Devices & Diagnostics, Health IT, Hospitals, Patient Engagement, Pharma, Startups

Startup eRounds: ‘If LinkedIn and Pinterest had a baby and that baby went to medical school’

A Nashville, Tenn.-based startup wants to redefine social media in healthcare with the roll out […]

A Nashville, Tenn.-based startup wants to redefine social media in healthcare with the roll out of a “social clinical” platform aimed at physicians who want to collaborate with each other using mobile devices.

The company, eRounds, was formed earlier this year and recently launched the BETA release of its image sharing tool for iPhones and iPads.

Think of it as a social media platform geared toward specific specialties but without the media part – the information and images are securely shared between the practitioners to help spur a dialogue between them, said CEO and founder Don Lawrence.

“Another way to put it,” Lawrence said, “it’s almost as if LinkedIn and Pineterest had a baby and that baby went to medical school. That would be eRounds.”

Initially, the collaborative effort will be geared toward spinal healthcare specialists, but there are plans to include more areas of medicine as the company grows, Lawrence said.

Especially among younger physicians who’ve been in practice for, say, 10 or 12 years, the lure of the social clinical concept is strong, but few if any models exist, according to Lawrence, adding that much of the existing clinical collaboration efforts are geared toward health systems, not individual physicians.

“They expect to collaborate with other doctors just as easily as they can with their friends on Facebook,” he said.

But Facebook and Twitter and the like aren’t well-suited for healthcare, with social media companies mining user data for advertisers, and current efforts to connect providers with each other are driven largely by vendors, payers and administrations.

“Really they’re serving the buyers, which is the hospitals and management systems,” he said. “While that’s going on, there’s an important part being neglected, and that’s the physician and their staff. What they ultimately want to do is treat patients. They can’t effectively do that within the context of EHRs. It just kills all the spontaneity .”

The thrust of the model is to let physicians and clinical staff to share medical photos, such as x-rays, CT scans and MRIs, with trusted peers. Patient information can be stripped away to maintain privacy, and images are then uploaded with questions put forward to a certain group of physicians within the same specialty.The sharing platform is HIPAA-compliant.

“What eRounds is designed to do and how people are using it is to formulate and share clinical insights,” Lawrence said, noting that a second opinion on a complicated medical issue could be one example. It would not be used for diagnoses or anything urgent, instead only collaborative issues like best practices.

“Clinicians are already leveraging their mobile devices to create new efficiencies and workflow improvements. eRounds is giving these ‘social clinicals’ a remarkable competitive advantage in their practices,” Lawrence said.

Previous methods of such collaboration are “archaic,” and with the social clinicals, geographical barriers can be easily overcome, Lawrence said.

eRounds is free to all clinicians. The company hopes to make money by eventually permitting reps from medical device and life sciences companies maintain a presence within the online community for a fee.

The company so far has been funded through friends and family, though Lawrence said talks have taken place with venture capital groups.

Other specialty areas for possible expansion abound, but Lawrence mentioned neurosurgery, dermatology and plastic surgery as likely areas.

“Before eRounds, it was not uncommon for me to make surgical decisions based solely on my own thoughts and experience,” said Dr. Brian O’Shaughnessy, a neurological spine surgeon and chief medical officer for eRounds.  “Now, I have the ability to get the opinions of other experts in my field, or share my expertise with those who need it.”

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