Current state of affairs
The current state of healthcare education in India is to say the least is indequate in preparing young doctors for the realities of current healthcare. Here's an outline on whats plaguing the system -
Urgent fix needed - Course is outdated
Clinical education used very old methods of teaching have failed to deliver real value to real clinical scenarios. This is justified by the fact that most doctors post their masters get highly specialized clinically and skill based oriented courses. Every gastroenterologist undergoes endoscopy training sponsored by medical equipment training. This only speaks to the larger problem in the system - lack of incentives to update the course.
Everything is the same - Teachers and teaching methods haven't evolved
50 years ago to now the teaching methods have remained exactly the same. From writing useless records to discussions that aren't directed towards anything - EVERYTHING IS THE SAME. The ability of teachers to deliver real value has been decreased because students today have access to teaching material from Harvard medical school. The lack of training among healthcare educators is really showing right now as students are disinterested in sitting through boring hours of lectures.
Students expectation has skyrocketed
Availability of content from all the over world and connecting with students internationally has shown the very obvious lacunae in the system. Teachers have often been seen as true pioneers in knowledge due to the knowlege monopoly held previously, now the system and its participants have failed to evolve with the Software is eating the world times. Often it was questioned if tech can ever make a dent in this ecosystem.
The answer is YES, its taken just a handful of players and they've managed to upend and question everything we took for granted in the past 50 years.
PPTs and surgical videos won't cut it anymore - what do we do ?
The ecosystem has eveolved massively in the past 5 years. Now you can learn EVERY (No exclusions) bit of clinical knowledge and skill from these platforms instead of your medical school. And the ability of students to watch what they want how many ever times needed is a huge plus, in a field such as medicine where everything isn't straight forward and memeory intensive ability to re learn effectively can give you the cutting edge.
Moving from black board to PPT + videos cannot match up to the quality or the robustness of the content. And this is increasingly becoming obvious. The system is failing, you may not notice it today - but these neo-educators are here to stay and dominate.
Marrow, Prepladder and Unacademy - what problems are they solving ?
Marrow, Prepladder and Unacademy started as online only coaching lessons for NEET-PG, the market void they saw was tier-2 cities that did not have prevalent offline coaching centers.
The economics of offline coaching centers (think Delhi Academy of Medical Sciences and Dr. Bhatia medical coaching)
These centers operate near clusters of multiple medical colleges - which mostly happens to be metro cities. But most medical colleges aren't located in metro cities they're located in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. So huge market void with >60% medical college students up for grabs.
Lack of teachers in tier-2 city colleges
Tier-2 cities do not get the older and mature medical college teachers that metro cities do. Most teachers in those colleges are there to graduate into a bigger college in a metro city. Which means that their inexperience works against student interests.
These online only players advertised themselves as platforms with quality teachers teaching all concepts necessary to effectively. Initially skeptisicm was high and adoption was low, once a critical number was reached network effect took over and now everyone has it.
The case for Whitearmy
Whitearmy - Help others to help ourselves started as a small Whatsapp group where interested students posting clinical methods and case presentations - it slowly grew to include more students from all the country.
Advantage Whitearmy
Whitearmy has positioned itself as a key value provider in the healthcare education field as it was founded by and is still run by a group of medical graduates who are also clinicans.
In the next article I will outline why the growth opportunity for WhiteArmy is massive if they can hold on to their founding vision for the future, the article is here
TL;DR
The field of healthcare education is undergoing a massive change right now, from shifts in teaching methods to technology adoption. Players such as Marrow, Prepladder and Unacademy have bulldozed through the market already, a new slow rising but definitely a player to watch out is Whitearmy.