way that the teacher wants to ask the questions. At the end of the day, everyone knows there are a lot of concepts that you learn in school that don't show up on the board exam, and there are a lot of concepts on the board exams that don't show up in school. And for the concepts that overlap, you know, are they giving you clinical presentations and your questions when you're tested in school? Are they teaching you the clinical relevance? Or are they just teaching you the mechanisms and the information you need to know and not putting it, you know, in the perspective of how you need to know it? So, you know, I think one of the issues that MedMatrix really solves is letting you keep studying for your classes, but doing it in a way that kills two birds with one stone. I'm also wondering, Deepak, you know, you thought about this last year, and in 2023, CHAT GPT was pretty much all of the rage, right? I mean, I know it was out previously. How much did you already have an understanding of AI in order for you to be confident enough to know, pull the trigger and say, this is what we have to do. Or did you have to come up with the idea and then say, okay, this is what I have to learn about artificial intelligence and, you know, integrating into your plan? Yeah, so as you mentioned earlier, MedMatrix and Matrix Learning is not my first company. And so I have a lot of experience like leading a team of developers and with software companies in general. So I felt very comfortable with my ability to work with AI and work with software. But, you know, CHAT GPT was all the grays and I even found myself using it to help myself study before MedMatrix was even an idea. So it just seemed like all the pieces of the puzzle were laid out right in front of me and I just had to put them together. So I'm curious about this. How did you use CHAT GPT to study? Because I mean, I think about it now as like, you know, soon to be attending and instead of using up to date, sometimes I'll just go ahead and try to get the quick and dirty about a medication or something with CHAT GPT. But as a medical student, how did you find that most people used CHAT GPT? Yeah, so actually when CHAT GPT first came out, one of the most pivotal moments that told me, hey, this is something that you should learn how to use. It was when a group of, I want to say like eight of us met in the lobby of my apartment building in a study room. We had an exam the next morning and basically the agreement was, hey, we'll all write two practice questions. We'll talk about them together and then we'll see how we do in the exam just as a way to study. And so I was like, hold on, we just have this new chatbot. It's supposed to be really smart. Why don't I just try it out? I gave it some information for my lectures. I was like, hey, can you write me a practice question to present to my group? And it worked great. It gave me an amazing question. I asked it to the group, everyone loved it. And it was like, one of those moments, I was like, wow, did I actually just like save myself 30 minutes of time trying to figure out how to write practice questions in just using this chatbot? And that kind of, that kind of stands out as a memory for me. So let's maybe now talk about exactly how it works, right? I think at this point, most people have had a chance to play around CHAT GPT. At least people that have been listening to this, and I'm a little bit, but, and we offline, we were talking about a couple other platforms as well, right? I think, which is, is it Bard? Google has Bard, right? Right? I was on you guys about consensus GPT. I feel like Bing has his own one as well. I forget the name of it. It's not very good from what I remember. But just describe yours a little bit more. I think, and maybe even for the listener who is not in medical school, maybe not familiar with the medical curriculum, you know, what is it special about that? You did a great job describing the dedicated board period and basically how we have to relearn this information. Some would argue that repetition is a mother of all learning, and maybe that relearning is what reinforces it. But I'm curious how, because you just created it, and you haven't actually implemented it into practice over that, right? We don't have a pilot study over the two years to see what it actually looks like, right? Because that's supposed to really going to tell us. And so maybe if you can give that background for people, and then we can kind of go from there. Yeah, you know, I think anyone who uses chat GPT for a lot of knowledge-based stuff will pretty quickly learn that it's not 100% accurate. You know, it can make up stuff and it can put information in there that sounds like it should be right in 100% confident. But you do a little bit of digging and you're like, hold on, this dose is 10 times what it should be or something like the units are way off. And so one of the most important things about medmatrix is that we spent a lot of time with validation, correctness, accuracy, and alignment to what the students have uploaded. And so at this point, you know, on that, on that regard, we have like a 99.7% good question rate based on student's feedback, which is amazing. Beyond just the accuracy, what we do that's different is we let you upload whatever you want, whether you attended a continuing education lecture and you upload the PowerPoint or you took notes in class and you upload those or a PubMed article you really want to summarize. We break it down into basically what you would want to know if you were getting an exam on that topic. And from those VACs, we can extrapolate, hey, what questions would test ask? What flashcards would you want to see to get those questions, right? You know, we even have AI presentation that uses audio and PowerPoints and like subtitles and speech to talk back to your real time and present an article or lecture back to you. So you know, what we really do is enable students to get multi-modal types of learning, however they want on specific content that they want to learn without having to rely on like generic question banks or software that are just tailored to medicine in general. That was actually going to be my follow