MedCases – New Strategies

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Bruce Speyer: “Hi, I’m Bruce Speyer, Chief Technology Officer of OBGYN.net and I have Debbie Hall with me today. Debbie is beginning a new tenure at MedCases as the CEO; she comes with ten years of background from Ovid Technologies, one of the world’s leading medical information technology companies and producers of free tech searching and very good databases such as MEDLINE. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Deborah Hall: “Nice to meet you.”

Bruce Speyer: “Good luck with the new job.”

Deborah Hall: “Thank you.”

Bruce Speyer: “You founded Ovid which is a very successful company. After ten years, you’ve taken it to over 60 million in sales a year now. What has excited you to make this big change?”

Deborah Hall: “Several things have excited me, first of all, I believe the founders - Jeff and Keith have put together some unique technology to deliver case based medical education to physicians and the technology is one which I’ve not seen even though I run a technology company now and am owned by a large world medical publisher. The technology, I believe, can be used and scaled to producing the way education and the way technology is going to be used in the future in education so that excites me. The other things that excite me, although it’s going to be delivered over the net, there really are four or five possible revenue opportunities - from producing continuing medical education for physicians, providing resident board training programs, medical education for students that are in medical school as an alternative way of teaching them about cases and diagnosis, as well as pharmaceutical companies to explain the use of new drugs so they can present a case based on a new drug and use that as a way of educating physicians about changes in medicine.”

Bruce Speyer: “That’s interesting, so you see this going way beyond your typical audience with certified medical education?”

Deborah Hall: “Absolutely, that’s one real market but I believe it’s much broader. I think the opportunities are as great in other areas as they are in CME.”

Bruce Speyer: “As a part of Ovid, did you have experience with the Internet or is the Internet kind of a new world for you?”

Deborah Hall: “No, at Ovid although we started as a company delivering systems to institutions that were unit spaced over the last several years, our business is now almost 60% Internet based and the company is moving very rapidly to being almost all Internet based. So I’ve had experience with the Internet primarily with a lot of medical schools in that we dominate the medical market in a number of countries around the world as well as with corporations. So these are markets that I’m very familiar with, and I think the opportunity is great. It’s just delivering a different kind of product that’s going to be created in a way which I believe is really unique and very scaleable.” 

Bruce Speyer: “We’re very happy to have MedCases on OBGYN.net. We have for fee MedCases but we also have a free MedCase of the month. We have urogynecology running in August and for September we’re putting up a breast cancer MedCase, and so we’re able to provide both CME for a fee but we also are providing a free educational service for the doctors and residents and using it for pharmaceutical information such will be something that we would be interested in the future.”

Deborah Hall: “We’re looking for key web sites such as yours that can better educate physicians and change the way they practice medicine.”

Bruce Speyer: “I’m glad to have met you and best of luck in your new job which starts in about three weeks. We’re talking at FIGO from Washington, D.C. in September, which is also very interesting and probably to you also because it’s such an international group but you said you had experience with the Internet itself.”

Deborah Hall: “I have, and I believe MedCases has great opportunities internationally which they haven’t really even thought about so it’s a whole area we’re going to explore.”

Bruce Speyer: “Thank you very much.”

Deborah Hall: “Thank you very much for having me.”