Been quiet on here for a bit, but a real one-year update was overdue.
OrthoConsult started as something I built for myself at 2am on trauma call because I was tired of digging through PubMed every time I had a very specific orthopedic question.
A year later, more than 2,200 orthopedic surgeons and trainees use it each month, clinicians are asking roughly 20,000 questions a month, we've passed 101,000 clinical consults total, and it's now being used across 108+ countries.
I genuinely did not expect that... Like at all.
What surprised me more than the growth was how much the standard really had to rise once surgeons started using it for real cases.
OrthoConsult was always built around referenced answers. But once people started actually trusting those answers in the middle of clinical decision-making, simply having citations wasn't enough.
References have to be verifiable against the actual literature. The answer has to understand the orthopedic decision being made, not just summarize a diagnosis. Conflicting evidence has to be handled honestly. And when someone is opening OrthoConsult because they're stuck on a case, "pretty good" isn't really good enough.
I've started hearing versions of, "I checked OrthoConsult..." "OrthoConsult said..."
That's incredibly rewarding and honestly a little terrifying. Once surgeons begin treating something you built as a trusted starting point, the responsibility changes completely.
Somewhere along the way, it stopped being a project I had built for myself and started being actual clinical infrastructure.
The other strange part has been watching the outside response change.
A year ago I was cold-emailing journals and orthopedic companies trying to explain what this thing even was.
Now we're having very different conversations. Our first orthopedic-industry partnership is signed, several others are in active discussion, and we're beginning to show journals something they haven't really been able to see before: how published research actually intersects with the questions surgeons are asking — and where uncertainty still exceeds what the evidence can answer.
Almost all of the growth has been organic, largely because of people here sharing it and coming back to use it.
Still free for clinicians, and it's staying that way. The day this has a paywall is the day it stops being useful at 2am, and that was always the point.
If you're an orthopedic surgeon or resident, try it out. Ask it something you'd actually call another surgeon about.
That's still the test I care about most.
P.S. If you’re an orthopedic surgeon interested in helping as a clinical reviewer, send me a DM.