up is kind of how is this different than let's say a year old question bank or, you know, one of the calm less question banks out there. Yeah, so the biggest difference is going to be that ability to really get pinpoint accuracy. Like, hey, I want to learn about the symptoms of wet heart failure in patients with this comorbidity and you can get 25 questions with different presentations and different answer choices. If you answer those 25, you'll probably never miss a question on that topic again. But beyond all the like traditional things of uploading the content and getting specific questions, we do a lot of cool things with AI outside of that. One thing being, hey, we analyze how long do you take to answer the question? How many words did you highlight? Where did you move your mouse? Should the next question you see on this topic be easier based on that information? Or did you get all the past 10 questions of heart failure correct? Maybe we need to make your questions harder. And because we use AI, unlike a traditional Q bank, we can say, okay, he's doing pretty good. Let's just rewrite all the questions and make it more difficult. And there's never going to be a time where you're repeating questions because every questions brand new. Yeah, I was just about to say, so this is a, this is generative questions, right? Coming out kind of the ether as, you know, chat GBT or whatever kind of AI software would be able to create off of whim. So that way, you know, when you, there's no set number of questions, which is nice. And I love this specificity. I mean, that's like the biggest thing, right? I mean, with these other Q banks going back, you know, back when I was in med school, you could do it by major theme, right? Cardiology, neurology, gastroenterology, but you can't do it necessarily by symptom. And so your goal I'm assuming, too, is to help students do better on exams throughout the year with the hope of increasing retention as they get to boards. Is that correct? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Awesome. Very cool, man. So we kind of just talked about how it worked. I want to really also talk about some of the challenges, right? So relating this to the medical curriculum, you know, obviously we have a large population of our listeners are in medical school or residency. And so this is always a hot topic for us, right? Is the medical curriculum? A lot of people who are not in medical school will even say like, why don't physicians get training in nutrition or training in XYZ when it pertains more to lifestyle? You go to an osteopathic school, our curriculum is definitely a little bit differently geared than let's say an MD school. In my opinion, I believe MD schools are a little bit more tailored towards the boards and their lectures are more tailored towards the boards. Whereas ours is very clinical medicine. It's very rural medicine, primary care focused, along with obviously osteopathic medicine. So in your opinion, now you're a third year student, what are some of the things that one, maybe you had expectations of coming into medical school, but now going through it, you look back and maybe things are similar or maybe things are different. But overall, what has kind of been your experience at viewpoint? I mean, I had expectations that it would be a lot of information. And I was worried that I would go through the first two years of med school and forget everything that I learned because it's just that much information. And everyone's heard the analogy when they go to med school. It's like drinking out of a fire hose or like eating pancakes for breakfast every day, but they never stopped coming. And it is. It is a lot of information, but somehow you go through the process and you come out the other end and you pertain a lot of it. And that was probably the most shocking thing to me when I'm in my rotations and someone asked me a question. I'm like, hey, I learned that like 18 months ago and I still know it in this vast sea of knowledge that I was supposed to memorize for licensing exam. I think that was really shocking for me, just those experiences of remembering those things. Awesome. So I think that's a good background so people can kind of understand one of the challenges and applications. But maybe one thing that would be interesting for us to talk about is, you know, anytime somebody gets on a business venture and we want to talk about planning in advance, right? We always want to do some contingency planning. It's just any good business owner. That's really any medical student, right? Really all type A people. And so what were the challenges regarding the business and the applications as you set out to put this into motion that you anticipated? And in the time that you've been running it, which one of those has come to a fruition and that you've been able to tackle? And what are the unanticipated ones as well? And I'm curious about that. I would say the biggest challenge that I anticipated was that people are suspicious. I think it comes out of many different angles. There are people who are like, is AI really good enough to write test questions and are they actually accurate? We've had people even students say like, can I trust this to study? Or am I going to learn wrong information? And I think some of that comes out of the good place of just not being familiar with where the tech is today. Some of it comes out of people in medicine like want to do what's been proven and what works. And as a brand new company, that was definitely a hurdle that we struggled to cross, especially in the beginning. No reviews like no one knows who if they're the first customer signing up for this platform that no one's ever heard of. But we got a few people. We have good reviews. We have like 1200 followers on social media now. We've had deals with schools. Things are really, I think we've overcome that hurdle. And now that people are seeing the power and the accuracy and how much Mad Matrix can actually help them learn, I think we're okay. But that was definitely a challenge I anticipated, but luckily we got over it. As far as things I wasn't prepared for, I would say that I didn't realize the value that people