Stefan Wisbauer, Managing Director, Lecturio

I’m Stefan Wisbauer, Managing Director here at Lecturio in Germany. Technically, that’s Lecturio GMBH.

Lecturio is a modern e-learning and ed tech company, and we’re actually in the top 25 globally according to Time and Statista, which makes us number one in Germany and in the med ed space.

We work globally, and we’re based in Germany. One of the things that’s unique is that we have a full video library of about 12,000 titles, which we’ve all produced ourselves with faculty from Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and so on, covering the full medical and nursing curricula. Those are the undergraduate curricula, up to RN and USMLE in the US system. But they cover everything that an international medical student, for example, in Germany, India, and so on, needs, which takes more years than in the US. In the US, they have a four-year model. MBBS programs, or many other medical education programs globally, typically last six or seven years. So we cover those full six, seven years, hence the high number of videos. And, obviously, there’s text, quiz questions, learning algorithms, and things like that.

But the fact that we’re video-first rather than text-first, with video as an add-on, is an important key to understanding Lecturio and differentiating us very clearly from traditional publishers, where it’s all about text first and maybe a little bit of video explanation.

On the medical side, it’s a unique stack of capabilities. The videos are one key component there. Historically, as I said, we were always video first. And then we acquired the New England Journal of Medicine’s HEALER platform last year. That is a clinical decision-making simulation platform.

That’s used in medical education and during residency training. So residency training is where the doctor specializes. They become a cardiologist, neurologist, or internist.

That simulates the clinical decision-making process, and it’s very thorough and detailed. This is the part where most mistakes happen in clinical practice, and where many traditional simulation tools go through the process, but aren’t as didactically clean as this one. For example, it isolates a separate score for interpreting the correct findings and for concluding the potential diagnosis from that, whereas that is often intermingled with fact-finding and other tools. And then in the end, you just get some feedback on what you overlooked and what you didn’t consider. But since you never got feedback on, like, “here are the correct findings and here’s a score for this,” you can’t isolate the different dimensions of clinical decision-making so cleanly. So this is what makes this a very unique and advanced tool.

It was really developed by leading minds and researchers in that field. The New England Journal of Medicine is the world’s leading medical research journal. Therefore, they built it, then changed strategy. We were lucky to be able to buy it. So that kind of complements this big video library with a question bank, articles, and so on, as I described earlier.

Then, in addition, we just acquired a company called SimTutor a few months ago. And that actually does clinical process simulation. So again, a very different skill set, where you have to know where to put the needle, how to angle it, and how far to pull the syringe, and so on. So, practical clinical processes apply to both nursing and medical professionals. And in a sort of video overlay, turning the video into an interactive learning tool. And that comes with an AI authoring tool, so you can kind of build those simulations as well.

And the final piece that’s worth mentioning is that AI is uplifting and making this more powerful. You have an AI tutor for the learner to discuss and engage in Socratic dialogue about the case questions they’re trying to solve. That includes the tutor asking you, like, why you think it’s this option. So you go into the sort of Socratic reasoning rather than just that “was wrong” and “here’s why” kind of thing. And that’s very powerful, partly because there’s evidence that with individualized tutoring, students do about two standard deviations better in terms of difference, mathematically speaking. Therefore, the world is trying to crack what’s called the Bloom’s two-sigma problem—two sigma for the two standard deviations—by finding ways to make that happen. So we’ve got that built into the learner side of things as one AI example.

A second AI example is a lesson planner that we have built into the platform for faculty. So there, they can plan a lesson for a specific concept. They get specific learning objectives and get to review. Only then is the lesson built. That makes it a very unique, efficient workflow.

On the simulation level, you can build the simulations with AI. Literally, the AI will outline all the steps for you and will create images. You pick them and have AI dialogues with avatars and similar things.

And finally, in the HEALER component, the AI plays an important role in evaluating the problem representations and management plans that clinicians create. This is where the doctor says, this is a 50-year-old patient with these symptoms and this history and so on. And getting those right, making sure they have all the information, but making them concise at the same time—clinically intelligent, so to say—is a key part of clinical practice that is not easily done and learned by just answering checkbox multiple-choice questions, which is what much of exams do. Then obviously, the management plan is what you’re going to do with this patient. So these are also important. So we have the AI kind of complementing that in very detailed ways.

Yes, it’s certainly the combination. So firstly, what’s unique is this complete stack. There are traditionally a lot of test-prep players out there with question banks and case questions—a 50-year-old walks into the doctor’s office with a headache, what’s the next step? Those were usually built for the individual learner, but they lack the kind of deep, underlying content base, especially in the video format. And the video format is didactically superior for you to remember and understand better than just reading. And these 12,000 videos, to give you a sense, none of the biggest publishers have more than like 2,000, 3,000 videos. So that’s more holes than cheese. And that’s already very unique. The whole theory, the simulation of clinical processes, and the most complex part —these clinical decision-making pieces—that’s unique again.

