Today, Doximity and Photon are launching Doximity Prescribe, a free prescribing experience built directly into a platform used by nearly every physician in America. I want to share how this got built. It’s a story of two teams focused on the needs of their users: clinicians and patients.
Doximity has always built tools that let physicians practice medicine anywhere, unchained from a desk. Prescribing functionality adds to that flexibility. Clinicians can now send a prescription during or after a patient visit, without leaving the Doximity app. Their patient gets a text with a secure web link that empowers them to shop between pharmacies. It's just as simple as writing a prescription on a slip of paper and handing it to a patient.
In this cycle of AI hype, companies increasingly announce features that haven’t even been built. Oversubscribed rounds and exaggerated headlines are more frequent than actual product launches. What's not new is that most healthcare products tend to be shaped around the needs of whoever controls the money in this system. Administrators, PBMs, pharma, and insurers all have a seat at the table, where clinicians and patients often don't. That's not how this partnership was built, and that’s not how quality care is delivered either.
This all started about a year ago, with feedback from Doximity members who asked for prescribing features in a survey. The Doximity team sent us an email, with a line that really hit home:
I admire your approach to making the product so physicians first, it's similar to how we thought good workflows like this should be designed, and a refreshing difference from the rest of the industry.
Doximity wrote the playbook on user-first growth in healthcare, and being recognized like this meant a lot to me.
Doximity didn’t build their distribution by telling clinicians what to want. They've built it by listening to the doctors actually in the trenches. Their early advisors had the fancy titles: big-name physicians and CMOs with great credentials. They switched. The doctors they listen to now are the ones working tirelessly on the front lines of patient care, every day. Those are the people they build for.
Eighty-five percent of U.S. physicians are on Doximity, with more than 800,000 quarterly active prescribers. They've earned that kind of trust over fifteen years by treating physicians like professionals: not extracting from them, not pushing them through funnels, not ignoring their time. The bar they hold themselves to is unusually high. When I visited their headquarters I saw a glass case full of phones by the front desk continuously making tens of thousands of calls to stress-test Dialer. It's at the front of the office because quality and trust are at the front of how they think about building.
Similarly, what's being announced today has been live, with a small group of clinicians, for more than six months. Our engineering, product, and design teams have been building this integration carefully, iterating with users, shipping fixes, trying things that didn't work before landing on things that did. Across both companies, the people building this have genuinely worked together as one team. It's truly been one of the most fun stretches of building I've had at Photon.
I first met Jeff Tangney earlier this year on a sunny afternoon during JPM week. As I waited for him in Union Square, I felt oddly nervous. Jeff is the rare healthcare entrepreneur who has taken not just one, but two companies public, a feat almost nobody in this industry pulls off. After a walk around the city together, I was certain of two things: our organizations were aligned in ways we hadn't yet articulated, and our shared values ran very deep. The biggest lesson I took from working with him is something he's been modeling for decades: patience pays off when you build what users actually need. That earns you their trust. That trust is how you earn free cash flow.
Clinicians asked for prescribing. We shipped it. Now we're investing in the integration as we tie prescribing functionality into other products in their Clinical AI Suite. If you're a verified clinician on Doximity, you can enroll to use Doximity Prescribe. We’d love it if you shared your feedback so we can make the product even better.
I'm grateful to Doximity for the trust, to Jeff for the partnership, and to the clinicians who asked for this. It's a privilege to help build this for you all.