had on data. And specifically schools who have a hard time measuring. Hey, how well are my students learning the information that I'm teaching them are? How likely are they to pass the board exam before they take it? Because from a school's perspective, at the end of the day, they want to know that they're doing the right thing for their students. They want to know that their students are absorbing the information and going to pass. So both the students and the school look better from that. And so it's been a challenge adapting some of the stuff that we've done for Mad Matrix to really collect data in a way that schools want to see and develop some metrics that will basically prove it from a more institutional perspective. So I can definitely see how the student would easily pick this product up. Right? I mean, going back, I obviously used Anki, having lectures, not knowing exactly how it related to board relevant things, having first aid open. I mean, it's a no-brainer to kind of have something that would be so specific to learn different symptomology, different signs, different questions. But when it comes to trying to get institutions to adopt and to essentially kind of buy out your, to buy your program, how does that pitch work? What are you exactly telling them as far as what they need to know? Yeah, so when we started pitching them to institutions, we were heavily student focused. We said, hey, this can help your students learn. This is another tool. And it's something that no other company can provide. And we quickly found out that didn't really work that well. And so we pivoted our pitch to, hey, we can collect data on your students. We can show you what they're learning, what they're not learning. We even have this new feature coming out where a teacher uploads their PowerPoint, the students answer the questions. And we use AI to tell the teacher by highlighting slides in green or red. Hey, the text on slide 27, only 10% of your students got the question around that topic right. So maybe you should reword that or teach it differently. And things like that where schools can optimize what they're doing to help their students perform better and get real-time feedback that doesn't wait three months for an exam or until the board exam, those have been really powerful in convincing schools that this is something that no one else can provide right now. So would it be almost kind of like a sketchy pathology? Let's say like a sketchy program where the school has a subscription to it and then they distribute it out to the students? Or is it that the institution that professors themselves are using med matrix uploading their lectures and then figuring out the best type of questions that might be board relevant? How does it work between kind of the professors, the teaching faculty and the students themselves? It's actually a mixture of both. We have professors using med matrix actually two right questions, especially those who don't have a clinical background or who have been out of clinical practice for a long time. They've told us like, hey, I find it hard to come up with multiple clinical scenarios every month. So I'm not repeating questions from last year that people can copy. And med matrix really helps with that because you put in your information and we'll write an illness script, we'll write symptoms and presentation for you. So professors have been loving that feature. And schools have been loving the feature of, hey, let the students access all of our course presentations and note packets and lectures and create whatever study methods they want because at the end of the day, if a school can have their students study more and perform better on the exams, why wouldn't they? Right. No, absolutely. You know, you being out there to your student, you've probably agree with us now that this field of medicine can be very resistant to change. What has been the biggest pushback from institutions from going down this route and using more artificial intelligence in a more efficient way to actually get data, see what their students are learning? I've heard a lot of different things. I don't know that one particularly stands out, but I've heard things like, are the students still going to learn if they don't have to take notes in class and make flashcards by themselves? I've heard things like, you know, questions about who owns the content, if they're uploading content to med matrix, is that something that's our responsibility or theirs? There are even questions of, hey, what if the teacher's lecture is actually wrong and they test the wrong information? Do we want our students to learn that six-month-old data or the new guidelines that were just published? So there's a lot of, and understandably, there's a lot of questions about how can this tech, how can we be sure that it's accurate and it's good and it's something that's actually going to help us more than, you know, other programs or just not using one at all? Well, it's interesting. So I would love to hear your response to that kind of pushback because to me, I mean, I think that regardless of using a software not, those issues can happen. I mean, I had professors teaching things that were, you know, out of date, I had professors who needed to update yearly or, you know, things like that. So I feel like those issues would be happening regardless. Am I right? Yeah, totally. And that's for one of the main points I raised to them, I say like, hey, our questions have a 0.3% error rate. I think if your exams at a 0.3% error rate, they'd probably be better than they are now. And so people quickly realize, yeah, humans aren't perfect at writing questions like neither is an AI. It's the best technology we have and it's, you know, it's definitely up there with good. Yeah. What about the concern? Like, I know one of the big pieces of considerations that we had actually, we had a guest lecture come speak at the institution that I'm at. Talk about how we just have to embrace AI because people are going to continue using it, right? The next generation, the current generation of students that we have, you know, a lot of 30 year medical students that work with me. And maybe even undergraduate