BoardVitals is a medical specialty board certification preparation firm, offering comprehensive study material and question banks for physicians, medical students, and others in the health-care industry. Founded in 2012, it delivers the most current questions to provide users with the best available board review, in a web application. The test questions are peer-reviewed by medical practitioners to guarantee the most relevant preparation for users. The exam provides user feedback on how they compare to their peers overall on a test and how they compared on specific questions. BoardVitals boasts a pass rate among its users as much as ten percent higher than the national average.
Based in New York City, BoardVitals was the recent winner of the 2014 Gust Catapult NYC venture capital competition for start-ups in the area, providing the firm with further venture capital and angel investing opportunities.
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Founding
BoardVitals was founded in 2012 by Dr. Andrea Paul and Dan Lambert. Dr. Paul is a graduate of Michigan State medical school, and a former resident at Yale medical school and Mt. Sinai Hospital. She has stated that among her motivations for the company was the disorganization she experienced while studying for medical board exams. In an interview with Entrepreneur Magazine, she remembered when she "was preparing for [her] own boards, [she] was putting together things from other books and notes that were not up to date." She critiqued the lack of any standardized preparation or review and therefore sought to make a dynamic change. Dr. Paul left her Yale residency program to team up with several medical educators.
She partnered with Harvard Business School graduate and software developer Dan Lambert in 2012 to head Board Vitals as its CEO. Lambert was formerly a co-founder and CTO at Pushpins, which was acquired by Ebates in 2013.
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Business structure
After its founding in 2012, BoardVitals has undergone several rounds of financing. In January 2014 it received a $500k seed investment from venture capital firms Rothenberg Ventures and Accelerator Blueprint Health.
In February 2014, BoardVitals entered the Gust Catapult NYC startup contest sponsored by entrepreneur and investor David S. Rose. The contest creates a platform for startups to pitch their business plan to a series of angel investors and venture capitalists. BoardVitals was selected as the winner of the competition out of over two hundred candidates. It was then invited to spend three months in a Silicon Alley incubator under the tutelage of Rose. BoardVitals has drawn the attention of several major investment groups.
Its clients include Harvard medical school, Yale medical school, and the Veterans Health Administration. In addition it has partnerships with several medical publishers, including McGraw-Hill, Wolters Kluwer Health, and Wiley Publishers. The business model focuses on aggregating questions and answers from Publishers, Universities, and individually contributing physicians in a single location.
Test preparation
Medical practitioners often continue their education after medical school by completing a residency in a specialty field to become a medical specialist. To complete their certification, the practitioner is required to pass a board certification exam to illustrate mastery of knowledge. Traditionally, there has been no standard review for these tests and study often includes outdated material. In addition, traditional review often requires multiple sources such as textbooks, lecture notes, and journals that can become costly and tedious. In recent years there has been a decline in pass rates among board certifications.
BoardVitals offers comprehensive test preparation for several specialty fields available on any electronic device. The material is taken from top medical universities, publishers and individually practicing physicians and compiled into a review database that can be accessed anytime from any number of mobile devices. It also only provides the most up-to-date medical knowledge in its curriculum, making sure its users never review obsolete material. Other material is sourced from top medical journals and texts in each specialty.
Questions are written by faculty from top institutions and by several physician contributors. These questions are voted up or down through crowdsourcing among users to determine which questions more accurately reflect the specific specialty exam. This also ensures that out of date content is removed.
Its board review programs are offered to individuals as well as medical schools, residency programs, teaching hospitals, and other medical facilities, both in the United States and abroad. It currently offers test reviews and questions for sixteen specialty fields:
- Cardiology
- Child Psychiatry
- Dermatology
- Echocardiography
- Emergency Medicine
- ENT
- Family Medicine
- Gastroenterology
- Internal Medicine
- Neurology
- OBGYN
- Pathology
- Pediatrics
- Psychiatry
- Radiology
- Surgery
Dr. Paul has stated the company plans to expand this to many more fields in the coming years.
Each exam and question offers users feedback on their performance. It indicates where they stand in comparison to their peers, including data about what other users answered on a particular question. The statistics give users an accurate review of their performance in each section. User can customize practice tests to suit their exact needs, with advanced statistics available to offer premier test review. Board Vitals has given a guarantee that users will pass their board review.
Reception
Dr. Paul was recently named among the top ten disruptive women in healthcare startups. Gust.com named Board Vitals the 'Most Promising' startup in New York. The company has been featured in business profiles by several newspapers including CNN, Forbes, and Fox News.
Board Vitals has been used by over 100,000 clinicians for board certification preparation and continuing education.
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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