Aaron Lemieux, MD - Content and Creative Director of SketchyMedical (ft. Bryan Lemieux, MD - Founder
Mission Our mission stems from the current state of medical education and how it’s been unchanged for such a long time. We want to make medical education more interactive, customizable, and efficient for students by developing a resource that they could use at any time of the day while they’re busy with other things in their life. We think that’s really the way to change medical education. For us, one step in that direction involved art: using art, story, and organization to help students better remember things. Moving forward, we hope to further refine and develop how we interact with the amount of material presented in medical education in ways that are fast, efficient, and fun. A change in this field has been needed for some time, and I guess now is as good a time as any to try to make one.
Vision The whole point of medical education is to learn how to become a doctor. Most students in medical school are there because they want to help people, and they found that the most fulfilling way for them to do that is by becoming a doctor. However, to really get to that stage without worrying about all the facts you need to memorize is hard. You’re standing in front of your patient trying to remember the proper treatment algorithm for X instead of really talking to the patient. It can be hard to take on extra patients, or even efficiently help the patients you already have, because you’re having trouble remembering the information you need. The whole point of Sketchy is to get students to the medicine faster by creating a “memory palace” in which they can store information that can be accessed at a moment’s notice so the student can get to the thing they came for -- medicine.
Background Sketchy started as a small series of videos on Youtube, created by three medical students at UC Irvine, simply by posting two videos and getting feedback. The founders’ whole inspiration was that they knew that there was a better way to learn this information. My brother, Aaron, had all these artistic ideas: doodling on the side of his notes, on First Aid, etc. With the help of the other two co-founders, they were able to make some videos out of it. It didn’t start with websites or big modules but just with one small idea as to how medical education could be different. The whole point is that it started off small with the one thing in medical education that we thought we had the skill set and knowledge to fix.
What is your role within the company? I was brought on really early because my brother wanted help in making this venture happen. I was brought on to finish the Micro course and then to create the Pharm course as a creative director, which has since expanded to what I’m doing now.
How do you handle or plan to keep up with changes in medicine? We’re already getting lots of feedback from students regarding things we should change and update. We’ve set up the learning modules in a way that’s editable and rearrangeable for the video production team that we have in house, so we’re able to make changes as needed.
Now that we have our two big medicine heavy courses of Path and Medicine, we review the courses yearly to make sure that everything is still current. Thankfully, students are very helpful, and we do get a lot of feedback. I think part of the students’ motivation behind the feedback is the nature of our product: students feel it’s worthwhile to give corrective feedback rather than just using our product briefly and then throwing it away because they see the value of the product. Internal medicine is probably the course that’s the hardest to keep up to date since the guidelines keep changing. Luckily, I think the symbols in our videos are easy enough to manipulate or swap out if needed, eg., changing HbA1c levels for diabetes management. It’s pretty fun to come up with new symbols, but it’s also important to keep the videos as malleable as possible to make sure that they’re still editable by our team.
What was the inspiration for the symbols and stories you’ve used? We’re very inspired by the things that we learned a long time ago, like literature and history, and things that we’re still interested in related to pop culture. Part of it is the fact that it’s really easy to enter medical school with an attitude of being gung-ho to learn everything there is to know about medicine, constantly study, read another article, etc., and also forget about everything else in life. It’s really all these other things that people tend to forget about in order to try to do well in medical school. Holding on to something else in your life is also important.
For us, it was all about art and drawing. The first few drawings in SketchyMicro were actually Bryan drawing in real time. When we were kids, we would draw superheros and video game characters all the time, and we eventually found that we could make stories with them. Luckily in college, they made us take a bunch of GE courses, so we had a super well-rounded education that we never forgot, and we were able to get creative with that material as well. Drawing on pop culture is essentially the same as drawing from literature and history when it comes to story narratives. To be able to use stories in a way that’s helpful in remembering things is so interesting, powerful, and so fun for us. It is the hardest part though. Fortunately, we found a lot of creatives to join the team, so we constantly bounce ideas off of each other. It speaks to having an interest, having creativity, and just going with it. Show people who you are and what you love. The inspiration behind what motivates you is what’s going to make your idea and your experience that much better. If you’re truly expressing and pouring what you love into whatever product or project you’re doing, that’s the way to turn it into what you want and help people the most with what you do.
Was it hard to leave clinical practice to pursue Sketchy? Yes. It was extremely difficult. My brother and I always talked to each other about where we wanted to end up and what we wanted to do -- maybe opening up a practice together or something. We found that there were almost too many choices for us in the second half of medical school. However, we always had that one common interest (that would have been very easy to forget in medical school): the more creative side. When Sketchy started taking off while we were still in school, the big tipping point was realizing that we could take this product and start our “practice” now. We didn’t need to go into the Match, we could do this instead. So we just went for it. We realized that Sketchy could ultimately be the practice we decided to open together. The feedback we got from students was so immediate and so palpable, and that made the decision fulfilling for us -- that part was awesome! We realized we could help people who are struggling now, in our own way, rather than going through a much longer residency which may not have given us the time to pursue Sketchy on the side.
It’s super stressful running your own business (a different kind of stress than medical school), so know that the stress doesn’t go away. However, it becomes more of a stress placed upon yourself for not wanting to let your users down instead of being stressed about letting down your attending or preceptor. The stress level was about the same, so that was an easy transition, but it was the awesome feedback we received from students that sealed the deal.