So you’ve got the uniqueness of this video content and the full stack. And then the way the AI works isn’t just kind of a chat; it’s real workflow support. You kind of put your lesson, detailed learning objectives, you refine them, generate the lesson plan, talk to the assistant about the lesson plan, get all the content auto-matched, and immediately create a bundle that you can assign. That is just not available in a traditional learning management platform or in these more test-prep-oriented, limited traditional systems.

We work in a number of ways. Our most frequent partnerships are with educational institutions—nursing schools, medical schools, and programs that train community health workers. We do this in English most of the time.

And the other level we work at is at the system level, where we selectively work with governments to help them strengthen the entire system. That often means we work with both academies and provide in-service training. And we have continuous education credits in various countries for that. In that case, it becomes more of a strategic collaboration, with localization and targeted content production in collaboration with the local client and ministry becoming topics.

And then finally, we do sort of system-level interventions. We were the production and technical delivery engines for the Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Educare initiative by the European Union. So it’s EU for Health—that’s the name of the scheme funding the overall effort—and alongside six or seven academic partners, I think it’s seven in six languages. We’re creating content for antimicrobial resistance. That’s relevant for every generation, as we often need antibiotics. We need them to work. If our bodies have evolved to become resistant to them, then we’ve got a big problem. So this is why this AMR topic is getting a lot of attention. And that’s targeting nurses, doctors and pharmacists in some six languages across Europe. So that’s a pretty large project.

The other one worth mentioning as a higher-level effort is our global AidUp. And that kind of, on the one hand, has a component in Ukraine, funded by the German government, KfW DEG (Deutsche Entwicklungsgesellschaft), and available for free to all Ukrainians to support them. And at the same time, there’s a global component. We’re looking to train 10 million people in disaster medicine in Europe, and we’re working globally with experts in this field, which often occurs in more disruptive situations. So that’s kind of focused on disaster medicine.

We will continue to evolve AI functionalities in numerous ways, such as integrating AI with the content library to provide safe support for clinical decision-making. Then, more advances on the simulation side are underway. We’re also hoping to execute more acquisitions.

And beyond that, there’s still plenty of growth potential in what we do as a core business with our stack. We recently added the SimTutor layer. Making sure all our clients benefit from that full stack is going to be one of the focus areas in the next few months as well.

As I mentioned, the AidUp campaign aims to reach 10 million learners in Europe. So that’s a fairly ambitious plan as well over the coming years.

What’s worth mentioning overall is that healthcare education is a hugely important area in terms of effect on people’s well-being, literally their lives, and the length of their lives. It’s a rewarding place to work, but also one where you face high levels of scrutiny and responsibility on the one hand, and a huge need for innovation on the other.

The way we deliver healthcare education, say, in the US, Germany, and other high-income countries, is obviously high-quality, but it’s also slow, expensive, and, in many ways, outdated in its methodology. And there are exciting ways to leapfrog in low- and middle-income countries that face greater pressure to do so, have younger populations, and, frankly, can’t afford to build the traditional brick-and-mortar medical schools, lecture halls, and everything else to catch up, because they’re behind. The rate at which they’re qualifying doctors and nurses means that the shortages will only get worse.

Therefore, there’s a desperate need to improve educational methodologies. And for that, you need not just ed tech, but the content as well. And that puts us in quite a unique position, with an advanced format like all these 12,000 videos no one else has. Therefore, that creates a very unique and exciting opportunity to do that. Obviously, then, you need leadership, change management, funding, and so on to make it happen.

And I hope that, with all these aid cuts, the mindset in some low- and middle-income countries that were aid recipients shifts from wanting kind of handouts from donor organizations administered through NGOs to a focus on cost-effective, modern, scalable, rapid interventions. And there, we can have a huge impact in a short time. We know this; we’ve seen this in numerous places. We’re very active in Ethiopia, for example, at the national level, and in dialogue with numerous countries that want to do ambitious national plans, but are sometimes hesitant to allocate the capital.

The final point I’ll make on that is: it’s interesting that the health ministers often make the case for good health based on the idea that health is a good thing. We all want to live long, be healthy, and so on. Economically speaking, the poor state of health in a population has tremendous impacts—the cost of absence from the workplace, the loss of productivity from excess weight and diabetes or unmanaged conditions. If you calculate the mathematics on that, you look at the prevalence of certain conditions, the loss of productivity, and the value of that is huge. And some of the health ministers are trained primarily in medicine, not surprisingly, and they’re not used to presenting these kinds of calculations to the finance minister in a country. Therefore, health is often underfunded relative to the value it generates because it creates huge economic value, and that economic component is often understated. Then, as a result, health ends up underfunded.

And we have these difficult discussions around how we don’t recruit nurses from blacklisted WHO countries in Africa, whereas nurses go unemployed in those very same countries? So what are we telling those nurses? It’s kind of a real dilemma. And so, I very much believe in making the case for more health investment, both locally and globally, and in ensuring that those capacities are employed and trained cost-effectively. And medical knowledge is changing faster and faster. Therefore, the need for ongoing support.

I guess that’s a bit of big-picture framing for why this is a relevant topic for global society.