As more information has become available online in recent decades, Srinivas Prasad, MD, noticed one area was lacking — spine surgery.
So Dr. Prasad, of Philadelphia-based Thomas Jefferson University, took matters into his own hands and made his own solution. His YouTube channel, Prasad Spine Academy, has more than 100 videos covering various spine surgery techniques and procedures. Most videos are short — around 10 to 15 minutes. But he also has longer videos up to an hour long.
Dr. Prasad spoke with Becker's about building his channel and why it was crucial for him to make the resources available.
Note: This conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Question: What was the origin of this project?
Dr. Srinivas Prasad: The genesis of it predates COVID-19, but the quiet period we had during COVID really gave me an opportunity to focus on this vision. I would say one of my core motivators when I took a job at Thomas Jefferson University was wanting to be in a fairly innovative environment and really focusing on education. Having said that, there are a couple of things that always surprised me. One was that I've realized, as I'm getting older, that our residents don't learn the way that I learned. They learn much more online. When I was a resident, that was kind of frowned on because there wasn't good content, and it wasn't well curated. But now it's the way most people consume information. So that's one thing that struck me; we don't really have a contemporary online educational resource that people like my residents and fellows can use to learn principles of spine surgery and surgical techniques.
Another thing that I felt was striking, and it's kind of in parallel, was that I felt like I see thousands of patients a year. If you have a problem with your dishwasher, you can figure out how to fix it — there's a video on it. But if I'm going to have spine surgery, there's not a lot of great resources. When I started Prasad Spine Academy, I would go online and there were very few high quality resources for patients. Now, of course, this is years ago, so things have kind of filled in now. There's more content now than there was five years ago, but it struck me as very surprising that there wasn't more content around that, especially given the importance of it. I felt like it's on me and on us as organized spine surgeons to develop material for patients and to develop material for trainees.
What was the biggest challenge developing the channel?
SP: I didn't really have a precedent for it. Putting together the team was probably the biggest challenge. Then what remains kind of a little bit of a challenge, but one that I'm kind of clarifying more with time, is specifically who my target audience is. When I first started, I was planning to make the whole curriculum, pick a topic in spine and go through everything I would teach to residents and patients.
Now I've started shifting a little bit more towards focusing on the residents, fellows and surgical trainees. I think that's where I can kind of make the greatest contribution. My expertise is really in the decision-making and performance of spine surgery and teaching these techniques. I've been doing it for a long time at Thomas Jefferson University, and I feel like I've developed skill in that as well. What I'm really trying to do is take that skill and instead of just focusing on teaching 20 people at a time or a few fellows at a time, it's scaling this so that it's accessible and available to people worldwide.
Q: How much of viewership is residents and fellows, compared to the general population?
SP: So far, I haven't promoted Prasad Spine Academy aggressively with neurosurgical and orthopedic residents or fellows or patients. It's just organic, but I would say it's mostly patients. If you think about the audience on YouTube, a very small subset of people are actually in surgical training, so far more people are trying to consume stuff as patients. I think YouTube has been good in that it's very accessible. It's not so great at targeting populations or audiences, so to speak.
For the surgical technique videos that I've been doing, which are more cadaver-based, that audience is almost all residents and fellows. I'm now at the point in the evolution of this idea that I'm now starting to shift gears into either partnering with organizations or really starting to promote it with residents, fellows, surgical trainees and spine surgeons worldwide.
Q: Can you talk about the importance of having these resources available?
SP: I would say we all want to be the best doctors that we can be, and we want to take care of people like they're our family. But the simple truth is that if you see someone who has cervical myelopathy, you need to spend a long time explaining the background on it, explaining what it is, explaining the natural history of it, explaining the surgical options, reviewing the decision-making and explaining why you're doing the surgery. There's so much to go through, but in a clinic, you have maybe 30 minutes to see someone. So the videos are really supplemental. It allows people to kind of absorb it a lot better. That is the importance from a patient perspective.
From a resident and fellow perspective, it's similar. Residents and fellows consume more and more information online. So the central goal of Prasad Spine Academy is to provide a go-to, high-quality resource for them where they can learn the basics of spine, they can learn decision-making principles. Maybe most importantly, the goal here is to review and explain surgical procedures with illustrations, animations, operative footage — all directed at residents and fellows. It's worth a lot to residents because it's like it gives them a tremendous amount of comfort when they've seen it really kind of broken down to a step-by-step thing. One of the technique videos that I made was on placing C1 and C2 screws, and I got a comment from a guy in Bangladesh who said, "I've never really learned it. I never really felt comfortable. But I had a case, I saw your video, I did it today and I've never felt better doing it." It's very gratifying.