At what stage in Sketchy’s life cycle was all of this happening? At this point, we had a rudimentary platform which was accessible on a subscription basis so we could use the money to make and develop more videos. It involved a lot of contract work with people who had experience with IT, tech, creating websites, and making videos. Brian and I did some of the original artwork, but that became contracted out after a while too. Brian and I would storyboard an idea, send it to an artist and then to a video producer, and then get into contact with our website designer who would upload it for us. Luckily, our team collectively had some artistic, website, and legal experience to set up an LLC properly. Mainly, though, it was all about coming up with the idea, having the drive to put some money into it, and just seeing what happened next.
Were you doing all of this while you were still in medical school? Yes. I did a research year during which I pursued a master’s degree, but during that year, I also had time to develop Sketchy. During my fourth year of medical school, there were blocks of training that I would move around to accommodate my work for Sketchy. It sounds impossible, and I don't really know how it ended up working out, but it did. Even at night during my rotations, I’d be creating or working on a sketch. It involved a lot of sleepless nights and moving things around. There were also some ways to bring it up with faculty to get a little time here and there, but it was mainly personal drive and lack of sleep.
Given your perspective, how do you see the relationship between business, technology, and medicine changing in the future? An example of their convergence in medical education specifically would be anatomy class and how it is somewhat of a hoop you have to jump through to become a “medical student.” I think there are ways to interact with anatomy, visualize it, and perform “dissections” in a virtual world where you see and label all the necessary muscles, veins, and arteries even better than you could in real life. There are also ways to make learning anatomy more efficient. Yes, anatomy exists in cadaver form for physical learning, but once you enter the technology world, you can really target the specific needs of a particular course at the student level.
Technology really is the future, especially for medical education. It boils down to just taking away everything you don’t need and bringing to the forefront everything you’re trying to teach the student. You could spend a whole week learning the brachial plexus -- from teaching, to dissecting, to a professor ensuring you dissected it correctly. However, if your ultimate goal is teaching the brachial plexus, you can show it to your students in 3D from day one and they can learn about it and visualize all the anatomical relationships immediately. From there, you can become more granular and teach dissecting through its own mini module if you want to. You can practice virtually holding the tools and dissecting. Technology allows us to take away all the things that are getting in the way of a student’s learning and just give the learning to them.
In some ways, Sketchy is similar. The information is literally there, and you may think that drawing a picture in a non-scientific way and learning from it is new, but it’s not really that new. For example, if you look at Netter’s paintings, all his depictions of arteries are red and veins are blue, but this color scheme isn’t true in real life. He’s literally creating a make-believe land for you to look at in order to more easily memorize anatomy. You don't need to look at actual anatomy to memorize it. You just need to look at it in a way that helps you develop connections that makes sense to you so that you’ll never forget it.
At Sketchy, we just take that to the next step. Instead of arteries being red, we make arteries a red pipe. Instead of talking about an aneurysm, we talk about some guy who’s worried about a submarine sinking. So, we’re just adding more layers of meaning and emotion so that the material just sticks in your brain forever.
How do you see that translating into the future of Sketchy? I think the future of Sketchy is going to involve incorporating more fields using our style, which is the easy next step. I think the tougher next step is going back to our belief system that the information is there, and we’re just creating a way to ensure that you can store it all in your brain and just get to the medicine. There are more ways to do that than just making videos. The videos are great, but at the same time there are a lot of ways to be interactive with this information. So, the future of Sketchy is getting creative and thinking of new ways to interact with all this content we’ve created. The information and content is there for us, so we just want to get more creative in terms of how students interact with the information to make it even more fun and memorable.
Do you see Sketchy being more focused towards teaching for the boards or towards making sure all the information you teach is clinically relevant? It’s easier to start with boards style material, but the goal is definitely to get into the clinical material and how students are able to think and perform on wards. The natural progression is just to start with board-style material because it's easier to make content that way, but with every course, we become more creative in terms of presenting clinical material geared towards the wards.
What advice do you have for future doctors and medical professionals who are in school right now? As you progress through a medical career from student to doctor, it becomes harder and harder to be a complete person in terms of doing all the different things you had dreams of doing or pursuing those creative endeavors you had dreams of pursuing. It gets tougher because you have less time. Specifically in medical school, it becomes very important to hold on to those other aspects of your life while you're studying and working on the aspect of you that wants to help others through medicine.
Whether it’s creative, entrepreneurial, or family and friends related, it’s important to hold on to these other aspects of your life for multiple reasons. For one, just being a complete person and developing multiple aspects of your life will be much more fulfilling for you later on. Additionally, you'll find that one thing in one aspect of your life ends up being completely relatable to medicine, and it'll make you a better doctor. That will 100% happen.
At the same time, if you have creative ideas and other pursuits, you should follow them because you never know what might be useful. For Brian and me, it was art. It started off as fun, but it turned into something more than that. It’s still fun, but now it’s providing for my family and giving me a career. You never know what other aspects of your life will come into play later so my advice would be to keep them developed and keep expanding your interests and developing other areas of your life. Maybe one day you can create something as different as Sketchy in your own medical sphere. Use Sketchy as an example to incorporate creativity into your own sphere or in whatever area you think you can change the status quo.