students for the assignments, for essays, things that they have to write, things that they could never ever write before. Manuscripts, some manuscripts now have like an AI checker built into it. I really know how great it is. And, you know, how accurate that is. But what type of concern should I guess faculty such as myself have about students of reliance on tech, right? I think the old school philosophy might be, oh, that's making people lazy. I kind of set you up for this one. But, um, you know, I think some, there is something to be said about the fact that we have to work through hard stuff. I mean, medicine is difficult because, I mean, at least some parts of it, right? For a reason, right? I think the most resilient people are the ones that you want in certain situations when you have to face really difficult challenges and take care of human lives and such and such. And so, I guess what I'm trying to ask is, you know, from that perspective, how would you communicate with somebody who's much more old school? Maybe they're season 15 year faculty member out 20 year out of medical school, where this wasn't even conceptually possible. And now they're thinking, okay, this is going to actually compromise the education because students will be lazy and they'll be reliance on tech and they won't want to work through difficult problems to arrive as solution, right? They won't have the quote unquote grit that we so often revere. Yeah, actually, it's really interesting because that's what we get people comment on our social media and messages and say like, isn't this just making things too easy? And if you really think about it, the data we see shows that students don't study less just because they study more efficiently. So it's not like people who would previously study six hours are now studying for two and then going out and drinking every night for four hours. What we see actually is that the people who study for six hours still study for six hours, but because they do it twice as efficiently, they come out on the other end, even better than the generation before them. And so it's really interesting because if you reframe the perspective from isn't this making people lazy to, well, hey, the students are going to study however driven they are, whether or not they have mad matrix. And so, we just see everyone, whether someone who studies for two hours a day or six coming out the other and knowing more, you know, having a better skill set when they get ready for their board exam and their locations. Yeah, that's fascinating, right? To to default back to that people are lazy and therefore they're going to cut the time to recognize industry information, whereas you're saying in the same perspective, no, actually, they're going to put the same amount of time and they'll just learn twice the information, right? Because they're going to learn it and process it and retain it much, much better. I love that. And that's what's really interesting, right? I mean, Darshan, I talk about this all the time and you have people who are further ahead of us. And I started off the conversation talk about Epic and there are people some and who I in my opinion don't belong in in medicine, at least in a teaching role anymore, where they'll just have this mentality, well, it was hard for us, so therefore it should be hard for you. Like no other reason with respect to working with trainees than that. And it's like the stupidest logic, you know, there were so many different things, like, you know, like maybe their place, my dad had to write a bike to work and I don't have to do that now. I want to different reason, but I don't have to, right? So you can insert any type of analogy there. And so I love that. I guess what I'm curious is, I mentioned earlier that you don't have a pilot study. We don't have long term data. And I'm curious where you and you said you have one business partner or two partners, two partners, great, okay? So what is, if you're allowed to disclose, like what is your understanding and your plan in terms of incorporating this and then rolling it out and then collecting data long term and seeing what that initial cohort might look like of people, right? I imagine the best way to do it would be some type of observational study if you're interested in inclined to do so of like a certain set of population of both students who are willing to entertain this and maybe nothing else or, you know, now that I'm getting carried away and we can talk about like two-armed study, right? Or somebody who's doing this and maybe doing the old standard way, etc., etc. So have you given some thought to that type of stuff? Yeah, I think you're just like any type of study in medicine or otherwise, there's really like phases that you have to go through to prove something out. When we first created the concept, it was just that, it was a concept, it was something we pitched to students and wanted to see like, how well does this work for you guys? We have great reviews from all those students and people joining today. Customer retention is amazing and people leave comments and say that everything is great. But when we created it in the fall of 2023, we actually went to a school and provided it to all the first year med students for free. And so we basically had 200 students. We tracked their usage over time and got data there and showed that, hey, people are liking it. They're still using it. We collected a lot of feedback on what people liked and didn't like and made tweaks and added new features. That was kind of our first like phase one type evidence, if you will. And then after that, you know, we're getting ready to finish a deal with another institution, which I won't disclose here. But we have basically provided them with a heavy discount. And in exchange, they're going to provide this to all of their students and collect data on how much usage correlates to exam scores in one course. And so really that's starting here in the next two weeks. And that'll be like a three month project. And that's this quote phase two type of data, where we're going to show like, hey, from a school perspective with real data, real test scores, does med matrix usage