Mission:

Our mission in developing and spreading MedicalPlexus is to make medicine and basic science research easier by promoting and facilitating free access to information, ideas, and people. The original idea behind MedicalPlexus was to have a place to share the papers, case reports, and presentations that medical residents create on a regular basis. Before, the vast amount of effort put into these documents was lost in an abyss of personal hard drives and jumbled network drives, never to be seen again. While not all the work was ground-breaking, it almost certainly would have proven useful to colleagues seeking materials on related topics.

It soon became clear that there was a need and an opportunity to do much more for the medical community. Communication within the medical community has been based on occasional conferences, personal relationships, and a limited network of collaborators. People looking to make professional connections in medicine or the life sciences must wait for conferences or be limited to intra-departmental gatherings. A place like facebook is great for friends and for social relationships, but everyone has things they would like kept out of their professional lives. Sites like LinkedIn are professional, but do not provide any tools that actually apply to clinical and research environments. We thought we could do better.

As doctors, researchers, and medical students ourselves, we built the site with the philosophy of trying to make our own professional lives, and those of our colleagues, better. After months of deliberation and many conversations with fellow medical professionals, these are some of the features that emerged:

• View any kind of media right in the browser—images, videos, documents, audio, or presentations.
• Upload Documents to a group, to your personal library, or for public viewing.
• Unlimited storage capacity, so upload anything you want.
• Privacy controls are easy and precise; decide exactly who can see each of your files and do it instantly.
• Create Projects to quickly bring together a group of people to accomplish something on a deadline.
• Subscribe to RSS feeds from any of over 800 science and medical journals and receive regular updates on your MedicalPlexus home page.
• PubMed a potential collaborator so you can see what they’ve published.
• Search through the user generated KnowledgeBase for relevant articles or videos.

How do I use MedicalPlexus?

A mission statement is well and good, but how do you use MedicalPlexus? Well, that depends on who you are. Certainly we can’t imagine all the ways to use it—we want you to explore and show us cool things to make better—but we’ve come up with a few to show you our thinking:

Researcher:

Suppose you are working on a paper with collaborators, some in your own lab, some in another city. If there’s a meeting to discuss a manuscript, you can use a MedicalPlexus Project to make the entire process easier:

• Before the meeting, you can share copies of the manuscript on MedicalPlexus so that everyone has a copy. No more worrying about the size of attachments on mass e-mails.
• During the meeting, you can text message anyone or everyone in the group to let them know of a last-minute change in location. Everyone can read the manuscript right in the browser without any downloading.
• After the meeting, your discussion can move online so that there is an accessible record. If you find a link or article that is particularly relevant, it’s easy to connect it to the presentation. People not able to make meetings will have a record of the work and be able to participate in the discussion afterwards.
• Finally, after the whole project is completed, all the work is archived in an easy to access and navigate interface so that you can return to it later. Never lose files to a hard drive crash again.

Doctor at a Teaching Hospital:

If you are a doctor at a teaching hospital, it’s very important for you to be able to build a relationship with residents in your program as well as provide assistance to them to help them learn. MedicalPlexus allows you to interact easily, instantly, and in new ways with the community at the hospital.

• Your residents can showcase the presentations, case reports, and other work they're already producing by sharing it with the MedicalPlexus community.
• You can easily create an archive of procedure videos and presentation slides to help your residents learn.
• You will be able to communicate with your residency program at a moment's notice with text messaging and status notifications.
• You can check the profiles of residency applicants to find out which students fit your program best.
• Your residents can research fellowships, network with fellowship directors, and create an online presence for themselves accessible only to the medical community that highlights all of their academic and clinical achievements.

Medical Student:

As a med student, we understand that your life is busier than ever before; at times, it can seem like trying to drink from a fire hose, if you pardon an old saying. MedicalPlexus can make your life easier and more successful.

• Upload papers, projects, and presentations to make an online presence for residency directors.
• Share and exchange study materials with other people at your school.
• Work easily on a group presentation or project with a MedicalPlexus Project.
• Create and manage an online presence for a student organization that makes communication, collaboration, and planning much easier and faster.
• Be able to read and access your files from any computer immediately, without any downloading or waiting for Acrobat to load.

About the Company:

MedicalPlexus was founded by Nambi Nallasamy, Michael Sands, and Brijesh Mehta, and is currently based in Cambridge, MA.

Nambi Nallasamy is currently on leave from Harvard Medical School, Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), having taken his second year off to work solely on MedicalPlexus. Nambi received his undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Harvard University. His research interests include visual neuroscience, ophthalmology, and computational complexity.
nallasamy@medicalplexus.com

Michael Sands is currently on leave from graduate work in the philosophy of mathematics at the University of St Andrews in St Andrews, Scotland. Michael received his undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Mathematics from Harvard University.
msands@medicalplexus.com

Dr. Brijesh Mehta received his MD from the University of North Carolina and is currently a resident in the Harvard/Partners Neurology Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, MA. He has done extensive clinical neuroimaging and translational laboratory research in neuroscience, and has numerous publications in high-impact peer-reviewed journals. He plans to become an interventional neurologist.
bpmehta@medicalplexus.com

MedicalPlexus is fortunate to have a wide-ranging and distinguished advisory board, including:

Rehan A. Khan is the Vice President of Marketing & Sales – Speciality Care at AstraZeneca India and is based in Bangalore. At AstraZeneca, Rehan leads a 115 person team and has P&L responsibility for 10 brands across multiple therapeutic areas including Oncology, Anti Infectives and Anesthesiology. Prior to joining AstraZeneca, Rehan spent 11 years in the US, UK and Continental Europe (Germany, Holland, Switzerland and Sweden) in marketing, business development, strategic planning and operations/turnaround roles with a number of blue chip firms including Novartis, Johnson & Johnson Merck Consumer Pharmaceuticals and Accenture. Rehan has a SM from the Harvard MIT Division of Health Sciences and a BS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
rehan.khan@medicalplexus.com

Dr. Gabriel Kreiman received his MSc and PhD degree from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and subsequently worked as a Whiteman Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is currently an Assistant Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Children’s Hospital Boston.
gabriel.kreiman@medicalplexus.com

Dr. Sudha Nallasamy received her MD from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently an ophthalmology resident at Scheie Eye Institute in Philadelphia. She is a Howard Hughes Fellow and has authored a number of papers on the genetics of ocular disease.
sudha.nallasamy@medicalplexus.com

Dr. W. Scott Butsch is a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is a specialist in obesity medicine and clinical nutrition, interested in promoting the emerging field of obesity medicine and advocating for health policy changes to improve nutrition, reduce health care disparities, weight discrimination and stigma.
scott.butsch@medicalplexus.com

Robert Granier is Director of Business Development at Massachusetts General Hospital's Center for New Technology Development. Mr. Granier was previously the Managing Director of Ventures & Consulting at Synergy Point Group and Vice President of Business Development at Carbtex Corporation.
robert.granier@medicalplexus.com