The 2017 MedTech Boston 40 Under 40 Healthcare Innovators

23. Nikita Bernstein
CEO, Founder of the Journal of Medical Insight (JoMI)
Nikita Bernstein’s got an exciting vision: capture on video complex surgical procedures being performed by elite physicians and publish them in a peer-reviewed medical journal. If the idea gains traction—and it looks like it will—Bernstein and his team at the Journal of Medical Insight (JoMI) could dramatically improve the efficiency and effectiveness of training for surgeons.

But how did Bernstein get started on this path?

Bernstein’s a technologist and developer at heart; math and computer science degrees from Rutgers University attest to this. Over 10 years ago, he co-founded the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE), the world’s first and only peer-reviewed scientific video journal. It was a success, but only in the niche of basic scientific research.

It seems obvious that medical education would lend itself well to video. Most obviously, it’s highly experiential and hard to describe well with just words. Science also tells us that we learn better when we see something rather than just reading about it. And, of course, video’s very much in synch with our culture’s mobile-first consumption of knowledge. However, producing video content is very labor-intensive.

Reflecting back on JoMI’s 2013 launch, Bernstein describes the opportunity he saw. “YouTube is one of the most actively used resources when residents and medical students prepare for cases — but there’s no peer review and the author-produced nature of content limited both the scope and quality. We thought: What if we create a peer-reviewed video journal and we do the filming? Seems like it’s worth a shot.”

Surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Duke Medical Center, and others liked the idea. They’ve since agreed to publish in the journal, allowing Bernstein and his team into their operating rooms and helping him create a compendium of video-articles spanning orthopedics, general surgery, neurosurgery, and head and neck surgery. The production values are consistently high and most are narrated and annotated by the surgeon who led the procedure.

The business model is working. JoMI content was used for surgical training after the tragic Haiti earthquake and traffic to the website comes from around the world with many top medical centers and medical schools paying for access. Looking ahead, Bernstein ambitiously notes, “We are starting to really scale to cover all surgical specialties. In five years, I hope JoMI will evolve to become a platform to accelerate adoption of technologies in healthcare that impact patient outcomes on a massive scale.”