WebMD took a page from social networks aimed at physicians and launched what it calls a virtual curbside consult for its Medscape channel. It wants to provide a way for physicians to share insights and collaborate on cases with peers around the world but also tap into its content at the same time. It expects to roll out the desktop version of the Medscape Consult app early next year.
The app for iOS networks will let users share interesting or challenging cases and consult with other physicians. They can talk about cases and raise questions by posting attributed comments, address questions to the Medscape community and thought leaders. Users can boost their profiles by building an online presence and participating in the online medical community.
It will also include content from expert authors and reviewers.
“We’ve been looking at virtual curbside consults for five years,” said Ben Greenberg, WebMD vice president, product management and user experience. Medscape is part of WebMD.
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In an interview at the Mobile Health Summit this week, Greenberg said the service would be free to doctors in 245 countries, although it is currently only available in English. It developed an image sharing tool with a cool facial recognition technology that is designed to blot out faces from patients to prevent their identity from being revealed. It also has a tool that lets users scrub identifiable marks, such as a tattoo.
Social networks such as Sermo have been around for years providing crowdsourced consults and encouraging. Earlier this year it highlighted its expansion plans to move into non-U.S. markets starting with Spain and Mexico. Other companies in the space include Doximity, Converge.MD and iMedExchange. In a company statement, Greenberg acknowledged the competition, but likened them to scrappy small businesses that lacked its depth.
“There are platforms where doctors can pose questions, voice opinions, and view cool images – all fine but fleeting, with varied clinical utility. Medscape created a digital platform that is grounded in evidence-based clinical information, supported by expert oversight and robust curation, and built on the foundation of Medscape’s Drugs and Diseases reference database – a well-established and trusted resource used by hundreds of thousands of physicians around the world.”
Medscape started a social network for physicians in 2008 called Physician Connect, but as Greenberg explained, it is more like a discussion board than a dynamic social network. Still, it has a loyal following so it has no plans to discontinue the service, Greenberg said. “We sort of skipped the second generation social network. Medscape Consult serves a special use case — physicians looking for clinical decision support content through either a second opinion, authors on its Medscape channel or from the Drugs and Diseases database.”
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A company like WebMD has the scale and resources to have a significant impact this subsector of digital health, depending on its long-term strategy. It will be a good test of how much loyalty rival networks have earned.