Medicine is a different language by itself and is really, really hard to understand. Traditionally, the medical field's solution to this problem is to design boilerplate patient materials at a general reading level to inform patients about their healthcare issues. At best, the industry is moving towards video content and digital resources, but there is still a wide chasm of lost information between what a doctor understands and what a patient is informed about.

There are a ton of existing companies, many quite profitable, out there trying to address patient education, demonstrating high demand within this niche. There's little to nothing in existence that uses the doctors' own notes as the foundation for the clients' educational material.

In this episode, Shuhan introduces us to his new solution, called Doctor Lingo. He envisions a service that automatically detects medical lingo as used in a doctor's standard notation practices and translates it into something that is easily understandable to patients. We discuss several collateral applications for this service and a bootstrapped way to get started. Listeners will discover a useful and fun business project which serves as an entry point into the growing, nearly trillion-dollar industry of digital health.

Here's a major plus...

Shuhan has already launched a version of this service to one paying customer. Shuhan has experience in successfully partnering with ambitious new teammates and you could be the next. Your job is to help explore other avenues for revenue and growth, and don't worry, you'll find many ideas that arise in the course of this episode. Get started, gain some traction, and report back.

Nuggets:

• Learn how Shuhan thinks about partnerships and arranges them in a way that optimizes for performance and accountability.
• Learn how Shuhan applies his heuristic, "the best predictor of performance is performance" for hiring and business relationships.
• Learn the clever tactic that Mayo Clinic used to rocket to the top of Google for medical searches.

Action Steps:

1. Create a marketing strategy to increase awareness of the product.
2. Outline how you would improve the existing service.
3. Collect lingo to attract and keep more users.
4. Brainstorm product variations.
5. Interview med students to understand what they’re looking for in an education app.
6. Create wireframe for med student education app.

Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.

Links:

Doctor Lingo
Electronic Health Records
Anki
Duolingo

Shuhan He is a doctor and an entrepreneur. He is the founder of Conduct Science, a brand that creates high-quality equipment created and developed by scientists for scientists. He is also the mind behind Maze Engineers, a startup that creates automated mazes which allow doctors and researchers to further improve their studies on behavior and neuroscience. He is also a Fellow in Emergency Medicine at the Harvard Teaching Hospital Massachusetts General Hospital.

Outside of work, he is a fan of fitness and wellness, advocating intermittent fasting and daily exercise. He has also done the Gobi March, a 250km race, placed second in age division of 18-21-year-olds in a marathon, and has done over 15 marathons/ultra-marathons.

He is currently based in Cambridge, MA.