correlate to, you know, student performance? And I think very quickly, you know, I'm hopeful and I'm very confident that that's going to be positive. And we'll probably move into, by that time, we'll be around for just over a year and we'll move into like proving outboard scores and things like that. Beyond just like all of the evidence that everyone in medicine likes to see, on a core level, the questions you get are extremely similar from all the other QBank platforms. And those you'll see on your board exam. So, you know, it's it seems like to me, it's one of these situations where as long as the questions provided are accurate and students are doing them, it's hard not to improve if someone studies. And, you know, it seems like some seems like a pretty basic basic that process there. And I'm assuming your software and the AI and the code can only get better as AI as a whole improves. Is that correct? I mean, there's really no way of hindering progress here. And it only seems like there's upside, especially when it comes the specificity, when it comes to creativity of the questions. Yeah. And that's a great point. So, we built med matrix to be adaptable and to grow as a software. So, one of the coolest features we have is on each question page, there's a feedback button, just like other platforms that are out there, but this one's cool because when you submit a feedback, we instantly within 10 seconds rewrite the question with your feedback in mind and then take those improvements and save them in our system for other people who have similar problems or similar questions. And so, the more people that use it, it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy, it gets accurate, gets more better, it gets more, you know, written more coherently. Gotcha. This is fascinating stuff. So, you know, we could obviously talk about AI in all of medicine and go above and beyond and what not, but I want to keep it to the curriculum. Really, where else do you think there's application for things like med matrix, right? Is there a role for it in undergraduate curriculum? Is there a role for it in residency as I'm bored, you know, studying right now for PM&R? Have you already kind of thought about maybe how this extrapolates out from medical school? Yeah. So, we already support a lot of healthcare fields, including like med school, both osteopathic and alopathic PA school, nursing school, dental school, pharmacy school, but we also recently added MCAT preparation. And so, we do have students already in college studying for the MCAT using med matrix. And I think it's fantastic because they're learning the skill of how to learn, which I think a lot of students come into med school from having only taken notes in college and they get to med school and they're like, hey, this isn't working anymore. So, we are expanding, we see med matrix having an amazing impact across the board. Beyond just like preparing for exams in school, though, long term, I really see the whole concept of medical education changing from an exam every month or however long to like a continuous proving that you know the information process. And I'm sure you've seen in some licensing fields in like residency and attending life, they're moving to like continuous recertification. So, instead of having to take a board exam every 10 years, you just keep up with the material, you answer questions every month or three months and you prove you continue doing your CME credits and you prove like, hey, I'm keeping up with the knowledge. That would be a better way to show that students are ready to move on in their education than just giving them 100 questions and like, hopefully you know, a good portion of these 100 questions. Yeah, but I'm going to jump in right there and I'll tell you right now that that thing is a joke. I'm doing that now. And like, for instance, I'm gonna blast my own primary academy, hopefully they don't revoke my board certification here, but ABVM and R used to do what like, so it's like $2,000 for every 10 years, and now as we have to pay 350 annually. And that math doesn't turn out to be good at the end of a decade, right? And so, I think it's a little bit more than that actually. And the questions that we have to do have actually nothing to do with the patients that I see at the end of day out. And so, I always attribute it that there's just a way to make more money. But I see your point, your point is well taken, that yeah, probably the continuous and the repetition thing rather than just kind of, what do you call it? Somebody recently said, one of my students, oh, pump and dump. That's what that's what they say, right? Like so, you can fully forget that information after two weeks or so, whenever you have the examination. Yeah, I was actually browsing your website earlier today, and yeah, you have the healthcare disciplines in terms of PT, I saw a nursing, and so I'm Catten. And yeah, my question also was going to be like, when is level three and for certifications? But it seems like, you know, that is something that's on your radar and where you guys see that going. I also wanted to ask you with respect to kind of, you know, at your third year, I don't think we got to ask you, do you have a sense of what you might want to go into terms of the field and what you're interested in? Yeah, that's, that's pretty tough for me. I came into medicine, really gung ho on like technology, and then I quickly realized that every field in medicine has technology and more and more every day. And so I find myself kind of stuck between a few different options. I like general internal medicine because there's so much variability in a type of stuff you see. But I also like sub specialties of internal medicine because for example, GI, you do a lot of colonoscopies with vision and, you know, like it's all tech. And then you move into something like radiology. Now you're working with software and there's AI coming to radiology. So it's been, it's been a pretty tough decision. It's been stressing me out in third year because everyone else is like, oh, I know what I'm applying to and I have absolutely no idea at this point. Yeah, I mean, we talked about this on the phone, right? And