From the OR to the Desktop: SurgeryU.com
Founded three years ago by CEO George Stepanian, SurgeryU.com is an online medical portal that offers on-demand streaming video of expert surgeons in action, for the benefit of doctors, medical residents, and patients, all of whom can watch and learn online.
"In surgery it is important to not just learn from the books but also be able to see as many surgeries as possible," says Stepanian. The surgical procedures shown in SurgeryU.com videos, however, are not wide ranging; they are focused in the specialty of OB/GYN. Actually, they are focused even tighter than that—concentrating on the latest procedures of minimally invasive gynecological laparoscopic surgery.
In fact, it is this fine focus and specialization that has made the site so quickly successful, Stepanian believes. "This is the only place in the world where this kind of thing is readily available," he says.
Of course, similar material is available on videotapes and DVDs, but the selection is limited and of dubious quality, and they cost from $50 to $90, says Stepanian. In contrast, doctors can subscribe to SurgeryU for $12.95 per month (with a minimum sign-up of six months). With that subscription, they can access any of the surgical procedure videos in the SurgeryU database (192 as of this writing). And the company is adding up to five new videos every month, according to Stepanian. The company also offers patients a 30-day subscription for $24.95.
The SurgeryU video database can be searched by surgeon, procedure, or diagnosis. For example, if you are impressed by a certain surgeon, you can search for his or her name and view all the videos he has contributed to the site. Or you can search for a procedure (hysterectomy, for example) and see how the site's various contributing surgeons have performed hysterectomies. Or you can search on a diagnosis (cervical cancer, for example) and see how the site's various surgeons have approached a similar problem.
Once a subscriber has selected a video, he or she can view individual steps of the procedure by clicking through the titles of the steps from an index, or he can click on "View the entire procedure."
The Web site also includes an email Forum, which provides an online meeting place for members of the surgical community. There doctors and residents can post procedural questions and have them answered by the surgeons who performed them, and they can engage each other in discussions. Questions and answers are archived so a subscriber can browse through and often find some important answers to some important questions.
Stepanian says that SurgeryU currently has around 1,000 subscribers who connect from all around the world—from 53 different countries, in fact. The site requires that users have a broadband connection (T1, DSL, or cable), which Stepanian says isn’t usually a problem because almost all hospitals have T1 or DSL lines. He says his company uses Akamai for streaming services and data storage.
From Chat Rooms to Operating Rooms
After having obtained his MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Stepanian got his first Internet-related business experience by serving as director of finance for Zoom Culture, a company that created Internet communities for users in the X and Y generation demographics. With that experience under his belt, he launched SurgeryU, but he didn't have to stray far from home to get the idea—his wife is an OB/GYN surgeon.
Stepanian says that it is critical for SurgeryU to enlist the right physicians as content providers. He says the surgeons featured on SurgeryU are all well-known doctors who have been "handpicked." They are the "true stars" of the surgical world, he says.
"All the content providers contribute their distinct techniques and methodologies to each specific surgical procedure included in SurgeryU," says Stepanian, "thus giving subscribers an unprecedented ability to compare various surgical approaches."
Medical editors of SurgeryU do all the editing, and doctors approve it, and upon approval narrate edited surgeries. All the encoding is done by SurgeryU.
Stepanian also has enlisted well-known experts to serve on the SurgeryU Editorial Board. By screening the content of pre-release videos, this think tank-style governing board helps to ensure that SurgeryU.com content is safe, accurate, and useful.
The biggest challenge still facing SurgeryU is "to maximize exposure" among the target audience—OB/GYN surgeons and physicians, medical schools and hospitals, says Stepanian. He feels he needs to do a better job of getting the word out, especially to professional groups and medical schools.
But Stepanian doesn't want his company to grow too fast. He believes there is a downside to offering too many videos at this point. He believes it is better to a have a few excellent videos that reflect well on the company than to have a lot of mediocre ones. "We need to build up our name first, then worry about building up our video database," he says.
And in the pursuit of profit, Stepanian has not lost sight of his company’s primary goal: better health through better education. "We believe transferring knowledge is an important aspect of our lives, and the Internet gives us a way to transfer knowledge all over the world and at very little cost," he says.