Stony Brook Medical Student Develops App to Close a Critical Training Gap

For generations of medical students, the images they study have not always reflected the patients they will treat.

In medical schools and textbooks, future physicians learn to recognize disease through visual patterns, often drawn from a narrow range of skin tones. For Priyanka Kadam, a student at the Stony Brook University Renaissance School of Medicine, that gap has become both a source of frustration and a spark for innovation.

"As I've progressed through my medical education, I've felt disillusioned at times to see how we can lose sight of our most vulnerable patients because of the rigor of our training," she said.

Kadam is the creator of LearnDx, an educational platform designed to help medical students recognize how dermatologic conditions present across different skin tones. The app combines board-style questions with diverse clinical images and explanations to better prepare students for exams and direct patient care.

"More personally, I've seen how our healthcare system can fail people who don't fit the mold we're taught. In my own family, that includes my father and my grandmother," she said. "Losing them both to treatable conditions made it harder to ignore patterns in how care can fall short, and raised questions for me about how their dark skin may have contributed to their outcomes. That's a big part of what drives me forward."

Kadam recently received the Early Career Innovations Award from the Skin of Color Society at the American Academy of Dermatology Annual Meeting, along with $35,000 in funding to support continued development. Kadam is one of two medical students to ever receive the award, which typically goes to early-career faculty and physician-scientists.

"It's still a surprise," she said. "It means a lot to me that physicians I admire believe in this as much as I do and are willing to invest in it."

Dermatology, more so than many specialties, depends on visual pattern recognition, yet the images used in training have historically lacked representation across skin tones.

"A hugely important and related effort within dermatology in recent years has been addressing the paucity of skin of color imagery for trainees to learn from," Kadam said. "But I've found that images alone often aren't enough to reach medical students, especially the ones who won't become dermatologists but will still need to recognize skin disease."

LearnDx attempts to address that omission by embedding diversity directly into the learning process. Each case includes images spanning a range of complexions, alongside explanations that reinforce diagnostic reasoning.

"Each question and answer includes images across the skin tone spectrum, partly so students learn the diverse presentation of disease, and partly so they internalize clinical reasoning that prioritizes diversity from their first year of training," she said.

The app also meets students where they are, with flexibility for self-paced study, and early feedback suggests the tool is filling a gap many students did not know existed. Kadam and her team have completed preliminary beta testing and are now preparing for a larger study to measure the impact of the app.

"So far, students have told us they haven't received this training formally anywhere else," she said. "They're excited to finally have a dermatology resource that fits into their existing routines."

What has struck her most is how quickly awareness can shift.

"Many students didn't even recognize the skin color gap existed in their training until they used LearnDx," she said. "If students aren't aware of these disparities until they see them in the clinic, it is the patient who ends up suffering for that."

The consequences of that gap can be significant. Skin cancer, for example, is often diagnosed later in patients with darker skin, in part because of differences in presentation and gaps in training.

"A major contributing factor, I believe, is that our most vulnerable patients frequently aren't making it to a dermatologist's office in the first place," Kadam said. "That makes it even more critical for physicians in other specialties to recognize how skin disease varies across skin tones."

"My hypothesis is that early-career physicians are where this blind spot first takes root, and therefore where we can most effectively intervene," she said.

At Stony Brook, Kadam enrolled in a dual-degree program that includes a master's in compassionate care, medical humanities and bioethics, an experience she said helped shape her approach to patient care.

"I'd seen how easy it is for empathy to erode during training, and I wanted to be intentional about preserving it in my own practice," she said.

Kadam said Stony Brook has been a supportive learning environment, and caring for a diverse patient population here has helped shape much of what she has worked on. "I grew up in mostly rural communities across the United States, and many of the patients we see at our rotating sites reflect communities that feel like home to me," she said.

The app itself began as a side project between her first and second years of medical school and has grown since then. One of the ongoing challenges is building a comprehensive library of high-quality images that accurately represent diverse populations.

"It's one of the most important decisions we'll make, as accurately labeled, high-quality images are what will ultimately differentiate LearnDx and ensure the quality of the education we provide," she said. "Even if just one student recognizes a skin condition in a darker-skinned patient because of something they learned through LearnDx, I'd feel we accomplished what we set out to do," she said.

She hopes the tool contributes to a shift in how physicians are trained and how patients are treated.

"Above all, I hope patients feel seen, heard, and taken seriously in their care. There's a long history of medical mistrust in communities that have been overlooked or mistreated by our healthcare system, and that doesn't change overnight," she said. "My hope is that LearnDx plays a small role in a larger shift toward training more empathetic and culturally competent physicians across specialties."

- Beth Squire