Billed as "experience-based medicine," a Silicon Valley startup is looking to make clinical decision support more valuable to providers by including peer reviews of myriad medical treatments.

 

SharePractice seeks to position itself between the CDS platforms offered by the likes of Epocrates and Wolters Kluwer and the social network developed by Doximity.

 

The idea, says company CEO and co-founder Andrew Brandeis, MD, is to give physicians a point-of-care platform where they can learn about – and share insights on and opinions of – various medical treatments, ranging from the commonly accepted to the unusual. By having physicians rate the treatments on a scale of 1-4 stars, the site gives doctors a peer-reviewed idea of what works and what doesn't.

 

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"We present it to the doctors and let them curate it and rank it," he said.

 

That peer-reviewed content, says Brandeis, is what sets SharePractice apart from typical CDS tools, and what he expects providers will like. It's why travelers, in looking for a good restaurant, will seek reviews on Yelp instead of Zagat.

 

"We want to suggest treatments based on evidence … and based on doctor's experiences, you should be looking over here at something you haven't considered before," he said.

 

SharePractice was born out of San Francisco's Care Practice urgent care center, which operates on a fee-for-service basis, accepting no insurance. Brandeis said he and his fellow physicians "got a lot of weird cases" that tested their resources, prompting them to collaborate on treatments. From that came the idea of a national network of physicians, sharing advice and treatments.

 

"We needed a way of aggregating all this knowledge out there (among physicians) that is missing from (clinical decision support tools)," he said. "This combines clinical and social (platforms) that goes beyond evidence-based medicine and (creates) a new paradigm of experience-based medicine."

 

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As an example, Brandeis noted recent conversations on SharePractice concerning Vitamin C treatments for HIV patients. Some doctors have found success in prescribing Vitamin C in IV doses of 50 to 75 grams three times a week for eight weeks.

 

"It turns out there's fairly good evidence to support that," he said. "And that's a treatment you'll never ever hear about in conventional medicine."

 

On the flip side, he pointed out a doctor who suggested treating a urinary tract infection with an enema.

 

"Fifteen doctors (said) that's ridiculous, so that idea was pretty quickly shot down," he said.

 

Brandeis said SharePractice links to any supporting research of clinical information when available, by giving physicians access to all the evidence they need in determining whether a specific method of care will work for them or not. 

 

The platform, available now only on the iPhone (the company is using $1.3 million in investor funding to develop Web and Android versions), now touts some 5,000 medical professionals. Brandeis said the platform is only open to verified physicians.

 

"We want to suggest treatments based on evidence … and based on doctors' experiences," he said. "This tells you what you should be looking at, and then it also tells you what other doctors have tried – maybe something you haven't considered before."