Enhancing Medical Residency Exam Prep with Advanced Analytics

The Client

PathDojo operates at the intersection of medical education and technology, serving medical residents preparing for Pathology board examinations. The platform provides comprehensive question banks and exam simulations that mirror the actual board exam experience, helping residents identify knowledge gaps and build diagnostic confidence.

As PathDojo’s user base grew, they had accumulated rich data about how residents engaged with questions and progressed through study journeys—but this valuable data remained largely untapped. They needed an analytics expert who understood both technical challenges and strategic opportunities.

The Challenge

PathDojo faced a dual analytics challenge serving two distinct stakeholders. Externally, residents needed personalized progress tracking: percentile rankings, category-level performance, improvement trends, and board readiness predictions. Internally, the content team needed data-driven insights to optimize question quality, identify coverage gaps, and determine which exam formats best predicted actual board success.

The data structure hadn’t been designed with comprehensive analytics in mind, requiring deep exploration, quality assessment, and strategic architecture design before any dashboards could be built.

Our Solution

We approached the engagement with a systematic methodology. The first phase focused on discovery—understanding analytics vision, interviewing stakeholders, and documenting the metrics that mattered most. Phase two involved deep data exploration: mapping all tables and relationships, creating a test environment, and validating data assumptions.

With the foundation understood, we developed comprehensive SQL analytics for external progress dashboards (percentile rankings, time-series analyses, readiness predictions) and internal content optimization (difficulty ratings, discrimination indices, category distribution reports). The final phase focused on automation—designing a monitoring system for continuous insights rather than one-off reports.

The Impact

For residents, personalized progress tracking created a clear roadmap through board preparation with precise percentile rankings by pathology category. For PathDojo’s operations, question performance data immediately surfaced actionable issues. The automated monitoring infrastructure delivered ongoing value, continuously surfacing insights as new data arrived.

The dual-purpose analytics system enhanced PathDojo’s market position—sophisticated progress tracking differentiated them from competitors, and data-driven content optimization ensured questions remained high-quality and representative of actual board exam challenges.