San Francisco-based SharePractice raised $1.3 million from Founders Fund, China Rock and Scrum Ventures this week. The company also launched its iOS app, which lets physicians evaluate and comment on different treatments that clinicians suggest to their patients.
Physicians can share treatments, get feedback on treatments and protocols from other physicians, and favorite specific treatments and ratings that they like in the app. Content that physicians rate is aggregated from different medical sources such as PubMed, UMLS, and Emerson Ecologics, but is also added by physicians using the app. Like a social network, SharePractice offers physicians a feed to scroll through to see the activity of other physicians in the community and flag content that they do not agree with, which SharePractice will then review. SharePractice users, however, cannot discuss diagnosis specifics.
“When it comes to treatments for medical conditions, other ‘competing’ platforms are either not social or not clinical; SharePractice is both,” SharePractice Co-Founder Dr. Andrew Brandeis said in a statement. “SharePractice is the only app available for doctors today that allows them to apply a principle they use in their personal lives -- peer-sourced recommendations -- to enhance their treatment choices in their professional lives. Our goal for SharePractice is to raise the standard of patient care.”
The app is free to use for verified physicians and medical students who are granted read-only access. To verify physicians and students, SharePractice partnered with Doximity and also double checks publicly available licenses and the National Provider Identifier (NPI) registry itself.
SharePractice's pitch to doctors hesitant about sharing so much online is: "keep in mind that healthcare professionals who publish their protocols on their websites have more patients than those who don’t. Sharing your protocols positions you as an expert, allows you to contribute to the growing body of medical knowledge, and attracts more patient referrals."
