Scope STORY

Consult your colleagues. Connect across fields and interests. Scope what comes next.

Medicine is unusual in how much of our lives we spend trying to become worthy of other people’s trust. From the beginning, we’re taught that everything at the bedside rests on one stubborn idea:

The power we hold over another person’s life has to be matched by an equally stubborn commitment to use it well.

Patients don’t trust us because we are clever or credentialed. They trust us, when they do, because they see us trying to make good on that commitment: calling for help, arguing on their behalf, checking the labs again, asking a colleague to take a second look at the film. They watch us consult, coordinate, and double-check, and what they are really seeing is not individual brilliance but a kind of shared discipline, a willingness to carry responsibility together.

In that world, trust is not a feeling you radiate; it is a pattern of work. You see it in the handoffs that take too long but are done anyway, in the late-night pages, in the consult notes that try to make sense of a complicated life in a narrow textbox, in the rounds that bring different professions and specialties to the same bedside. No one person holds the whole picture, and no honest clinician pretends to.

The system only works when people with different training, in different roles, can reliably find one another, speak plainly, and act together on behalf of someone who, for a time, has no choice but to believe that we will.

But online, that covenant has fractured.

The digital world was never built around the same sacred space that exists in an exam room or at a rounding table. We built a parallel world that was never asked to carry the weight of an exam room or a rounding table, and then we smuggled clinical authority into it as if nothing had changed. The result is exactly what you'd expect: instead of shared context, we have noise; instead of accompaniment, performance; instead of accountability, anonymity or its opposite-spectacle.

Where medicine depends on knowing who is this, what have they seen, what are they responsible for to build meaningful discussion and connection - The digital world offers us feeds.

Feeds don't know what a call night is, or a consult, or a code. They don't know what it costs to be wrong. They only know how to sort and amplify. And so almost no one, patient or clinician, can reliably see who is speaking, what they actually know, or why they believe what they're saying. Instead of workflows, we have feeds. And almost no one, patient or clinician, can reliably see who is speaking, what they actually know, or why they believe what they’re saying.

If we’re serious about building any kind of bridge between the clinic and this digital landscape, we have to start by asking a deceptively simple question: where does medicine actually begin?

It does not begin in an algorithmic feed or a branding exercise; it begins at the point where one person takes responsibility for another, with the people at the center of care who spend their days stitching together research and guidelines, drug formularies and device constraints, biotech promises and insurance denials, lived patient stories and family histories, the quirks and failures of local systems, and the hard limits of their own training and experience, and then trying, often under conditions no app designer has ever seen, to translate all of that into a decision for one person, in one bed, on one day.

Any so-called “platform for medicine” that treats this as background noise, an edge case rather than the center of the story, is not neutral. It is misaligned with the very thing it claims to serve.

And in medicine, misalignment is never just a design flaw; it becomes, sooner or later, another way of abandoning the people who can least afford to be abandoned. 

Inside the hospital: the last true commons

Inside the hospital, we still have a working model of how medicine should talk to itself.

Everyone knows care cannot be delivered by one person. Specialties are consulted and paged in patterns that look chaotic from the outside but follow a deep, shared logic on the inside. Team structures may differ, ICU vs ward vs ED, but the underlying assumptions are the same:

Medicine is inherently multi-specialty.

Knowledge is inherently distributed.

We only function because we can find the right colleague at the right time.

Rounds are the clearest expression of this. Rounds are not “content.” They’re a structured conversation space: a table to connect and debrief, to surface complex cases, to argue over different mental models, to teach and be taught, and then to scatter for the day and do the work, knowing you’ll come back.

You can walk through a hospital and see how this plays out:

Talking with people in your own specialty whom you actually know.

Grabbing a curbside consult about a weird imaging finding or a borderline lab.

Going upstairs to ask someone more senior, or down the hall to someone junior, how they’re thinking about a case.

Sharing not just clinical dilemmas but side interests, research questions, and “you won’t believe what happened on call last night.”

The hospital is a coherent domain model made physical. Roles, relationships, and communication patterns all make sense in relation to the work.

The hospital is the commons. We eat, breathe, and sleep medicine together there.

