MedCareer: Building China's Premier Clinical Research Learning Platform with Research as the New Traffic Gateway
“What Makes an Outstanding Physician? Clinical cultivation and practice are essential, involving continuous learning, diagnostic and therapeutic practice, and experience accumulation. By immersing oneself in clinical work and navigating its challenges, one can enhance professional competence. Meanwhile, engaging in medical research, particularly clinical research, is crucial to creating new knowledge, concepts, theories, and methodologies. Only such researchers can become leaders guiding the future of medicine.”
——Academician Wang Chen
Clinical practice and clinical research have never been isolated from each other; rather, they are complementary and mutually reinforcing. However, there remains a significant gap between China’s capacity for clinical research and that of foreign countries. Clinical physicians often encounter the following dilemmas when conducting clinical research:
① Lack of systematic and standardized education in clinical research, coupled with an inadequate understanding of basic concepts, leading to difficulties in formulating clinical questions; ② Insufficient support from statistical and methodological experts, resulting in significant challenges in study design and statistical analysis.
Compared with the training and education in clinical skills, clinical research training in China is still in its infancy. Most programs consist of 2–3-day offline workshops, and this intensive yet brief instructional format fails to meet physicians’ learning needs for clinical research.
In 2016, a platform named “MedCoffee” was launched, founded by a graduate of Peking University Health Science Center. MedCoffee aims to enhance physicians’ clinical research mindset and skills, providing professional academic services in clinical research to clinicians. Within just two years, MedCoffee’s user base exceeded 100,000.
In April 2018, MedCoffee welcomed a new shareholder, ZeChuang Tiancheng, a medical big data company. With the synergy of 1+1>2, MedCoffee has since been entrusted with a new historical mission: to build China’s premier platform for learning and collaboration in clinical research.
MedCafe: Committed to Building China's Premier Learning and Collaboration Platform for Clinical Research
Among MedCafe’s 100,000 users, 60% to 70% are clinicians or master’s and doctoral students in clinical disciplines. Nearly 20% are methodological experts in fields such as epidemiology and statistics. These two groups are indispensable to clinical research and constitute the core user base of the MedCafe platform.
Enhancing clinical research thinking and skills is the primary demand of MedCoffee users. As ZeChuang Tiancheng’s core educational platform, MedCoffee mainly provides the following two services:
MedCoffee has established a WeChat official account and an independent website, continuously producing and publishing high-quality tutorials on clinical research methodology. The authors of these original tutorials are primarily affiliated with renowned domestic and international medical institutions, including Peking University Health Science Center, Peking Union Medical College, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Fuwai Hospital, and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Every tutorial on MedCoffee is a masterpiece refined through repeated expert discussion and polishing. The high-quality content has not only attracted numerous learners but also drawn many like-minded, distinguished speakers who proactively share their clinical research experience on the platform.
In the “Research Q&A” section of MedCoffee, users can discuss questions arising from tutorials or real-world studies. Additionally, MedCoffee has established multiple professional discussion communities where physicians can quickly obtain expert answers to challenges encountered in their research. This is one of the key strategies MedCoffee employs to enhance user engagement.
Yikaihui’s activities include both online and offline components. While online content is updated frequently and reaches a broad user base, in-depth exchanges and user engagement still rely on offline medical events. By organizing offline activities, Yikaihui can systematically address users’ challenges and strengthen their trust and loyalty toward the platform.
MedCoffee Club’s Complete Revamp: Integrating Big Data Platforms to Deeply Bridge Theory and Practice
Compared with some existing clinical research medical education platforms, MedCafe differs from them mainly in two aspects: first, the format of clinical research education. Some existing medical education platforms deliver content unidirectionally through text, videos, and other media, with members and users serving purely as passive recipients.
From a research perspective, this unidirectional learning model fails to address the practical challenges faced by physicians, as users still encounter numerous issues they cannot resolve independently. Therefore, MedCoffee aims to establish a bidirectional interactive model that not only delivers content to users but also ensures their questions arising during subsequent clinical research are promptly addressed through the platform.
MedCoffee has established research communities and groups to facilitate interaction, communication, and collaboration between physicians and methodological experts in fields such as epidemiology and statistics. This enables users to initiate discussions on practical issues encountered in clinical research work, fostering a real-time, bidirectional interactive model. Learning is merely the first step; conducting high-quality clinical research relies on hands-on practice and engagement in clinical research projects.
In response, the new version of MedCoffee will integrate with the EinMatrix big data platform by ZeChuang Tiancheng to offer a diverse array of scientific research projects. This will provide users with opportunities to participate in real-world clinical studies, thereby enhancing physicians’ clinical research capabilities through both theoretical and practical approaches.
Furthermore, the new version of MedCoffee is piloting a novel model for clinical research education that closely connects every clinical researcher to form a new collaborative research network. Within this network, each individual plays a vital role; members with diverse skills can engage in close communication and foster collaboration. Experienced researchers continuously mentor and support newcomers seeking to enhance their clinical research capabilities, thereby facilitating the ongoing improvement and certification of clinical research competencies.
"Bringing Doctors Together and Retaining Them Through Scientific Research as the Link"
MedCoffee’s services revolve around two core pillars: first, the aggregation effect, which brings together a large community of professionals with clinical research experience; and second, research projects, which enable physicians to participate in a wider range of scientific studies. The new version of MedCoffee will continue to focus on enhancing these two aspects—people and research projects—to help leading researchers better showcase their value on the platform.
Furthermore, MedCoffee will strengthen communication channels among its users. The new platform will enable clinicians to easily connect with methodology experts, thereby conducting research more efficiently. In the past, MedCoffee relied on traditional community models that offered limited functionality and a suboptimal user experience. By transforming its community into a structured product, MedCoffee will deliver a qualitative leap in user experience.
Although MedCoffee has been established for only two years, it is encouraging to note that some users have successfully published their papers through learning and exchanging ideas on the MedCoffee platform. These research achievements and shared experiences will become one of the important sources of content for MedCoffee in the future, thus forming a closed loop of content within MedCoffee.
Integration with big data platforms has brought MedCafe one step closer to its goal of “advancing the level of clinical research in China.” After acquiring theoretical knowledge, users can participate in a diverse range of clinical research projects to gain hands-on experience, thereby enhancing their clinical research capabilities through a combination of theory and practice.
On the other hand, the involvement of more outstanding researchers can also improve the efficiency and quality of data collection, thereby facilitating the efficient conduct of clinical research projects.
In the future, an increasing number of research projects will be showcased on MedCafe, bringing together more outstanding researchers, accumulating more high-quality data, and producing more high-caliber scientific outcomes. This will help generate Chinese evidence, ultimately benefiting patient populations and enhancing the quality of medical services across the entire industry.
On the occasion of MedCoffee’s second anniversary, we sincerely invite discipline leaders, young physicians, and experts in epidemiology, statistics, and methodology to join this platform, working together to set new trends in clinical research.
