Donor Connect: Our fortnightly updates to donors
Dear Donors - In case you have missed any of our mailers, you could check this page and catch up. And if you are someone who has stumbled upon this page for the first time, we invite you to join us in our journey. Give us a donation to sustain our work. Contribute your time/ expertise. Connect us with people who matter - in the National Medical Commission / ICMR or any of the Councils. Help us reach medical / nursing / dental / pharmacy and other colleges. In short - Become a part of the history we are creating! We welcome you!
June23, 2023: Spreading Awareness of QMedCourses: A Journey of Resilience and Commitment
We hope you are doing very well. We sincerely appreciate your support for QMedCourses as we strive to enhance medical research nationwide. We would like to update you on our recent progress and the challenges we have successfully overcome.
We had started QMedCourses in June 2020. In the first two years – thanks to the pandemic, medical colleges (rightly) focused their priorities on handling the same. In fact, thanks to the situation, they had several tough decisions to make – like whether to keep students on campus or send them home! Post pandemic, they took time to get things back in order. Thanks to this situation, majority could not prioritize learning about our courses and implementing them.
A fresh start to spread awareness of QMedCourses – www.qmedcourses.in
Now as things have settled, we felt this is the best time to make an effort to reach out to every health science institution and encourage them to work with us. We need to let them know about QMedCourses – how it could help all of them save hours and do better research.
We just sent out communications by post to all 650 medical colleges in the country
To do this our Trustee Mr Sriganesh got data about 650 colleges into a spreadsheet, and we did a mailmerge exercise in order to print a letter addressed to all of them. We also sent them a one-page note about our courses and a proforma invoice, which should encourage them to act.
We discussed with the post office and got them to frank all of them and mail them out. All this involved a fair amount of work and coordination and our Trustee put his heart and soul into this. Thank you Mr Sriganesh!
We sent out emails too
We are also sending out the same communications by email with the hope that the heads of each institution will check one of them. Next, we plan to repeat the process with Dental colleges and other health sciences institutions.
We have also prepared a bunch of catchy posters to share on Social Media. We will be posting them every week.
We hope to hear from many colleges soon.
We seek your wishes
Our commitment to reach out to all institutions stays strong. We are working hard at this and need your best wishes to take our mission ahead!
June 9, 2023: QMed gets its first educational grant
It has been a couple of months since we wrote to you. In the end of March, I had mentioned about having been ill. It did take a while to regain strength, catch up on some backlog and more. However, it was a demanding time. We have had delays with our communications – our blogs and donor connect emails. My apologies. I thank you for your understanding.
Here comes a great piece of news! I am happy to share that in April, QMed got its first ever, large Education Grant! We got this grant from Pfizer. Getting our first large grant has happened after 15 years of our work. With this grant we are currently hard at work, planning workshops and offering our ELearning courses to 10 AIIMS institutions in the country.
I would like to record my appreciation and thanks to Pfizer not just for having given us this grant, but for making the effort to understand the work we do, why we do it and helping us with all processes and documentation for the grant. It is interesting to note that when they give us an Education Grant, they give us the independence to carry out the whole activity. They have no expectations from us except that we utilize the money for the purposes that we shared with them.
We have got in touch with most of the AIIMS institutions and they have started responding. Most had vacations in May, and hence there have been small delays. We will now speed up our communications and follow ups, and move ahead.
Once we start, it means travelling to ten different AIIMS institutions all over the country to conduct workshops and handling their registrations on our ELearning site. We are very excited about this
The grant money will help us for a few months ahead, and we hope that by then more institutions sign up for our courses. Pfizer has also indicated that they might support us further if we demonstrate completion of work for all ten institutions and good feedback from them.
Do send us your best wishes!
