Healthcasts, the leading online community for healthcare professional consultation and real-world experience, announces a host of powerful new features and functionality for its ConsensusMD research tool that are now live on the platform.
Healthcasts community members search ConsensusMD, an AI-powered research tool that combs through Healthcasts’ rapidly growing, proprietary database of peer-to-peer consultations and case studies, to identify and validate the best treatment choices for their patients in real time. New features announced today extend the tool’s ability to highlight the most critical scientific attributes of the consensus and provide relevant context to aid decision-making.
“ConsensusMD is such a unique tool, it saves valuable time by giving you access to how these treatments really work on actual patients with complications and comorbidities, and all of the complexities we face with patients,” said Steven Samuels, MD. “I can get all the basic information I need from drug websites and evidence-based tools, but ConsensusMD gives me the real-world experiences of practiced physicians like myself. That’s the next step that’s not offered in other places and which is critical for delivering the highest quality care.”
New ConsensusMD features announced today include:
- “Top Related Treatments,” which aggregate treatment recommendations for any searched disease, highlighting consensus insights so healthcare professionals can quickly validate their treatment decisions against the real-world experience of thousands of their peers across the country.
- “Frequently Mentioned Insights,” which highlight and summarize information related to administering specific drugs, including side effects, modes of administration, dosing and cost/affordability.
- “Most Relevant Consults,” which highlight the top perspectives from the database that are most responsive to the search criteria. This is especially useful for complicated clinical scenarios or rare diseases where there may not be a clear consensus in the aggregate.
“Once doctors get out of their core areas of expertise, it is amazing how misinformed they can be about all kinds of conditions and treatments,” said Charles Kochan, Jr., MD. “ConsensusMD really closes those gaps by consolidating physician and specialist opinions, which is critical, especially for clinicians practicing in small clinics or rural areas where they don’t have easy access to colleagues down the hall or at the hospital. I have been using it for a while now, and ConsensusMD just keeps getting better and better.”
On-line reference tools are extremely valuable, but there is a significant gap between “gold standard” “on-label” care guidelines and the realities of treating real patients with real-world complications and circumstances. ConsensusMD’s ability to access, organize and output that kind of trusted information in easy-to-digest formats provides a critically important complement to typical reference resources.
“We have so many great drugs already approved and more coming to market, but a lot of times the FDA is only approving them for very specific uses,” said Betsy Brown, MD. “Doctors often prescribe things off-label, which can work very well for certain conditions. In those cases, the drug company cannot provide guidance, but your peers can tell you where they have seen it work, what they have tried and how it has gone. There are a lot of conditions like that where off-label use is the best thing to do, and ConsensusMD is a great resource I have seen for accessing and organizing those kinds of insights, saving time and optimizing care for patients.”
“Healthcare professionals often struggle to get practical advice on cases outside their typical areas of specialization, especially when they’re looking for treatment options outside of the strictly “on-label” indications for therapeutics,” said John Theobald, CEO of Healthcasts. “Healthcasts has become the go-to resource for sharing peer advice and cases, and ConsensusMD, launched last year, has quickly become an essential research tool that quickly summarizes all the relevant information responsive to a specific query into a concise organized report. The new features announced today take advantage of the tool’s AI framework to extract and abstract the insights users are most interested in, such as consensus opinions and rationale.”
About Healthcasts and ConsensusMD
Healthcasts is an online community of doctors, nurse practitioners and physician assistants who use the platform to consult with each other and share clinical advice and cases to ensure the best care for even the most complex patients. Members also use ConsensusMD, an AI-powered research tool that combs through Healthcasts’ uniquely powerful repository of real-world evidence and case studies, to distill down to specific answers for their care questions and research topics. Together, Healthcasts and ConsensusMD represent a powerful research and consultation toolset that delivers practical, real-world guidance that goes beyond the information available from research papers and institutions. For more information, visit: www.healthcasts.com
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