you know, a couple of months ago when when we first met and ultimately I mean, you might agree maybe not, but the person that comes to mind is Remy Webby, right? Who dropped out of family medicine and then kind of just went down like this tech route, match day, connect. And so I feel like if a lot of what your passion is is building and, you know, really being there for people in the sense of software and the things that you might be, quote unquote, better at and would be able to put your time. I almost think going down the rabbit hole of like internal medicine or just residency itself can really, really be a time stuff, depending on where you go. I mean, luckily where I go for residency, it's, I really do have a great work life balance where I can focus on the podcast, focus on building other things. So I mean, it's tough to give that advice, right? Because I mean, you go through four years of medical school learning these questions and then to show for what, right? If you're not going to take a lot of student debt. Yeah, right. All those different things to do what, right? And then I guess that's the other question, right? It's like, where's the, where's the biggest money going to come from? That's an important factor too, right? It's going to be through building companies out versus practicing. But as, you know, we've talked about you can always do an intern year and then from there kind of decide and then you can still always practice like via urgent care or other other modes. So yeah, I'm glad I'm really not into our shoes, but I mean, dude, you're doing a lot of a lot of really cool work. I did want to follow up and ask though about the medical school curriculum again. You know, obviously when ultimately I were in medical school, the boards were not passvail. You had to score and then that score could have led to some sort of stratification. As medical school continues to evolve, things are now more and more passvail. I think there's more humanities courses as well. Where do you see medical curriculum going? Next, I mean, do you continue to see a passvail? Do you think that people are able to be stratified into their specialty of choice? What are you currently seeing? I think right now there is a lot of emphasis on like step two currently in this year being the thing that stratifies students. And I also feel like, you know, the writings in the wall, that's going to change soon. I think that's going to go passvail in the next two to five years. And for the lot of the same reasons that step one, the first licensing exam went passvail is it wasn't really designed to stratify students. It was designed to see like like a driver's license test. Who's like ready to move on? And so, you know, it's a good question. Like when we get to that point when classes are passvail and step one and step two are passvail, everyone's got great letters or recommendation. Everyone's in school. You know, what stratifies people? And I think, you know, I'll give you an analogy like we talked about earlier, med students are like drinking from a firehouse. But another way to think about it is absorbing water like a sponge. And I think in the future, instead of just retaining every drop of water that touches us, we can let some of that out. You stay, you know, we have some of it with us, but focus on learning the skills that let us look up the information we need. But, you know, connect with patients better and practice better medicine without having to just focus on the knowledge that we absorb because like we all know medicine gets more and more complicated from every perspective every year. Yeah, it's a good point. I mean, I always say this, the pump and dump, pretty much analogy. I remember like going through an intern year and looking back at medical school and saying, you know, what did I really learn? And I mean, obviously you need to have that foundational knowledge. You need to go through that kind of work ethic, but you really don't learn how to become a doctor until you are the doctor, right? Until you're actually prescribing, until you're actually facing the patient, until you're actually making those game time moves that say, you know, what do I do here? Do I go X, Y, what are the benefit risks? And those are really like you just highlighted the things that you may not get that hands-on really exposure. That accountability really isn't there as a medical student. And so, yeah, I think more exposure to that, those sim labs, those humanities courses and just, you know, as I talked about in your uncle's podcast, having that better range as a medical student going in without being so pigeonholed, even when it comes to critical thinking. Because I think we do our best critical thinking when we're able to see the entire field, rather than just looking at one place. So, do you book with that? I mean, we've obviously asked you a lot of questions, I think, something we're trying to do better here in 2024 is also have the guests ask us anything. If there are any questions you have for us, but there comes from perspectives, anything you're wondering about, no pressure though, if you don't, but also just one open the floor up for you. Yeah, I mean, I guess I would ask you, put yourself back in med school and you're trying to figure out how to study. What was your approach, if you can remember, to the first part of med school when you had no idea how to learn? And, you know, what do you feel like you would recommend people do differently today? I was drowning. And so, I know what's interesting, you talk about the continuous thing. I can tell you at least for me and everybody that I surround myself with, we all knew that was important, right? I think most people ahead of you will say, hey, you better be doing questions day one. It's really just being so time poor and also like just focused on the next task. And, again, just trying to get through, get through, get through, get through and not quite figuring out like how to be really good at time management, which is the reason I think we struggled and not being able to do that. And then I didn't, I don't think I was the type of person who had to relearn all that information. I'm the type of person