Mar 28, 2023: March updates
Date: Tuesday March 28, 2023
Category: General Update
Keywords: Institutional Subscription, QMedCourses
March has been a great month in some ways and tough in other ways. Great because we had one new institution joining us for our ELearning courses, and two renewing access for the same. The new institution to take up our courses is the Dr DY Patil Medical College from the city of Pune. The two to renew are Sri Manakula Vinayagar Medical College, Puducherry and the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, Kochi. We are already in conversation with them to see how we can work together to encourage maximum learning from our courses. More importantly we are stressing this year that they must throw the courses open to the undergrad medical students, as we are really convinced that this is the best stage for a student to learn these skills.
March has also been tough as several family members and I, fell ill. I had to stay away from work for most of the month. I am glad that we mastered a lot of “work from home” methods and processes during the pandemic and so I could at least execute any urgent and important functions.
I have to specifically thank my colleagues for all their support and taking on more responsibilities from me during this month. They have done a great job. I am also happy to share that this month we have had Priyanka join us at QMed. Priyanka will be taking care of a lot of digital promotion work – something much needed to get everyone in the country to learn more about our courses and enrol.
This month’s update is short and I hope to give you better stories and news next month from QMed.
Wishing you the best and thank you for being there for us!
Feb 23, 2023: Foundation story – Origins of QMed Foundation – “The CD Story”
Date: Thursday February 23, 2023
Category: Organisation Founding Story
Keywords: CD, General Medicine CD, Organization story
People often ask me what made me start QMed. The answer is – several things, but a big trigger was the QMed’s “General Medicine CD”
What was this CD about? When QMed was first only a private limited company, one of the activities we often did was to carry out PubMed searches for students, and doctors who asked for them. Every topic was different and obviously, the search steps were different.
Rajeev Surana, who used to work with us then kept saying “You should not have to re-do searches every time. Every effort needs to be re-usable”. My standard response used to be – “When every individual’s search request is for a different topic, how could we not re-do them?”
And yet, we deliberated upon this thought. And came up with a great idea. Why don’t we start a project where we list several topics and build in a ready PubMed search for each of them? Once people understand this, we could create more projects with more topics, and even make customized ones for those who need them.
We decided to choose 20 general diseases and conditions like Asthma, Diabetes, Hypertension and more. For each topic, we planned 10 subtopics like causes, diagnosis, treatment etc. For every subtopic, we planned three links. Links to
a) Not free (articles with evidence)
b) Free articles
c) Articles available in common journals
Here is a sample
Glaucoma-complications
a) Not free
We thus had 500+ hyperlinks to “pre-done” PubMed searches. When one clicked a link, it would open PubMed, run a search on a topic and fetch just a reasonable number of results (around 30-50 in most cases) – real time. We had built the query so that only the latest and most relevant results showed up.
We launched this product – on a CD then – as we did not want people to remember another password. This was in 2004. People were not yet comfortable with remembering too many passwords. The CD also had a PubMed tutorial – both – in a digital format as well as a print booklet. We had priced the CD at a reasonable Rs 350/-
We expected large sales. We sold just a few.
But there was a key incident which was a major contributor to our decision to start a not for profit trust. A doctor heard about our CD and called us for details. My colleague explained it all clearly. The content in the CD was a PubMed tutorial. Many topics were available as “Internet links”. He would have to run the CD with an internet connection on. Every time he clicked a topic, it would run a real time search and fetch him the latest updates. He heard it all.
After getting the CD he called us and said
“This is only PubMed which is free and you are charging me for it. I don’t want it”.
After all our explaining, he had not understood anything about our offering.
This incident made us feel strongly about the need to create a not for profit arm. We felt it was high time we started teaching what PubMed actually was and what capabilities it has for structured searching.
Only after students and professionals had the necessary literacy would they be able to appreciate something like this.
It took us another three years to register and formalize QMed Knowledge Foundation – in end December 2007. Between then and now – 2023, which is about 15 years, we have conducted nearly 250 workshops and delivered more than 500 lectures. The need is still strong! We need to reach a large denominator.