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What is the difference between a good doctor and a great doctor? According to Dr. Andrew Brandeis, it is experience, and he is launching a mobile application that holds the experience of thousands of doctors.
Share Practice is a collaborative clinical reference for doctors. After a doctor makes a diagnoses, the next step is to recommend treatment. Traditionally, the physician will step out of the room and consult with a reference book, research, or medical resource to find the best course. However, Brandeis said that these sources are not adequate because their funding comes from pharmaceutical corporations and insurance companies or from universities where findings are slow to publish and arduous to consume.
“Doctors right now have an antiquated way of transferring knowledge,” Brandeis said in an interview at his office. “I was calling or messaging or texting other doctors I trust to ask questions and realized that there was no structured way for us to share our experiences. When you are busy seeing patients, you don’t have time to sort through a ton of information. I want to collect doctors’ brains and experience in one place where it can spread quickly.”
As a practicing physician himself, Brandeis wanted to build a better way for doctors to connect over medical information. He started out with a Dropbox account that his colleagues could contribute to, and by the time it grew to 30 doctors and 10,000 treatment options, he decided to take it to the next level.
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Share Practice pulls information from multiple medical databases together and contains thousands of diagnoses. Doctors can drill into a specific diagnosis to see the various ways other doctors have treated it. Every treatment is ranked by up-voting or down-voting from the community, and doctors who regularly contribute popular treatments have greater weight within the group. Specialists commenting on their area of expertise also rise to the top. The system will ultimately have filters for qualifiers and “co-morbidities,” which means that recommendations can take ages, gender, chronic disease, and other factors into account.
“We are layering experience on top of research,” said COO Zach Bell during the interview. “Getting doctors to collaborate is important, but one might put it in a Word doc, one might write it in a notebook, one might just remember the information. We created a tool for them to document their experience in a clinically relevant way that can be accessed when they need it. It was really important to us to develop a tool that fit into the doctor’s workflow.”
Epocrates is Share Practice’s biggest competition, along with companies like Sermo, Doximity, Cure Together, and HealthTap. However, the founders said Share Practice is distinguishable because it emphasizes the social and collaborative element while also allowing for integrative medicine. Share Practice isn’t just about prescribing drugs but rather sharing treatments that are the most effective. Brandeis said that it is difficult to get treatments in front of a large audience, and he gave the case of a doctor in New Zealand who found that honey could be used to treat a specific type of lesion. It took 15 years for the information to get to the U.S.
The startup is part of Founders Den in San Francisco and has raised $750,000 from Founders Fund Angel, Base VC, Hub Ventures, and a series of doctor angel investors.
Photo credit: Share Practice
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