in terms of retention. I do a pretty good job. But also, I think I'm one of the people who really has to have a deeper understanding of certain topics before they're allowed themselves to move on, which sometimes can be detrimental when you get bogged onto a concept that you can't understand. You're like, okay, I just need to abandon this and I'm just going to take the hit on this question. But I think that really helped me. That being said, though, I think having a more efficient system, clearly that's what I'm saying, but I need it, right? Because I was so time poor, would have been beneficial. Because you also felt overwhelmed with the amount of resources you had. I think we used like, I don't know if people use DIT anymore. Is that doctors in training? Is that a thing? You guys use that anymore? You don't even know what that is. So, you know, I know you know Pat Thoma is, right? So, but Dars, you know DIT, right? Oh, dude, that was awesome, right? And so, it was like a Pat Thoma type concept, but yeah, we were using DIT. And so, you had this, I mean, I know you guys do sketchy micro, right? You had all the kind of stuff. And so, you were like, okay, what's the best resource as well? Because you want to get the best, right? So, we're maximizers, Darshani. And I think that also became very, very challenging when there wasn't always a consensus. Aside from you world, that's the only consensus, right? Especially if you go to DO school, you're like, okay, yeah, you world, but what about the complex? Yeah, I don't know if that answers questions or not. Yeah, for me, I kind of, I really had a great time in medical school because I knew grades didn't really mean anything. And so, if I got an A, I was kind of pissed and I was like, damn, I spent too much time on that. And I was really just trying to get through. Not because, guys, I'm not a terrible doctor. For anyone listening out there, please, I will still take your business. But I think I understood the game and I understood what the school was behind. And so, same thing for me, I looked at the best resources and I was on the Anki Grine from day one. So, I knew about it and for those out there, they're like, what is Anki? It's actually the Japanese word that means wrote memorization. And so, it's kind of a software program that shows you flashcards and based off how hard, easy that you've rated, you'll either see it the next day or you'll see it months from now based on the difficulty. And so, that is really what I used throughout my entire like two years. Going back though, honestly, something like your program would have really helped having questions because I remember saving you world. So, I didn't have to pay for like the two-year subscription, you know, and only having it for six months. And then, and then wasting all those questions to be like, wait, why do I have to know it now? And you didn't know it for boards. So, having questions, doing Q banks earlier on, definitely would have helped me with more of that retention. And I think even now when I'm studying for PM and R boards, I realize like, you know, I'll be learning a concept on EMGs or something and I just don't get it until I do a question. And I'm like, oh, that, you know, I need it in question format to actually test my critical thinking and go down that rabbit hole in my own mind. And so, that's kind of where, you know, looking back, my advice to students would be to do as many questions, find the great resources, and work smarter. So, yeah, things like sketchy, things like pathoma. I mean, there are still some sketchies that I remember till this day that will help me, you know, with patients or with the upcoming board exam and stuff. But yeah, I think that's what, that's what, what worked for me at least. Yeah, no, that's amazing. And that's exactly the type of change that, you know, we're trying to push for. And, you know, really just imagine like if you had access to sketchy videos that were tailored to exactly what was going to be on your exam, the way that you learn and questions that were, you know, written more difficult because you got there earlier, or ones before easy, you know, that's what we're all about personalized like tailored learning. Feature looks bright, man. Thank you. Thank you, but thank you for for doing the work you do, man. I think it does, it really does take a special person, I think as contact readers as, I guess, technically business or as Josh and I, we realize that providing education and providing a resource for people takes a great deal of investment and energy and grit to use that word again. And so for you to do this, and I think for the greater purpose, I think that ultimately just, you know, providing a service for people, right? We talked about, you mentioned that you didn't maybe go into medicine for, quote, unquote, the right reasons that everybody else does. But I think we are all in the service industry, right? We're servicing, you know, you're providing a service to humanity in that sense. And so for you, just do it a different way that you're, you're educating the educators, right? And so that's, that's going to even go out tenfold more. So that's, that's very cool of you. I'm like, before we come to the last couple of questions here, I am wondering though if you've given some thought as we were talking earlier about your residency and future and specialty, into how you're going to balance, you know, the time investment from being an entrepreneur, yeah, having some, some partners really probably help. But I'm curious how much like time you spend into this now on a weekly basis, or maybe a monthly basis, if you can help cost quantify. And then from a self-experfective, like, how do you see that changing as you get into maybe a grueling residency curriculum, internear, maybe a difficult fellowship like GI or something? Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, right now I spend an insane amount of time on, on med matrix. I would say I probably spend 40 hours a week in rotations and 40 hours a week on med matrix. And it's definitely tough. And it's, you know, it's something that I tell people who ask me like, how do you do it? You have to be passionate about it without the passion. You're not going to want to wake up in the morning and then, you know, continue working on it. But beyond just what I do now, you know, I am really grateful that med matrix is not my first venture into software. And I think a lot of the skills that I've developed from my earlier businesses, which I'm still a partner on one of them. And we have an amazing team of people that take all the workload off. On that business, I, you know, I've really taken the role of a leader and I hop on there like an hour or two a week just to provide direction. And I think that if, you know, push comes to shove when I get to residency, I can, I feel very confident in my ability to set up a team to keep leading med matrix down the right direction, you know, alongside me. But you have always been this type of person that finds a problem that I face and comes up with a unique way to solve it. And so med matrix is just that. I got through the first year, two years of med school and I was like, hold on, this is wrong. Like, there's a better way to do this. And that's one of the real, real driving forces behind me. You're still looking at practicing medicine and seeing patients as I think I would see problems that may not be apparent or find solutions that, you know, that only I would be able to see. And I think if that's my skill set that I can help a lot of people, a lot of doctors do their job better and really make an impact there as well. So, you know, it's a battle I face because on one hand, I would love to be full time on med matrix and reach as many students as possible. And every student we reaches another doctor that cares for more people. On the other hand, there could be something else that I find myself passionate about five, ten, twenty years down the road that, you know, I don't want to shut the door on. Yeah, I love that, man. Definitely keeping things open and looking for opportunity, you know, and increasing that surface area of luck as well, right? It's what you're kind of all about. So, I'd love to, love to, love to see that mindset. And it's all too much said, the future is really bright, man. So, I'm really excited to see, I'm excited to follow your journey, honestly. So, where can medical students go who are listening to this, you know, find out about med matrix, look into it a little bit more, maybe have some questions, follow you, and I believe you have a discount code as well for anyone interested in signing up. Yeah, for sure. So, you know, anyone interested, nursing, PT, med students, pharmacy, MCAT, we got it all. Just go to medmatrix.com, coupon code is med redefined in all caps. I'll give you 15 bucks off your first month, which, you know, today is the largest discount that we offered. So, you know, I think the people who are listening to this podcast are exactly the type of people that we jive with here at medmatrix, and we want to do everything we can to help you guys learn better and faster. So, thank you guys so much for having me on the podcast. Sure, man. And I apologize, not just medical students. You've definitely got a whole plethora of things out there helping a lot of providers. So, we'll definitely link that into our show notes as well. So, make sure to go there for easy access to get to the website. Last but not least, Deepbuck, your third year medical student. We asked this to all of our guests. I'm sure you've gone to answer now, too. Now that you've been kind of on clinicals as well, is how do we add the health back to health care? Yeah, I think, you know, maybe this is just my bias perspective, but I really think AI can help us do that. And in, in, in the way, I mean, that I feel like we lost part of the health and health care because of how stretched thin and restricted doctors are on a day-to-day basis. I mean, even on my family med rotation, like my attending is complaining about 200 inbox messages and labs to review on a daily basis. And that's just, you know, an insane amount of tasks to assign to someone and expect them to be empathetic and put in all their care and effort into seeing their patients. And so, I think things like AI that write notes and AI that can, you know, triage inbox messages and even faster learning tools to help people keep up with their CMEs. I think just taking that load off a physician so that they can really sit down and spend the time focusing on the people part of health care, connecting with their patients and helping, you know, push preventative care and a lot of the emotional parts of medicine that I think we lost is going to be a big part of that for me. Yeah, definitely. That was the exact complaint about the messaging portal and taking up all the time is what one of my attendings today had. So, right on, man, thank you again for coming on. Yeah, thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Thanks, Deepak. And there you have it, folks. Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Medicine Redefined. If anything that we talked about in today's episode really peaks your curiosity and you want to delve further into it, be sure to check out the show notes. We have hyperlinked all of the resources, all the podcasts that we mentioned as well as the research articles. If you enjoy this episode, please consider sharing it with a loved one, share it with your friends and family. And also, please leave a rating and review. It goes a long way to helping our algorithm out. I want to thank our team, Herita Yapuri for social media, Ethan Jew for video, Zaynab Lugmani for research, and Sarah Khan for our upcoming newsletter. That's right, we have a newsletter that is about to roll out, so please be sure to go to MedicineRedefined.com so you can input your name and your email so you can stay up to date with that. And as always, our disclaimer, everything in this podcast is for educational purposes only. It does not constitute the practice of medicine and we are not providing medical advice. No physician, patient, lachement, is formed, and anything discussed in this podcast is not represent the views of our employers. We recommend that you seek the guidance of your personal physician regarding any specific health related issues. Take care.