Looking for a secure way to network with fellow surgeons online? Need to find a high-quality video of a robotic Whipple? Want to attend an educational webinar with live discussion? Curious what surgeons in various subspecialties are working on? There’s an app for that.
Agnostic to specialty and modality, SurgeOn (surgeonapp.com) is a free, surgeon-only networking application built to solve the problems associated with other online social networks.
“Right now, most surgeons either don’t have a home to connect virtually or they use public social media sites. Those are great in their own merit, but they have tremendous limitations, such as privacy concerns, security concerns, and discoverability issues that have led to litigation,” said Mark Soliman, MD, a colon and rectal surgeon with AdventHealth Medical Group Colorectal Surgery, in Altamonte Springs, Fla.
“We’ve looked at each of these problems from a 30,000-foot view and tried to solve them in a way that’s congruent with how we want to be treated in the social space, respecting the beauty that’s created when you collaborate with people online,” Dr. Soliman said.
The platform has alleviated privacy issues while at the same time preventing trolls from hiding behind an anonymous handle, by verifying that every person who joins the platform is a surgeon based on their national practitioner identifier (NPI) number. Although this limits SurgeOn to U.S. surgeons for now, Dr. Soliman’s team plans to launch an international platform that will include non-NPI verification, opening up the platform to residents and students who do not yet have NPIs.
“[This way,] you know the qualifications of every person you’re communicating with in the application,” Dr. Soliman said.
To protect against the risk for surgeon data being brokered and sold—the way other social media sites use member data—SurgeOn simply doesn’t collect it.
“We refuse to collect certain aspects of data. There’s nothing that we could sell to brokers or lenders, and nothing that could be stolen,” he said.
As a platform created by surgeons exclusively for surgeons, SurgeOn is unique among physician-oriented social networking platforms.
“Surgeons know what surgeons need, such as a categorizable video library. We know that we tremendously value the feedback of our fellow surgeons when it comes to specific videos, specific steps of an operation, so we built in voting algorithms—basically a Likert scale,” Dr. Soliman said.
While protecting its members’ privacy from people outside the surgical community, the app allows surgeons to explore other specialties and learn more about their colleagues and what they do.
“A general surgeon can easily wander into a cardiothoracic surgeon community, look at their videos and posts and comment, or into a urology community or gynecology community. The ability to discover other communities and commune with other people is a big deal in the surgical space. You get to see what’s happening in other quadrants of the abdomen. This is the essence of multidisciplinary collaboration” Dr. Soliman said.
Launched in August 2021, SurgeOn currently has about 1,000 members and contains the features any social media user would expect to find opening an application, Dr. Soliman said. The team has a laundry list of items in development, such as surgical society integration and an events section.
“Where you see SurgeOn right now is not where you’re going to see it in three weeks, three months or three years. There is nothing we want more than to truly unify all of surgery under one roof,” Dr. Soliman noted.
SurgeOn is available as a free download in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store (surgeonapp.com/ share).