Doximity’s Profitability Playbook: Building a High Margin Business in Healthcare
Across industries, the most profitable companies aren’t pure software companies—they’re platform businesses that harness network effects. Meta. Airbnb. Visa. Booking.com. Each of these businesses post gross margins above 80%.
Each company dominates their market not by owning assets, but by facilitating interactions between users. Platform businesses win by scaling revenue faster than costs, compounding engagement through network effects, and aligning monetization with incentives and value creation.
And this holds true in healthcare.
According to analysis in our 2025 State of Healthcare Platforms Report, publicly traded platform companies are 4x closer to profitability than software companies with SaaS business models. In a margin-constrained environment like healthcare, this distinction is massive.
In this piece, we outline Doximity’s profitability playbook: the strategy they employed to build one of the highest margin healthcare businesses in the US.
The Most Valuable Healthcare Platform in the US
With a market cap around $10 billion, Doximity is one of the most valuable digital health companies in the US. One of the chief reasons for this: Doximity is the Goliath of gross margin–exceeding 90%.
Often referred to as “LinkedIn for doctors,” Doximity has evolved into the most valuable digital health platform in the U.S. It has attracted over 600,000 monthly active prescribers, including 80% of U.S.-based doctors and 60% of nurse practitioners and physician assistants.
What began as a professional network for physicians has become a thriving multi-sided ecosystem connecting clinicians, pharmaceutical companies, and health systems—all while operating at breathtaking revenue growth (36% CAGR), revenue per user (3x increase in 5 years), and profitability (91%).
“Doximity is, first and foremost, a physicians-first company—this is our life’s work. Everything we build is designed to make doctors’ lives easier, more efficient, and more connected.”
Network Effects-powered Profitability: Doximity Case Study
Doximity’s exceptional profitability stems from more than just fiscal discipline. It’s the result of a deliberate strategy to build and monetize a sticky, high-trust clinician network. The playbook below illustrates how Doximity tackled the cold-start problem, built daily utility, and created a powerful flywheel that now underpins one of the most capital efficient businesses in digital health.
Doximity’s Network Effects Playbook
The table below outlines the key steps in Doximity’s network effects strategy, detailing how the company methodically built its clinician network, solved early adoption challenges, and scaled a highly profitable multi-sided platform.
Lessons from Doximity’s Strategy
While SaaS continues to dominate digital health, it’s becoming clear that platforms outperform, offering better margin potential, defensibility, and growth. And few have done it better than Doximity.
Key Takeaways:
Build trust and engagement with your core stakeholders/users
Remove barriers to adoption (workflow, fees, etc.)
Focus on utilization and retention, not merely adoption
Add complementary sides/users to the network that can be monetized
Leverage behavioral data to optimize offerings, value and reduce churn
Doximity has shown the model works in healthcare. The next generation of digital health giants won’t just digitize workflows—they’ll own the ecosystems that power them.
