Faculty Feature: Dr. Monika Safford

For this newsletter’s Faculty Feature, Yangjingyi Ruan (SVG Social Media/Event Planning Leader), Mohith Arikatla (Club Event Leader), and Nick Bartelo (SVG President) had the opportunity to sit down with Monika Safford, an alumna who received her MD from Weill Cornell Medicine, now a clinician-investigator with more than 600 papers published in top tier journals. She is an expert in patient-centered research on diabetes, cardiovascular epidemiology and prevention, and health disparities. Among her published studies are noteworthy investigations on an underserved and largely African-American region called the Alabama Black Belt, where two-thirds of adults are obese and many have diabetes, hypertension, or other chronic conditions. Dr. Safford previously served at University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) School of Medicine as the Inaugural Endowed Professor of Diabetes Prevention and Outcomes Research, Assistant Dean for Continuing Medical Education, Associate Director of the Center for Outcomes and Effectiveness Research and Education, and Co-Director of UAB's T32 Health Services and Comparative Effectiveness Research Training Program. She is the founder of MedExplain, a non-profit building a free online resource with content designed to reliably answer medical questions by the general public. Dr. Safford is leading the cause to educate patients unable to talk extensively with healthcare professionals from all backgrounds with reliable, understandable information. 

SVG: Your research focuses on preventative healthcare, chronic illness, and complex disease. As a clinical investigator, what major issue did you experience throughout your career that led you to found MedExplain?

Dr. Safford: As a clinician educator at New Jersey Medical, the patients I cared for were really inspiring to me. I saw firsthand the limitations of US healthcare, where people who are right above the eligibility level for benefits like Medicaid were the ones who were struggling the hardest. This got me interested in helping patients in poor communities. I switched to a research track and worked with large databases reflecting the care provided in the Veterans Health Administration (VA), and was later recruited to the University of Alabama at Birmingham to work in a VA research center. Even though the program took off and I received academic leadership positions, something was missing.

As I talked with patients living in places with incredible poverty and chronic disease burden, I heard from area health care providers that better patient education materials were needed to help fellow community members have better health outcomes. Since doctors and nurses are pressured to see so many patients every day, there is little time for education. This is the hole MedExplain was designed to fill.

SVG: Can you speak more on the product of MedExplain and how MedExplain provides answers to questions better than other available sources?

Dr. Safford: MedExplain is setting a new universal standard for patient education. What sets us apart is the emphasis on scientific evidence. We do rigorous review of the scientific evidence and then present that information employing communication science principles and established theories like social cognitive theory, adult learning theory, gist theory, and storytelling. No other patient education company uses these theories in their content. Instead of flooding patients with too much information, we use questions that people have about their health. Often those questions are not even answered by usual education materials. The questions make you think, not stress you out, and are kept simple and short, like TikTok vids that last a minute. People leave our site saying things like “now I can move forward, I really understand what I wanted to know.”

SVG: MedExplain is a free online resource with content designed to reliably answer medical questions by the population. What is the business model behind your company? How will the company make profit?

Dr. Safford: We recently made the decision to become non-profit since we are so mission-driven. If you go down the VC route, you’re beholden to them, and what they want is early return on the investment. That drives a lot of business decisions, and profit driven decisions may not be the best way to grow the company at this early stage. 

Our early strategy is to develop our content in the context of research studies, using grant funds to support our costs. We've done a lot of qualitative market level research on what people value in patient education. Now we're in the process of procuring grant funding and foundation funding to support integration into the electronic medical record. We are moving toward revenue generation with safety net hospitals and clinics through shared savings due to increased revenue by increasing patient adherence to revenue-generating guideline concordant procedures.

SVG: What advice would you have for graduate students and postdocs who are interested in creating a company?

Dr. Safford: The most important thing you can do is find a mentor. Having somebody with experience in the area of your startup is invaluable because they have made many mistakes and can guide you to accelerate your success. The entrepreneurship community at Cornell is a great resource for finding mentors and advice. 

Perseverance is also important. Just like in a research career, when your grants get rejected, you just have to revise them and resubmit until they get funded. I learned in one of Cornell’s many incubator programs that Peloton had to make over 2000 pitches until they got funding. So don’t give up!