Under the Microscope: K2P
Why Avestria Invested in this Physician Education Startup
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In this series, we explain why we invested in our current portfolio companies. In the process, we hope to highlight the white spaces in women’s health and the life sciences — as well as the people, products, and companies working to fill those gaps. The name “Under the Microscope” refers both to our extensive due diligence process and our investment focus on healthcare and the life sciences.
You can find a longer version of this post on Medium.
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Medical information doubles every 73 days. What 2020 medical school graduates learned in their first three years was just 6% of the medical knowledge at the end of the decade (2010-2020).
That doubling time has only increased in recent years: from 50 years in 1950, to 7 in 1980, and down to 3.5 years in 2010. To put in context, what 2020 medical school graduates learned in in their first three years was, by the end of 2020, only about 6% of total medical knowledge.
With the increasing amount of new information out there, how do physicians keep up?
Knowledge to Practice (K2P) offers a new approach to continuing medical education and board review
K2P is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based online healthcare education provider for physicians for board review and continuing medical education (CME). To help physicians stay up to date, save time, and improve the quality of the care they provide, K2P breaks down medical knowledge, with input from key opinion leaders, into on-demand microlearning modules
Microlearning refers to the presentation of a body of knowledge in small units, often 5 to 20 minutes. A microlearning approach can often save time and increase retention and knowledge, as a 2015 study showed. For physicians facing an ever-increasing amount of knowledge they must have to complete their CME and board reviews and subsequently, keep their licenses, micro-learning can save both time and money. Hospitals and healthcare systems currently spend between $3,500 and $5,000 per physician for continuing medical education – and, as of 2018, there were over 985,000 licensed physicians in the United States needing that information.
Board reviews are additional expenses: The American Board of Internal Medicine’s fees are $650 for a traditional board review exam (with a $1,200 cost for each sub-specialty). A Knowledge Check-In (KCI), a new program available to some physicians starting in 2020, replaces a 10-year review with a check-in every two years, costing $130 with another $240 required for each subspecialty.
Those fees, though, don’t include sunk costs: board review preparation and CME content are often presented as a one-size-fits-all education that doesn’t account for individual physician’s own strengths and weaknesses. In fact, in its 2018 study, K2P reported that average users needed to concentrate on only 25% of the content available in a comprehensive board review course. K2P’s personalized content, in contrast, reduces study time by 75% and eliminates not just sunk costs but additional fees for an instructor, classroom, transportation, and lodging.
Since its launch in 2013, K2P has seen the positive effects of its approach In 2019, the company shared that out of its 5,000 physician users, 94% implemented changes in practice, 96% found the product intuitive, and 98% reported superior learning on K2P’s platform than on its competitors’.
K2P currently offers 400+ hours of content across six programs in three different focus areas: “Comprehensive Curriculum” (“CV Updates®” and “IM Essentials®”), “Board Review” (“Cardiology” and “Internal Medicine”) and “Emerging Medicine” (“CurrentMD® CV” and “CurrentMD® COVID”. “CurrentMD® COVID” is one of the company’s latest programs: in July 2020, when K2P launched its CurrentMD COVID program – at no cost - to South Carolina physicians, the state was ranked the third worst place in the world for COVID transmission. In October, when this post was first written, South Carolina had the lowest transmission rate in the country.)
Through its software as a service model, K2P allows physicians to give their patients the highest quality of care - all while helping hospitals, and healthcare systems save money and time. In this way, K2P truly lives up to its name: its informative, personalized approach allows physicians an efficient and effective way to study, to learn, and to turn their knowledge into practice.
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At Avestria Ventures, we look for early-stage women’s health and female-led life science companies with products or technologies that improve healthcare quality and/or access, lower costs, induce clinical or behavioral change, are evidence based, have scalable commercialization plans, and have a sustainable competitive advantage. Know one? Contact us via our website, LinkedIn, or Twitter.