Osmosis Prime: Solid Product but Room for Improvement
Today, I will be talking about Osmosis, a medical education software as a service product.
Osmosis was founded in 2012 by two second year medical students at Johns Hopkins - Ryan Haynes (CTO) and Shiv Gaglani (CEO). Nine years later, the popular and successful startup was acquired by Elsevier.
Osmosis offers three packages: basic sciences, clinical sciences, and osmosis suite billed at 6, 12, and 24 months. This new pricing differs from the previous Osmosis Prime offering in a number of ways. First, the services offered - Osmosis Suite is the closest thing there is to the previous Osmosis Prime package. Second, the pricing - the new Osmosis Suite retails at $479 for the 24 month package while Osmosis Prime went for $328. Therefore, there is a 31.5% increase in the pricing. Ouch! Perennial Osmosis Prime members like myself were given access to the Osmosis Suite at the same price but new members will feel the brunt.
The increased pricing can be explained by multiple factors: recent acquisition by Elsevier, inflation adjustment, transition of step 1 to pass/fail, or simply the team at Elsevier might be convinced that they can get more for their product. It is understandable why they would feel this way since uWorld, the top dog in this space, prices its step 1 12-month plan at $559. Boards and Beyond, the other top dog, prices its Step 1 two-year plan at $399 currently but with its recent acquisition by McGraw Hill I anticipate there will be changes to the pricing soon too. Amboss, another player in this space, retails two-year subscriptions at $258. It is unfair to compare these products based on pricing alone since they are very different. For the purpose of this video we will focus on what makes Osmosis unique.
First, Osmosis has a very comprehensive video library that covers almost every medical and nursing school module. The team at Osmosis has made a remarkable effort to translate most of these videos in Spanish and there are talks that they may be expanding to other languages too. These videos are grouped into playlists by module and have accompanying transcripts. What’s more, the transcripts have hypertext links to other videos on the website. A significant proportion of videos also have summary notes and flashcards which I find extremely helpful. My next favorite thing about Osmosis videos is their use of mindmaps to foster retention of complex concepts. They are top notch in this aspect, only rivaled by the bosses at Sketchy. If, like me, you find that the way the videos are grouped does not work for you, you can create personalized playlists. Earlier, I mentioned flashcards. Like most, they are built on spaced repetition - helps you focus on your weaknesses and build a consistent habit. I like to go through flashcards on my phone early in the morning - takes me about 40 minutes. Now, if you feel the flashcards are missing certain things you can always create your own flashcards using the decks function.
The one feature that separates Osmosis from the competition is organizational tools. In my opinion, Osmosis is the Trello of software as a service products in the medical education space. Why? First, they have a great calendar which can be found under the study schedule tab. This helps the user decide whether they’d like to study for medical or nursing school and/or board exams. The user can select a deadline for their exams and the material they will use to study. The app integrates other resources like the USMLE First Aid and Boards and Beyond to the schedule. Linked to this, we have the workspace feature which helps users collaborate with other users and further integrate different resources. This to me, is the sale point of Osmosis. Get it when you need structure and want to be kept accountable!
Another important feature of Osmosis is its social responsibility. The team is always engaging the community and this was really evident at the height of the pandemic.
The app is solid, but there is a lot of room for improvement! I have to admit that I was willing to overlook these issues before but with the new price point I am not sure that it makes sense to have users suffer through some of these pain points. First, I cannot wrap my mind around the fact that the mobile app does not give users access to the schedule at least on android. I don’t know if this is the case on OS. This is a huge mistake if you ask me because the organizational features of Osmosis are what make it unique. Shiv, Ryan, and Rishi if you are watching this, please fix it! Related to the last point - we cannot reschedule activities outside of a week. So, say you want to move a flashcard deck from saturday to the next monday, you can’t do that currently. That’s just sad. Next, the app has not updated references to newer versions of First Aid. That’s another missed opportunity. Now, let’s talk about flashcards. The team has done a great job of integrating different flashcard types. For example, some of them require the user to think about the answer, others require they type an answer, and finally others require clicking on a structure. Currently, there is no way for the user to know what question type they are getting. Please, add some kind of indicator. Also, users should be able to control their flashcard reset time and to set their time zones. Next, Flashcard analytics could be a lot better. Right now all Osmosis has is a breakdown of questions answered correctly, answered incorrectly, and unanswered by topic. Nothing on question difficulty or module breakdown, nothing on confidence level, time it took to go through the questions, there is a lot of metadata they can make available, no way to download that data as an excel spreadsheet. Moreover, questions are not up to par for the USMLE - the Osmosis team can do a lot better. Without doubt, uWorld, Boards and Beyond, and Amboss USMLE questions are heads and shoulders above Osmosis right now. Many do not require that two-step reflection that is characteristic of USMLE questions and more importantly, the explanations of why certain options are incorrect are simply insufficient. Finally, there are a few Osmosis videos covering nursing stuff. It would be nice if the team would tag those videos so users can decide if they want to watch those videos and how much of the videos they’d like to watch.
All this being said, I believe Osmosis is a great product and would recommend it to most people. However, it cannot be your main board preparation tool. For those who have the time and can afford it, I would recommend supplementing Osmosis with uWorld during the dedicated study period at bare minimum.
So, these were my thoughts about Osmosis. Have you used Osmosis? Do you agree with my evaluation? Let me know.
