Medicine is an area of study that has seen a lot of changes in the last few decades. Several years ago, it was almost impossible even to imagine the progress we have seen today in medical education. Progressive technology, easy access to the internet, and shifting trends have brought a change in all sectors, and medical education isn’t an exception.

Earlier, students could only study from books and cadavers. Later, plastic models were introduced, which helped students to understand better. However, they still lacked a comprehensive approach to studying human anatomy. Thanks to the new age tech platforms like Physeo, students can now access detailed graphics and illustrations explained by trained experts for better comprehension and information retention.

Zach Thomson, CEO & Co-Founder of Physeo was with the CEOViews team to share their entrepreneurial journey.

Story of inception

Rhett and Michael were two medical students who, like all others, were struggling to find good resources in Physiology. This requires in-depth and intense visual-spatial memorization. But the issue was that students were teaching themselves from a thick textbook with few illustrations. ‘Wouldn’t it be great,’ they thought, ‘if there was a visual resource for medical students to study from that would make this more intuitive? Rhett reached out to Zach Thomson and Steve Harding, and they founded Physeo.

Although Physeo started as only a resource for physiology, the company quickly expanded into all medical education subjects.

At Physeo, they are legitimately concerned with students’ well-being. Their sincere goal is to provide the platform that works best for the majority of students. Their interest is in what customers have to say, and the subsequent action in responding to those desires helps to create a truly unique and beneficial platform. They also believe that rising tides raise all ships, so they’ve made a real effort to collaborate and cross-promote with other complementary companies in the same space, which ultimately leads to industry-wide growth and increased market share all the way around.

Why Physeo?

 Adding to this Zach said, “Until we built Physeo, there wasn’t a truly all-in-one platform that could confidently take medical students through their first two years of medical school and their first major USMLE exam. This reality required competitive students to use many cumbersome and often expensive resources. Physeo removed redundancy, uncertainty, and high cost and changed the market landscape by creating an extremely high-quality, affordable, one-stop-shop experience”.

To address the reality that not everybody learns the same way, they have worked really hard to create a platform that any style of learner can benefit from. By incorporating abstract style lectures, image mnemonics, textbooks, spaced repetition, and quizzing, they believe that Physeo has covered the breadth of avenues that are realistically available for learning and processing this particular subject matter.

Physeo removed redundancy, uncertainty, and high cost and changed the market landscape by creating an extremely high-quality, affordable, one-stop-shop experience

Challenges

Speaking about the challenges they have faced, Zach said, “It’s been a wild ride! The market has changed dramatically since we entered. Everything from the way that exams are scored to new competition entering the space. Overall, we have been able to anticipate and adapt to the evolving market landscape. One of our biggest challenges is reaching all medical students that would benefit from this resource. Medical students are a particular niche audience. Additionally, they tend to roll over frequently (a new set every four years) and advertise to each other mainly by word of mouth. Consequently, we can often easily enter a school and have a huge audience, gaining users like wildfire, only to have another medical school that doesn’t have a single student who knows about or use our product. Advertising to a group that spends all of their time studying has also proven challenging”.

Strategy around innovation

Physeo has remained competitive in an increasingly competitive space through strategic partnerships and being willing to pivot and adjust quickly to meet the demands of the market. They feel innovation is a fun buzzword to throw around, and while it is very important to innovate, the process often isn’t as glamorous as people might like to believe. They have found that innovation, and innovative ideas, often come on the heels of hundreds of hours of real work and analysis that ultimately lead to new and useful ideas. They also believe that the company’s overall work ethic and willingness to innovate and evolve have kept us a high performer in an intense market.

Plans for the future

Right now, Physeo is just wrapping up a huge project in their clinical library. With the completion of the clinical library, Physeo will be the only platform that can absolutely take a student, with any learning style, from the first day of med school all the way through to graduation. Once they continue polishing and refining the library and interface for medical education, the sky is really the limit in the education space. They have lots of plans and are extremely optimistic and ambitious.

The management plans to continue to work hard to reach more students and help them see the value that Physeo brings to the table. While there is always room for healthy competition, they intend to bring Physeo to the front of the pack by listening to the market and giving the users what they want in the highest quality way possible.