Business Breakdowns
· Jim Jones, Matt Reustle
[00:00:00] S1: Excited to be here. Doximity may not be known by the common person walking around the street, but physicians know who Doximity is. It's a digital workflow platform that is purpose-built for healthcare professionals: doctors, registered nurses, graduating students, nurse practitioners, physician assistants. Those are the people that are on the platform, and they spend a lot of time on the platform. [00:00:00] S0: What are the use cases for them in a day-to-day? Obviously, it's gonna be different for someone still in school versus the doctor or surgeon or whoever might be using it that's in the workforce, but what would be some of the day-to-day use cases for them in terms of how they're using Doximity when they log in? [00:00:00] S1: It started as a LinkedIn for doctors. There was a little social networking, medical referrals, job postings. Over time, they've added a number of technologies that are more in the doctor's workflows. Now it's a platform with capabilities that are similar to DocuSign, Zoom, Slack, a newsfeedlike The New York Times sort of thing, and then increasingly scribe functionality and ChatGPT. We're taking a bunch of household technologies and putting them on the platform. To the investor, it would be like a Bloomberg or a FactSet that you're just on all the time. To the advertiser, it's more like a Facebook because doctors will tell you who they are. "I am a radiologist in Milwaukee." Then advertisers know exactly who they're targeting and can direct to the right place.
· Jim Jones, Matt Reustle
[00:00:00] S1: It started as a LinkedIn for doctors. There was a little social networking, medical referrals, job postings. Over time, they've added a number of technologies that are more in the doctor's workflows. Now it's a platform with capabilities that are similar to DocuSign, Zoom, Slack, a newsfeedlike The New York Times sort of thing, and then increasingly scribe functionality and ChatGPT. We're taking a bunch of household technologies and putting them on the platform. To the investor, it would be like a Bloomberg or a FactSet that you're just on all the time. To the advertiser, it's more like a Facebook because doctors will tell you who they are. "I am a radiologist in Milwaukee." Then advertisers know exactly who they're targeting and can direct to the right place. [00:00:00] S0: In terms of the business model itself, what does it look like in terms of subscription revenue? Is it primarily ad-based revenue? How do they approach that? [00:00:00] S1: It's primarily ad-based revenue. The idea is that we wanna have the doctors and the medical professionals on the platform as often as possible, giving eyeballs and spending time on the platform, and then big pharma will advertise their drugs to the prescribing doctors. [00:00:00] S0: Makes sense. When you know where the fish are, you can fish in that pond. You mentioned when they launched it was a social network, primarily the LinkedIn for the medical professional. When was that, and what was the storyline for evolving over the years? How much history is there in this business?
· Matt Reustle, Jim Jones
[00:00:00] S0: Makes sense. When you know where the fish are, you can fish in that pond. You mentioned when they launched it was a social network, primarily the LinkedIn for the medical professional. When was that, and what was the storyline for evolving over the years? How much history is there in this business? [00:00:00] S1: The current CEO, Jeff, he's had a previous business, Hippocrates, and Hippocrates helped doctors make decisions about prescriptions and patient safety while on the go, so it was kind of a digital drug reference guide that was founded in the late 1990s as mobile phones were becoming a thing. Eventually went public and then ultimately sold to Athenahealth. He started Doximity in 2010 with a guy named Nate Gross and a woman named Shari Buck, really focused on the intersection of technology and healthcare, and then they went public in 2021. [00:00:00] S0: There's a definite history just in terms of the founder being around this space and probably understanding the pain points. Still somewhat of a youthful business in terms of being founded within the past 15 years and a shorter public lifespan than that. In terms of competition in this space, what exists? Forget about LinkedIn. That's gonna be a different bucket and way more generalist. Do they have other competitors in the medical professional network space?
· Matt Reustle, Jim Jones
[00:00:00] S0: There's a definite history just in terms of the founder being around this space and probably understanding the pain points. Still somewhat of a youthful business in terms of being founded within the past 15 years and a shorter public lifespan than that. In terms of competition in this space, what exists? Forget about LinkedIn. That's gonna be a different bucket and way more generalist. Do they have other competitors in the medical professional network space? [00:00:00] S1: There are competitors. So when you think about how pharma companies are trying to reach doctors, historically it's been banner ads trying to chase doctors as consumers, trying to find them on golf.com or other places. Pharma reps can be viewed as competitors, so pharma reps going into the hospitals and trying to educate the doctors on recent studies or drugs that are coming out. There's a bunch of point solutions. There's telehealth providers and there's newsfeed providers. What Doximity is, is really taking a lot of those point solutions and putting them on a platform so that the hospital or the doctors have one platform and have all the services available to them.
· Jim Jones, Matt Reustle
[00:00:00] S1: There are competitors. So when you think about how pharma companies are trying to reach doctors, historically it's been banner ads trying to chase doctors as consumers, trying to find them on golf.com or other places. Pharma reps can be viewed as competitors, so pharma reps going into the hospitals and trying to educate the doctors on recent studies or drugs that are coming out. There's a bunch of point solutions. There's telehealth providers and there's newsfeed providers. What Doximity is, is really taking a lot of those point solutions and putting them on a platform so that the hospital or the doctors have one platform and have all the services available to them. [00:00:00] S0: When I think about the doctors interacting with who is advertising towards them, but also trying to take in information from the network itself, what does that look like? If I'm a doctor, can I do independent research in terms of new medicine that's out there? Is that something that's offered, and how does that interact with the advertising? Because obviously you always have this balance of the information and what's being fed to you, sponsored content, educational content, all of that. I'd just be curious to hear how they've approached that and found that effective balance.
· Jim Jones
[00:00:00] S1: Right now they show one ad in every 11 news items. The business started as this social networking, LinkedIn-like, and then over time they added a newsfeed, so there's thousands of new pieces of information that come out broadly across the healthcare space. Doximity will basically use machine learning to help filter out the news that's relevant to you. You're not sifting through thousands and thousands of articles that may or may not be relevant to your specific practice. They call it "cutting the scut," which just sort of enables doctors to get through that stuff quickly. The business evolved even further: "Okay, now we have all these eyeballs reading their daily news." You get the CME credits by reading these documents in order to maintain your licenses. That was the first step into the "workflow," and then they started adding workflow tools that help the productivity of the doctors: digital signing, HIPAA-compliant documents that can be signed and digitally faxed, secured messaging. Doctors can't just message other doctors using traditional text message, so they implemented that. The telehealth business: they are lowering the technology bar for the patient, making it very easy for the doctor to call the patient. To call that patient, you can select, "Hey, I want the caller ID to say this is the hospital calling," so that the patient doesn't necessarily have your cell phone and can call you at all hours of the day, but at the same time, the patient knows that it's the hospital calling and they're dramatically more likely to pick up the phone. They're very doctor-specific, unapologetically very focused on the doctor first, maintaining their time and respecting their time. These products that they come out with are very targeted at increasing doctor productivity.