About our project
The problem we solve: Doctors and Nurses watch medical video daily but:
1) It is widely scattered
2) The most relevant segments may be deep within a video and impossible to find with YouTube search
3) Much is behind paywalls and only accessible to medical school library members and impossible to share
4) Medical institutions make video but much is seen by few
About our solution:
SciMedTV will provide science and medical professionals around the world with free or inexpensive access to:
1) Curated video collections
2) That are searchable by full-transcript
3) Integrated with text libraries offering
4) Recommendations, and specific clip sharing
5) Supported by online communities and offering
6) Distribution channels for partnership programming
Progress to
date:In November, 2016 we launched the Scientific and Medical Video Library at www.scimed.tv
Doctors, Nurses and Scientists can now
1.Search ¼ million scientific and medical videos by their full-transcripts that have been
2.Curated from 300+ universities, medical centers and research facilities worldwide and
3.Share specific clips from deep within long videos
The audience is small but growing. Doctors, nurses and scientists have praised it. Here are a few testimonials:
Dr. Ryan Suplee, Vascular Surgeon, Lenox Hill Hospital - ”Great site. Searching via the transcript is very useful. In general, it can be annoying when searching that you then don’t have access to the entirety of the article or the video. Starting the video at the search word is pretty slick as well. It would be a good reference for medical professionals looking up a quick question, or for medical students looking for instructional videos.”
Natalie Helmer, Nurse Practitioner, Weill-Cornell Medical Center - "Working as a staff nurse in the hospital over the past ten years, I can think of many situations where having such videos at the palm of my hand would have been very helpful. I think especially in the critical care units where we set up various pieces of equipment that require a good amount of troubleshooting - we are always running back and forth to look things up, confirm alarm settings, etc. Would be great if the CVVHD machine (continuous dialysis) from Nxstage or the impella heart pump from Abiomed could be shared on here so we could save time instead of searching on websites when machine alarms are going off and the situations require urgent attention. I think these short and long video clips all found in one place can be very empowering to nurses! Great idea!"
Dr. Laurence Kirby, Professor of Mathematics, Baruch College - ”I have found SciMedTV to be a useful distillation of the abundance of material available on the internet, enabling me to locate and view research-level seminars in my own specialized field within mathematics, as well as more general lectures in mathematics and science and some cutting-edge mathematical animations. It has also alerted me to some interesting lecture series. The text search capability saves time by allowing highly focused searches. I shall recommend it to my students as a tool for learning and exploration.”
Daniel Barnett, Author of “Movement as Meaning: In Experimental Film (Conscious, Literature and the Arts)” – “It’s a game changer”
About Our Team
Creator: Gary Welz
Location: New York
Education: BA and MSc London University
Bio: Gary Welz began work on SciMedTV in 1992 and received initial support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This project was developed at the New Media Lab of the City University of New York Graduate Center, CUNY. Mr. Welz teaches mathematics at John Jay College. He has a BA and an MSc from the University of London.
Hospital Affiliation: John Jay College, CUNY
Title: Founder and CEO
Advanced Degree(s): B.A. Philosophy and Mathematics, M.Sc. Mathematics
About Our Company
How We Help Patients
Patients and family members need a source of reliably good videos related to their illness, prescriptions, equipment needs and treatments regimen. Video collections curated for doctors and nurses treating specific illnesses and conditions can be provided to patients and family members and these videos can be a useful supplement to the information they are given by providers.
How We Help Physicians
Healthcare providers rely on videos to learn about new treatments, obtain information about diseases and their symptoms, complete training programs and a variety of other needs. Currently, medical video is widely scattered, often behind paywalls and it is impossible to search the transcripts of these videos to find the portions that are relevant to a specific need.
SciMedTV is addressing these problems by aggregating and curating medical video from many respected sources at its web site www.scimed.tv. This site is a demonstrations project that allows visitors to search a collection of over 1/4 million scientific and medical videos by their full transcripts. But much more needs to be done.
If funded here, SciMedTV will create a collection of custom web sites and apps that will be tailored to the needs and interests of specific professional specialties and institutions. Individual users will have personal profiles offering them recommendations and the ability to keep a list of favorites. In addition to streaming video, SciMedTV will include a social media component that will allow users to review and recommend videos to other users.
The premium service subscriptions offered here will contain videos that are not publicly available on YouTube or other web sites, but are behind paywalls or only accessible to medical school library members and impossible to share
How We Help Hospitals
Doctors and nurses working in hospitals often need to view or share a video about a particular condition, treatment or piece of equipment with colleagues and patients. At present, a long and complicated search may be required or certain important collections of video may be inaccessible due to their need to be licensed.
SciMedTV is addressing these problems by aggregating and curating medical video from a large number of respected sources at its web site www.scimed.tv. This site is a demonstrations project that allows visitors to search a collection of over 1/4 million scientific and medical videos by their full transcripts. But much more needs to be done. Custom collections can be created to suit the needs of specific groups within a hospital community that allows them to find and search within the videos most critical to their needs.
How We Help Partners
From out point of view, Partners can include professional organizations, philanthropic institituions, corporations, government angencies, universities and other not-for-profit organizations. These organizations often need to reach out to providers or patients to sell a product or serve the needs of a constituency. SciMedTV can serve them by including their videos in our collections and providing the employees, clients or students of these institutions with access to useful collections of video.
Our current web site: www.scimed.tv is a demonstration project that allows visitors to search a collection of over 1/4 million scientific and medical videos by their full transcripts. This collection needs to be augmented with video that is now behind pay-walls and curated for the needs of specific groups. We would like to provide our partners with custom video collections branded to suit the needs of the partner and their constituency.
Innovation Details
Intellectual Property Summary
This project uses technology that is in the public domain. The video indexing and player software are not proprietary and cannot be patented. The crux of this project is that it takes existing video indexing technology and applies it to curated collections of videos.
Clinical Information
Not applicable/
Regulatory Status
Not applicable.
How we will use the funds raised
The following budget lists the amounts of the contributed funds that will be dedicated to various components of SciMedTV's development. This infusion of capital is intended to nudge this project from pilot to sustainable enterprise.
Use of Funds
| Database , web & app development |
125,000 |
| Video licensing |
50,000 |
| Hosting and streaming |
25,000 |
| Video aggregating and curating |
50,000 |
| Marketing |
100,000 |
| Legal and administrative |
50,000 |
| Partnerships |
50,000 |
| Miscellaneous |
25,000 |
| Total |
475,000 |
Thank You
This project is long overdue. The needs it meets and problems it solves have been neglected for far too long. This project must be done now because it can be done:
- Easily (Video is in the cloud, transcribed, easily indexed and distributed)
- Inexpensively (Much content free or cheap to license, streaming costs low)
- Fast (User-Interface and backend technology is readily available and the audience can be reached via social media)
This will be a self-sustaining business, but it will also provide important social benefits including but not limited to the fact that it:
- Advances medical education and research
- Levels the playing field for doctors, nurses, scientists and patients in remote or poor locations
- Creates a Platform for further medical and scientific communication in the medium of video
Our business model is to create multiple custom video portals on the web and as apps that are:
- Curated for specific audiences
- Subscription-based services
- Add-based services and
- Vendor services
This should lead SciMedTV profitability within a few years.
