Osmosis is a web and mobile learning platform that couples a robust medical content library with learning science principles to improve medical students’ knowledge retention. Similar to evidence-based medicine, we believe in evidence-based education. Our team includes PhDs in neuroscience & education, practicing clinicians, and medical students who have built research-proven cognitive techniques into the Osmosis platform to maximize learning and retention. In our paper in the high-impact Annals of Internal Medicine, “What can medical education learn from Facebook and Netflix?” we described a vision for the future of education. After lamenting that the tools that our future clinicians use to socialize (Facebook) and watch TV (Netflix) are managed by more sophisticated algorithms than the tools they use to learn medicine, we decided to build Osmosis so that we could bring data-driven content recommendations to our future clinicians. Essentially, Osmosis analyzes what the students are learning in class and generates custom quizzes and resource recommendations to help medical students simultaneously prepare for school, board exams, and most importantly clinical practice. By solving the problem for medical education, we believe Osmosis can also be applied to many other fields of education.

Since being honored with Reimagine Education’s 2015 e-Learning Award and its 2015 Overall Award, we’ve come a long way:

• Our content has been featured by the Washington Post, has been used by major health providers like Kaiser Permanente in California, and is now featured content in Google and Wikipedia searches.
• We have one of the fastest growing, most popular medical education channels on YouTube – with over 150 free, custom teaching videos created by our newest team members – the former Health and Medicine team from Khan Academy. To date, we have over 1.7 million views and over 6.5 million minutes of watched content on our channel.
• Our user base has increased from 30,000 students in December 2015 to 65,000 in October 2016 (>100% growth). In fact, questions on our platform are now answered over 50,000 times daily (and rising) by medical students and residents in 200 of 218 countries around the world. This highly active group of users also help us identify ways to improve our content.
• We’ve developed official partnerships with more institutions: 22 medical schools now officially use Osmosis as an adjunct to their curriculum, up from 10 schools in 2015 (>100% growth).
• We currently cover roughly 6,000 concepts in medicine, and help students master these concepts with our 30,000 flashcards and 5,000 USMLE-style clinical vignette questions.
• We have developed a number of education partners such as Medscape, Picmonic, Sketchy Medical, and KenHub Anatomy who offer excellent content designed for medical students.

We credit these successes to the introduction of new key features of the platform, to our engaging, user-friendly library, and to our focus on customer service and support. We receive hundreds of comments from faculty and medical students each week about how valuable they find our content, and we consistently see 150% growth month over month. We are grateful to QS-Wharton and Reimagine Education for their role in our successes.