Outside the hospital: fragmentation and borrowed rooms

Outside the hospital, that domain model collapses. There’s no central place to return to. No digital equivalent of rounds. No structured way to reconnect with colleagues across institutions, stages, or borders.

 At the same time, medicine itself has become overwhelmingly specific:

24 boards, 34 specialties, 89 subspecialties, 600+ fellowships, hundreds of societies, thousands of journals, and more.

And so what have we done?

We tried to keep up by multiplying: listservs and Slack workspaces, WhatsApp groups and email blasts, portal after portal after portal.

The result is exactly what we try to avoid in hospital systems:

nobody knows where anything lives.

Who should I be listening to?
Where is that amazing thread on this rare complication?
Which society actually understands people at my stage and in my corner of the field?

In the hospital, we’re organized by specialty and cohort, but we can always reach across those boundaries when we need to.

Online, our infrastructure does the opposite: it carves us into tiny pieces and then leaves us there, scrolling alone.

So we did what everyone else did: moved into platforms that were never built for us.

Twitter briefly felt like the back hallway of the hospital, fast consults, sharp takes, real-time cases, but it was never designed to handle nuance, evidence, or risk. Its origin story is ad-driven public discourse, not clinical reasoning. And now it’s chaos.

LinkedIn became an awkward waiting room where genuine case discussion lives side by side with promotion posts, personal brands, and growth hacks. Its origin is resumes and recruiting, so everything is subtly pulled in that direction.

Reddit gave us deep dives and niche communities, but anonymity, fragmentation, and lack of verified identity mean you can’t map what you’re reading onto the actual structure of the field.

Doximity solved a real dialer and identity problem and then stopped. You sign in, do a task, and leave.  It never became a home.

A reminder that software always carries the imprint of how it was born.
If a system starts as billing, it will keep behaving like billing.  If a network starts for business resumes, it will keep behaving like business resumes.  We have been trying to communicate medicine online in rooms built for advertisers, recruiters, and influencers.

This is not a UX problem. That’s a foundational logic problem.

The consequence is emotional as much as structural:

Doctors feel like they have competitors instead of peers.

Colleagues are reduced to abstract avatars.

The younger generations now feel pressure to be online to connect without guardrails.

So the deepest job to be done:

“Give me an online home with my colleagues.”

is left unmet.

The second fracture: expertise without legibility

While all of this was happening, the internet did something else: it flattened expertise.

In most feeds, a board-certified subspecialist and a charismatic wellness influencer look the same. “Expert” became a marketing word, a badge you claim for yourself, or a target for cynicism.

This is what happens when you separate identity, evidence, and conversation into different places:

Your identity lives on one platform.

The evidence (papers, guidelines, data) lives somewhere else.

The conversation is scattered across comment threads and group chats.

No one can see the full triangle at once.

But medicine cannot function without expertise. Not the authoritarian, “because I said so” kind. The collegial kind: People who have trained deeply in something. Who keep learning. Who are willing to explain how they think, not just what they think.

The problem isn’t expertise. It’s the abnegation of expertise, when we hide it, flatten it, or detach it from identity and evidence. Patients are left guessing. Trainees are left hunting in the dark. Clinicians can’t easily tell which voices are grounded in training, experience, and data, and which are not.

If we want to rebuild trust with patients, we can’t start with them. We have to start with the people who carry that trust every day and give them a place that reflects how medicine actually works.

What Scope is trying to do

Scope exists because of all of this.

Scope is the first true digital home for medicine a curated, verified, and protected space where the medicine can finally talk to itself, without being flattened into “content.”

 Scope is an alternative digital community for medicine, built from the domain logic of healthcare itself, not from the leftover concepts of other networks.

At its core, Scope is building the trusted identity and evidence layer for healthcare online, so clinicians, trainees, anyone on the journey in medicine can navigate health information with context instead of chaos.

That means three concrete things:

1. Verify who is speaking: Not with vibes, but with training history, affiliations, and professional context that map onto how medicine is actually structured.

2. Papers, guidelines, cases, trials, talks, linked, attributed, and easy to explore.

3. Connect to anyone within the network
Scope is not building another feed, we are bringing them back in the form of bulletins. 

1. The commons: Scope’s place to talk freely the way you do on other platforms, but with verified colleagues instead of random timelines. New humor, rants, public-health takes, AI/tech, GRWMs, stories-all the human parts of this work that don't fit in a journal article. It's where you stay yourself in medicine, so your other social accounts can stay personal without pressure to be online.

2. Focus: Focus is where medicine gets organized and goes deep. It's built around cohorts and specialties so everyone has the rooms they need: Residents to vent and problem-solve, fellows and attendings to trade cases and career questions, med and pre-health students to talk studying, boards, and applications.  In one place, you'll see the infrastructure of the field: society and board updates, hiring, manuscripts and journal clubs, trials, conference threads, and shared resources-PDFs, and more. Your feed in Focus is shaped by you: follow by specialty, stage, interests, or societies, and still explore everything else when you want to through discover.

And we're not leaving behind the "medical Facebook group" energy, we're bringing those interest groups into Scope with the same kinds of conversations and features, but with real verification, more trust, and a chance to actually build things together.

Overall: The Commons is where medicine hangs out. Focus is where medicine studies, organizes, hires, learns, explores interests and builds together.

From scattered bullets to a living graph

Right now, your professional life looks like:

a CV in one place, a hospital directory in another, scattered society profiles, random Twitter follows, a LinkedIn trail of titles, and a dozen group chats.

It’s all you, but there’s no model tying it together. Scope takes those same inputs your:

interests, credentials, training history, societies and boards, alumni networks, research and industry ties, goals and passions and turns them into the backbone of a living graph of medicine.

Concretely:

A med student in Miami can see people like them, where they trained, what they’re reading, which societies they’ve joined, and follow those paths with context instead of vibes.

An interventional radiologist in France can quickly see fellows, collaborators, trials, and guidelines inside one coherent environment instead of juggling tabs.

A fellow can stay grounded in their niche cases and critical communities instead of being swallowed by generic “health content.”

An attending can teach and mentor with their full, verified professional identity, knowing that the system was actually built for that level of risk and responsibility.

This is Scope as a modern Republic of Letters for medicine: Creating a space where people can communicate across borders and carry true honest conversations

Who we’re building for:

Scope is not just “for doctors” in the generic sense. It’s for the whole system of people who make medicine work, across time:

Pre-health & medical students, giving them a save space, and the ability to see real paths, not myths. Finding mentors and examples who actually map onto your background.

Residents & fellows, keeping your identity and relationships intact as you cross programs and institutions; sharing cases without disappearing into noise.

Attending physicians: having a digital presence that behaves more like a professional commons than a billboard; teaching, collaborating, and learning without having to prove your identity.

We are hope to respect the full lifecycle of a clinician, instead of treating each phase as a different customer segment with a different login.

Education vs learning:

One more distinction matters to scope. We spend years receiving formal education. That is simple what institutions give us, curricula, modules, and more CME credits.

Learning is what you chase on your own because something in you refuses to stay ignorant.

Right now, education has infrastructure.

Learning mostly has chaos.

Scope chooses learning. It’s where the med student who can’t stop reading IR papers at 1 a.m., the attending who is quietly obsessed with obesity medicine, and the resident who lives in AI/ML preprints can all: find each other, share what they’re seeing, and do it inside a structure that respects who they are and what’s at stake. 

Why Scope has to exist

Medicine’s best part has always been collegiality: the sense that you are not carrying this alone, that you have real peers, not just contacts, to think with, argue with, and lean on.

Our current digital infrastructure has structurally erased that. 

We let other people’s origin stories define our rooms, and then wondered why those rooms didn’t feel like home. Scope exists to start over with a different origin story:

one that begins with care teams and cohorts, not “users”;

with colleagues and societies, not “followers and creators”;

with identity + evidence + conversation wired together from day one.

So that medicine can stop renting space on platforms that don’t care what happens when people act on what they see and finally move into a home built, from the ground up, for the people who keep everyone else alive.

 Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

More coming soon.

Best,

Jackie